Maximizing Focus Group Insights: A Guide to Reflective Practices [Ep 130]
In this episode of Trial Lawyer Prep, Elizabeth Larrick discusses the importance of immediate and thorough reflection on focus group feedback for trial lawyers. She emphasizes early recording of impressions, detailed review within seven days, and actionable steps to improve trial strategies. Elizabeth shares her methods for compiling and analyzing data to ensure focus group insights are effectively utilized in courtroom preparations.
00:00 Introduction to Trial Lawyer Prep
00:40 Welcome and Episode Overview
00:53 The Importance of Reflection in Jury Research
02:39 Immediate Reflection After Focus Groups
06:28 Seven-Day Reflection and Analysis
10:03 Implementing Feedback and Next Steps
16:08 Conclusion and Additional Resources
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to Trial Lawyer Prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants? Ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively. Then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success. Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world, understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process.
Elizabeth is an experienced trial lawyer, consultant, and founder of Larrick Law Firm in Austin, Texas. Her goal is to help you connect with juries and clients in order to improve your abilities in the courtroom. Now, here’s Elizabeth. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I am glad you’re here. I am your host, Elizabeth. And if you’re joining me today, it is January 1st, 2025.
And. As usual, kind of the end of the year, I thought it would be a great episode to talk about reflection, but more [00:01:00] importantly, talk about using reflection to get the most out of your jury research. Here’s the thing. You spend time and money and energy running focus groups and mock juries to understand better what juries are thinking and what they want to know about your case.
And sometimes all we really want to know is Do we win or do we not win? But what I want to do is give you an episode to talk about how to get the most out of your focus groups. Because what I see so much in lawyers is you get your initial impression and then you just move on and I really don’t want you to miss out on going deeper and getting the most out of what you receive from your focus groups so that you can Use it better and more effectively in your cases,
maybe you are getting ready for trial. Maybe you’ve just done a focus group for mediation. , maybe you’re deciding whether to take a [00:02:00] case or not. Even in all those places, you can learn so much more about what the focus group is giving you and that feedback. If we take a little time to do some reflection.
Now, this episode of course comes out of my own personal reflections in looking at working with lawyers in 2024 and of course the many years before that with focus groups and where folks are missing the mark. And again, don’t want you to do that. You use all this energy and time to create these things, to work, , with others in doing them.
So let’s talk very quickly and make a brief episode here. Point number one. So important to do an immediate reflection after your focus group or mock jury. I see so many lawyers who just finish up and pack up their stuff or leave the zoom and don’t take those moments right after you [00:03:00] finish a focus group to reflect and put their thoughts down on paper.
Yes, of course, all of our focus groups are recorded. However, I rarely see lawyers go back and actually re watch their focus groups. So, if you are going to add any kind of step after your focus groups, after your jury research, it would be to stop what you are doing, sit down, and do an immediate reflection.
Because in even as little as 24 hours, our memory begins to fade, right? That’s just kind of how our brains work. We have to take in new information. So you want to sit down while it is fresh, right? Those immediate things on your brain and write it down, write down those takeaways. Of course, if you have others there with you, that is a great time to sit down and have just a super brief discussion.
And this is what I do with all of the lawyers who work with me in my [00:04:00] focus groups, because I think it is so invaluable to have even a quick discussion after you finish your focus group to ask, what do you think they understood? What do you think they missed? Where do you think they were confused? What surprised you?
What didn’t you hear? that you thought you would hear. Because, , we walk into all of our focus groups testing different facts, testing different evidence, testing sequence , of information, testing our witnesses. And we come in with our preconceived notions. We think, Oh, that particular defense is going to work really well.
Maybe it’s social media posts. Maybe it’s pictures of somebody. Doing a handstand, those have totally happened by the way, and you want to know, oh, those are definitely going to have traction. Well, you already come in as a lawyer and as somebody creating these focus groups [00:05:00] with a preconceived expectation about what they’re going to say.
Did they say it or did they not? You know, that’s kind of one of those things where we can look at when you create your focus group plan and your goals and what are you testing? Like what is a hundred percent going to be in your presentation? That should be a hundred percent. The question you’re asking after you finish, what did I hear about that particular topic?
So many a times when I work with lawyers, what I get back when we do this reflection, this immediate debrief discussion is Oh, well, I didn’t have enough time to give them X information. I always try to bring people back to the core of, I just want to know what is your brain telling you right now about what they get?
What was this feedback that you heard? Because what is so important when you have a round table and you have multiple people to bounce things off is what you’ll hear is. You know, Bobby Joe over here heard that [00:06:00] it was bad, but then, you know, Susie said it was good, so then it’s like, oh, wow, everybody heard a little something different.
Well, who did you hear that from, right? And now you can actually kind of really be able to see and put some things together about different participants, what they’re saying and where it may have come from, because that’s that next level of being able to reflect on what you heard about And why you may have heard it.
And having other people in that immediate reflection time is also very important. Naturally, you want to record all that good stuff too, because the next step in reflection would be to go within the next seven days of your focus group and take a look at the transcript. Take a look at the chat. If you’re virtual or if it’s in person, look at those paper votes.
What was actually written down in the transcript? reactions to the questions. And [00:07:00] what I like to do is compile that information into a chart or enter a table, because when I do that, , creating a memo or creating a report, however you want to label it, but just basically taking that information and taking it from all the separate little places and putting it into one.
So you can really compare what they actually wrote down, what they actually put or said. And when you’re able to do that, your brain. Oh, you get a whole nother level of reflection because you’ve got your initial immediate thoughts and takeaways. Now, when you’re actually going back within those seven days and looking at, Oh, this is really what they said.
Oh, wow. Everybody actually wrote down this same point or something very, very similar. Oh, okay. And how are those people then talking about it? Because one of the good things about having A chat or having in person votes is you can take those what they actually wrote down or what [00:08:00] they typed and then compare it to what they said in discussion to really see.
Did they tell me the truth? Were they actually giving me a true answer to something, or were they just telling me what I wanted to hear? That’s a very good way to check to make sure, okay, was this a good focus group, or did they just tell me what I wanted to hear? Because they’ll trip up somewhere in between those two things.
And the other thing you can do, too, is look at what you presented. Maybe it was an opening statement, or maybe it was a PowerPoint. And in comparison with what they wrote, what they typed, what they said in discussion, , were there pieces where, Oh, you know what? That’s probably why they said that. I added this fact into the timeline, or we mentioned this in the opening statement.
I can hear that reflected in what they’re saying. So then you’re able to really see connections better on the information and then compare it to what your initial thoughts were. Because many of times what will happen is in our initial takeaway. Our brains will get hung up on maybe one comment and typically that comment is negative.[00:09:00]
And then when we go back and we look at in , our seven day reflection, we can see , Oh, that was just one particular person saying the same thing over and over and over again, that my brain got ahold of. Nobody else was saying that. And that way we’d say, okay, so don’t because you don’t want to take action in your case based on one comment from one person that nobody else in the group took ahold of.
That is the danger of what you could be missing out on if you don’t do this extra reflection. So again, the other thing we can do is write down at this point, , we’ve done our immediate reflection, we’ve done our seven day reflection where we’ve really compiled all the thoughts, all the information into a one document.
You can call it a memo, call it a report, but just put it all in one place so it’s easy to find. We need to go back and look at it, but then also that really tells you, okay, what do we test next? What’s the next step for this case and what do we need to retest? And what do we need to [00:10:00] do new for the next one?
And finally, what I like to do is make. an immediate list of changes or steps that need to be taken for the information. , for example, if you did an opening statement, Go in and immediately start putting in those edits or put in those comments so that you can begin to work it into your opening statement.
If you need to create a timeline, go ahead and put that in there. Or if you did create a timeline, move things around, go ahead and make those changes right now while that feedback is fresh on your mind. And then sometimes I will put in a comment, if you’re working in Word, so that I know, Oh, this is where that comes from.
So if I try to change it back or somebody comes and change it again, they can know, Oh, that’s, that came from that focus group where we, we mentioned this. The other thing to do is make a list of action steps for discovery. For example, if the focus group told [00:11:00] you things that they wanted to hear or see, now you need to go ask for that request for production, go ask for that interrogatory.
Or maybe you need to go talk to your expert who’s about to give a deposition or maybe you are creating questions for your deposition for this fact witness you’ve immediately gotten that feedback. And more importantly, what will happen is you can actually use the language that the focus group gave you versus you using lawyer words,
It if you don’t make this list, it’s typically it’s lost, right? What I see a lot of times is lawyers will run focus groups.
We’ll have a memo or report. We’ll have it all in one place. And then we come back together to get ready for an opening statement or we get ready for the next focus group. I’ll say, okay, well, did you go and get that thing that the focus group wanted? Did you ask that expert for that? Did you, and they’re like, Oh, No, no, we didn’t.
I was like, okay, well, it’s lost, right? We don’t want, I don’t want you to lose that. I want you to be able to have that [00:12:00] information and immediately take those steps. That’s the whole purpose of the focus group, right? To not only help us better understand the way the jury thinks, but to help us now shape our case to how they think and how they expect to see this information.
The other thing you can do as well, along with making a list of steps To take or making those immediately changes to your presentation is to do a comparison to your other focus groups. This is something I enjoy doing for my lawyers that work with me on multiple focus groups is we basically end up doing kind of a large visual chart.
Again, you know how I love to make visual aids, but if we can put things in a way where our eyes can really see them right next to each other, who were the jurors that were good profiles, who were the negative profiles, and be able to just really see that, Oh, okay.
Oh, and that when we tested this, Oh, but the next focus group, we took it out. We didn’t put that in. And how did that really change things? That is really helpful for us because, , when we’re coming down [00:13:00] to trial, we’re synthesizing a lot of information, plus new information that is coming across from opposing counsel.
And so to be able to have that, , document where everything is beside itself is extremely helpful to quickly. analyze and then make very quick decisions on things that you need to put into jury selection or opening statement or direct exam cross exam. So recently we had two focus groups on a particular file and we did them two months apart and ran two kind of different styles of focus group.
One was very kind of exploratory, what are the concepts and themes, and the other one was very much directed with a very specific presentation about. The facts and evidence in the case. And what we were able to do is basically look for recurring themes and retest things that we heard that we believe to be positive,
and what that really helped was guide , Oh, did we see it? Did we hear [00:14:00] it? And then have a lot of confidence, , Oh, we did it. So this needs to be included 100%. And , when you’re able to really dive into the focus group feedback, then you can really use it again for the next one.
And then again, gain a lot of confidence, in what is positive for your case. And you will also hear what is dragging down, your case as well. I don’t want you to miss this step. I want you to be able to really get the most out of your focus groups. And so plan the time, right?
You work really hard on the front end. You prepare, you spend money and energy getting ready for these focus groups. Take that extra 30 minutes, right after and just book that on your calendar so that , okay, immediately once I, walk out of that room, those focus group participants leave that room, or I get out, exit out of that Zoom, I’m going to immediately go and write down my thoughts.
And again, this is not a [00:15:00] detailed, what did everybody say list. This is, what are my takeaways? Again, answering those simple questions. What did they understand? What did they not understand? What did they miss? That’s generally always a really good question is what do we give them that they didn’t even talk about?
And then, of course, taking another step of reflection within the seven days to really look at what they actually typed or wrote down for us, in response to directed questions and looking back at that transcript, looking at our presentations, and then putting everything into one document, being either a memo or report, whatever you want to title it, and then being able to go back and compare our initial thoughts with what was actually typed in or said in the transcript.
And of course, that last point, which is taking those immediate steps, we’re making a list, of steps and actions that need to be taken to get the focus group, those folks, what they needed to hear or see or talk to your experts [00:16:00] or your witnesses, even to make sure that that testimony is not lost, but it’s going to be given over to the focus group.
All right. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and take a little more time to do reflection after your focus groups and jury research until next time. Thank you so much. And don’t forget, I do have a monthly trial lawyer prep newsletter. If you’d like to join, check the show notes for the link. All right.
Until next time. Thank you.