How Can a 1-Hour Virtual Focus Group Save You Time In Your Civil Litigation Docket?
Can a one-hour virtual focus group transform your trial preparation? In this episode of Trial Lawyer Prep, we uncover the groundbreaking benefits of incorporating virtual focus groups into your litigation strategy. By pinpointing what juries truly want to know from the outset, you can streamline your discovery and deposition processes, ultimately saving time and resources. Whether you’re navigating personal injury, employment law, or criminal defense, learn how this innovative approach to case preparation can align your strategy with jury expectations, enhancing your courtroom success.
Join us as we break down the strategic advantages for different types of cases, from car crashes to medical malpractice. We also dive into the intricacies of using virtual focus groups to identify key testimony areas, sift through complex violations, and prioritize the most impactful issues. Plus, learn follow-up instructions to ensure you maximize the effectiveness of these sessions and be ready to revolutionize your litigation practice.
In this episode, you will hear:
- The benefits of using virtual focus groups to refine case strategies
- Understanding key issues in car crash, trucking, and medical malpractice cases
- Efficient case preparation through third-party opinions
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Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome to the podcast trial lawyer prep. I’m your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and I’m excited that you’re here with me.
This is a podcast dedicated to lawyers working through their litigation cases. Whether you may be personal injury, employment law, we [00:01:00] do a lot of plaintiff’s talk, and this also could be applicable to criminal defense lawyers as well. Busy in business litigation. We have a couple of examples as well, but this.
is dedicated to folks who are building their litigation cases. up to trial. So we talk a lot about trial preparation, but we also really focus on for me case preparation because when I worked as a lawyer and had my own law firm, we spend so much more time in case prep than we do in trial prep. So what we have been doing lately is talking about using virtual focus groups as case preparation.
And I’ve had some folks come on and talk about using virtual focus groups. I’ve talked about them here and today that is what we’re going to do as well. So we are going to talk about virtual focus groups from a standpoint of saving you time, right? Maybe this is a time management tool, possibly. Okay.
There are lots of great time management tools out [00:02:00] there. We are all have the same amount of time. It’s really how we use it. And so what I want to talk about is using a one hour virtual focus group to help you manage the time. You’re spending on a case because we all have a large caseload. Okay. There are maybe some folks listening in who have five or six, and that’s awesome.
I totally applaud you, but I think most folks listening probably have more like 20, 30, 40, and help you if you’ve got 60 to 70. So. But really, there’s always a baseline of time that we’re spending on all litigation cases, right? There’s always going to be time on discovery. There’s always going to be time on depositions, and there’s always going to be mediation time, and it’s not just time that we spend In those things, but also in the time creating and preparing and then reviewing all the information we actually get from discovery.
So a lot of times we use time [00:03:00] hacks already, like forms and discovery templates. And trust me, I was one of those people, too. Who just, hey, who has one of these and can I send it now? Ultimately, I don’t know if it really saves you time because you have to spend more time on the back end, reviewing all of that information, reviewing all those discovery documents that come through.
And then, you know, you spend a lot of time pursuing, getting those actual answers that you may need. So what I want to think about Put in your mind is what if we had a way to shortcut, right? Spend less time in that discovery deposition to really focus on what the jury wants versus what we think they may want, or kind of just going through the motions.
Now we’re talking about one hour here. Okay. And so we’ll talk about how that really fits in as a time saving device, but also You know, saving time will also save you money. So if we don’t know [00:04:00] what the jury wants, we end up sending our templates. We end up just kind of guessing. We want to see everything possible.
We spend extra hours in our depositions on all kinds of questions, which, you know, In the end, we’ll then spend, have us spending more time doing those page and line designations, going back through all of that to figure out, okay, where do we have more berries in the bucket? And we may actually spend more time doing focus groups because once we have all of this information, then we have to basically maybe take all this and then edit it down for focus groups.
So what if we could just do a virtual focus group early in litigation to help us Fine tune where we’re going to spend our time and our energy pursuing things that really light up the jury versus kind of trying to get everything. The objection that I normally get about [00:05:00] this is, well, I won’t have enough time.
I won’t have enough information to do a focus group yet. I want to get more information. And that may be true. I’m gonna put a maybe there, but. Remember, we’re just talking about one hour. So if we really look at how much information do we need for a one hour virtual focus group, we’re really just talking about needing 15 to max 20 minutes of information because we want to spend more time talking to them about just the facts.
Now even at this point in time, you would have filed or be ready to file. So you would know what possible positions that. is going to be taken in litigation. So you already know, Hey, this is the story that this person’s going to tell. And this is what this person’s going to say. So you can already kind of put some of those facts in there, but what it can do is just test those facts, right?
And. If we [00:06:00] wait, so let’s just think, okay, let’s just wait. Then we have, again, this huge job of editing down all this information and choosing what we’re going to take to the focus group. But no matter what, we still have to test those facts. They’re still going to gravitate towards those facts, but we’re going to have waited.
into the weeds, right? So it’s like, okay, so, you know, we can walk into the swimming pool and, and, you know, just wade in or people can just jump off the deep end. And what happens if we jump off the deep end and we give them too many facts, it’s too confusing way too quickly. And we never really get any good feedback on just the facts.
And those are super important because that’s where they’ll go, right? They can’t figure out where people are. There’s too much. It’s super confusing. We’re trying to lead them to this conclusion. And they’re just like, no, this fact over here. So we really want to make sure we know what our facts are. And that’s how that one hour virtual focus group can work because that will give you what the blink reaction people are having to the facts.[00:07:00]
They will tell you what their immediate assumptions are. What are the inflammatory facts? What are issues that intrigue them? And what are ones to them that are already closed down? Closed and shut, like not even a discussion point. You want to know that. You want to know what expectations that they’re having immediately of the people involved.
Right. Think about a car crash like they have a lot of expectations about drivers and driving because they do it every day, right? So there’s a whole big, you know, pile of expectations that people are having when it comes to car wrecks. And trust me, you may think this is super clear. Elizabeth, we have a video.
We have a, we have a video perfectly of the crash and. It’s just never as clear as you think. Like they’re always going to find some kind of factor, some other things. So you, especially in a car crash case. Okay. Cause again, they do it all the time. So they have a lot of expectations around it. Other cases are different.
We’ll talk about those [00:08:00] examples, like trucking cases or bad mal or other things that they’re business litigation cases as well. So, but on this particular point, And we want to be doing these early in litigation so we can learn all these things. And then that will give us the direction that we need to go, right?
Where are good facts and how can we go in that direction? Where are the ones that are bad? And how do we, maybe we need to go into that direction, but in a different way than we thought, right? So a lot of times what’ll happen is. From this very basic one hour virtual focus group, we will really kind of figure out where are people lacking knowledge and is it something that can be educated through people we already have, right?
Like maybe it’s an education point that can be easily done through defense witnesses, right? Maybe it’s something that, no, we need to get an expert on this particular thing. One of the examples that I have for this is In a daycare case, done a couple of focus groups recently for a daycare case and what we kind of found after doing, [00:09:00] you know, two of these kind of shorter one hour was like, there’s this gap of information for how a daycare is supposed to be run.
There are some assumptions, but there are just, they’re pretty far off base. And then. You know, to the point where it’s like, okay, the defense is not going to talk about these facts or these regulations or, you know, whatever this particular piece of education is. So, okay, great. This is where we need this expert.
Okay. So that gives a lot of direction for what kind of expert that you may need to go find. And really, Also the personality of the expert. I mean, experts run the gamut. I’m sure we all know there are some that are just fantastic teachers and there are some that are really bad teachers, but they’re just, they’re very good at doing like this thing we need them to do, but the teaching part, maybe not so much.
Again, we want to get this direction before we jump in and go down our usual path. It also will help, you know, Hey, maybe I don’t need to ask all those questions of discovery. Maybe I can shortcut this piece of the [00:10:00] deposition, you know, my depth template that I always do, but also maybe I’ll build more over here where there were these inflammatory facts.
So let’s talk about a couple examples. We talked a little bit about a car crash and I think for a car crash, a one hour virtual focus group is going to be great to give you those expectations, which are really going to help with nailing down your depositions for your at fault driver, but also really knowing.
where your client needs to talk about in their deposition. That’s going to help you with preparation and where to focus. And because a lot of times for, especially with car crash cases, because again, we have this, all this experience driving, like you’re, your client may not see that they need to be talking about how they.
where they were looking exactly and having that seatbelt on and a couple of just really small things that make a big difference to folks and making it abundantly clear. And I think that’s where a lot of car crash cases get a little caught up in [00:11:00] litigation going farther because there’s Deposition testimony is so unclear, right?
And so it’s like, well, yeah, we’re going to roll the dice because this is not clear, right? And if this person can’t testify clearly about it, like we’ll roll the dice because car crash could be anybody’s ballgame at jury trial. So let’s talk a little bit about maybe a trucking case, right? These, those trucking cases, you know, we have lots of discovery because we want to know, we want to see these documents.
We really don’t know how are they running their business, these applications, these files, driver files. We really want to find out how many violations can we find now, most folks who do trucking cases, when it comes in the door, you have this whole level of investigation that you do, right? You’re going to do all the open records, your question, you can find, you’re going to go safer website, you can grab all this stuff, then you’re going to get even more and discovery.
And sometimes it’s really figuring out. which violations have the most bang for the [00:12:00] buck because you could have a trucking case that has 20 or more violations, but not all violations are equal. Right? So the example that I have is there was a case that I helped work on a couple of years back and the lawyer became very fixated on the application being wrong.
It didn’t follow the rules. And they always use the application. They didn’t fix it. And this guy filled out the wrong application and the actual facts, the case we’re about making this turn a jug turn versus not doing that. Anyhow, we don’t have to get into that part of it, but he got so fixated. He ended up building a very large piece of the case around this bad application.
And it was like, where is this coming from? And he’s like, Oh, it’s just so egregious. And it was just really built up about it. But I was like, but what, but focus groups don’t even mention this. And so it’s like, Oh, so you got to drop that, right? So he ended up having to edit all that out before they went to trial because.
It wasn’t anything that was inflammatory at all, right? [00:13:00] And so again, having a little bit of direction when you have, again, you may have all these violations and a lot of them you may know about before you even file, right? Again, thinking about trucking case and what we can find out about trucking companies and all the information that is available for open records and having them to kind of wade through.
But having that initial blush with the facts. With walking people through some of these violations to figure out like, okay, what’s your expectation here? Like, is this an issue that intrigues you? Like, would this be something you’d want to know more about? Like how is this even remotely tied to what happened on the day of the crash?
Right. So asking some really just open questions to figure out what people really want to see, know, and understand versus guessing at it. But also I think in a trucking case, you could have this flat, really a large gamut. And needing to know which is inflammatory and which is not. Cause again, you could spend hours and hours in that position going after.
And again, we’re setting aside the fact that you may obviously have [00:14:00] some opposition that doesn’t provide all the things and you have to go out and do all those anyhow. We’re just talking about finding kind of that inflammatory information early. Then you really can start having a direction, pushing things in the, you know, into the area that you want versus kind of again, running the gamut and trying to chase after everything.
Another example is a MedMal case. Typically, again, MedMal, you’re going to have the records before you file a lot of places, including Texas, have a requirement for a report even before you’re allowed to file. So you’re going to look through all these records, right? You’re going to find probably all several violations, right?
Nursing violations, doctor violations, like policy violations, like all these violations. And really, You want to know just on the basic facts, right? Like what makes people mad? Like, what is their blink reaction to this? If it’s an emergency room, is this just how it always is? And we’re just stuck with it because it’s an emergency and the doctors are just doing their best.
You want to [00:15:00] know all that before you get in there, because you want to know where to spend your time and what to pursue. This came up recently for a series of focus groups that I have done. In a med mal case, and we always start at the basics. We start with a one hour because we want to know just at a base level, let’s look at these facts.
Let’s check out this timeline. What happened to this patient and what, what makes them mad? What doesn’t make them mad? What would we assume, you know, Ms. Upsetting, but maybe it’s not to them. Like, so, And then we did it again, because, and again, in Mad Mal, we’ve got lots of facts to test out before we get into a little bit deeper of the medicine and causation and those kind of things.
But typically you always want to start out with a short one hour virtual focus group to figure out what do they think about the facts. What I’m encouraging you to do is do that early. Do that before you get dumped on with all these facts and all [00:16:00] these documents, right? Do that very early on. In the case, you can do it at filing, you can do it before filing, do it right after that first discovery, if that makes you feel more comfortable, and then just run it to see, again, what we’re looking for, expectations, immediate assumptions.
Issues that intrigue them, places they want to know more, inflammatory facts, and again, test your own assumptions, right? Please form it into a question that doesn’t reveal your bias. You know, ask those questions early on. Get that information early on to give yourself direction to know how do I spend my time.
Building up the theme, building up the story that the jury wants to hear. Not necessarily that I want to hear because if we don’t know, our lawyer brains will go after, all right. We want to know it all. That’s we, we do like that is we are very inquisitive. We’re taught to be that way. It could be this, it could be that.
Let’s go get all this information and that’s great. [00:17:00] Trust me, those are all good things. But if we had just a little bit of information, right, that will significantly give you more direction, which will then be able to save you time versus going after all of it. And of course we go, we should make a guess, right?
Based on Our past experience based on other people’s experience. We can make a guess about what the jury wants to know. But again, we’re just guessing and we don’t want to guess, right? Because we could go spend all this time pursuing this particular casing that we think is important and that doesn’t help because if they think it’s something else, right, you’re going to lose and you spend all this time and generally time equals money, right?
Experts, more depositions, longer depositions, extra questions, more discovery. Pursuing that discovery, you know, to get it if you need to have the other side, you know, it’s just a lot of time and energy and money that can go into that. Where if we had just a little bit of direction that will significantly help you.
And also it gives you a lot of confidence to know I’ve checked [00:18:00] in with non lawyers. And here’s where they are, and that’s great. And this is different than checking in with our family members, our church groups, our people that know us, right? We’re checking in with a group of non lawyer strangers. You’re just going to shoot to me straight because they’re here.
This is their whole purpose. They know they’re supposed to give me their opinion. That’s what we want to do. So, We want to save you time. We want to use these as an effective case preparation tool. Our one hour virtual focus groups. Okay, because we want, we don’t want you to send extra discovery. We don’t want you or your team to have to spend more time reviewing documents that don’t make any sense or that aren’t going to be used.
And we really want to, again, set you up for success when it comes down the road. If you do have to go to trial, you’ve got very easy depots to do page and line designations. Right. We might not have to have all those fights for completion to play all this boring stuff. It’s going to put everyone to sleep and they’re going to miss the good stuff.
Okay. So we want to [00:19:00] have a tool that is effective and efficient. It’s one hour here, a virtual focus group to help get you on the right path. And so that’s how it can save you time. We’re going to be better about sending discovery that’s pointed at what The jury wants better at asking questions that the jury wants to know.
And again, that’s just going to set you up for cleaner, smoother mediations. And again, easier transition into trial and more focus groups as well. So think about that saving you time when you’re going to do other focus groups, you’re going to kind of already know, okay, he will just set up the story the same way we did before.
We feel confident. We already know what people are going to say about that. We expect, we’re just going to hear that echo again, and we’re going to get deeper into the facts. deeper into deposition testimony than we could get if we had to wade back through those facts and then get into that deeper water with those documents and deposition clips.
Okay. I hope that this was helpful. If you have questions, please don’t ever hesitate to email me. My email will be in the show [00:20:00] notes. And if you are interested to learn more about, get deeper into the weeds here about virtual focus groups, please sign up for my monthly. Email list. The link will also be in the show notes.
And of course, if we’re not friends on LinkedIn, please follow me or connect with me. All right. Until next time, please rate review on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.