Have you ever wondered how to set up a focus group system that not only saves you money but also provides invaluable feedback for your courtroom success? In this episode, I share my insights and experiences on creating your very own focus group that will help you improve your skills and case strategies. I cover the non-economic damages model, the confusion around it, and how it could create gaps in your case. Plus, I discuss how to eliminate a defense argument and even add facts to your case from the focus group feedback.

We dive deeper into strategies for ensuring reliable feedback from your focus groups, such as preventing repeats, providing clear instructions, and utilizing the right tools for communication, payment, hosting meetings, and advertising. By treating participants with respect and making it easy for them to participate, you can guarantee they’re engaged and providing honest feedback. Listen as I discuss how these strategies can help you get the practice and feedback needed for courtroom success.

Lastly, I touch on streamlining focus group logistics by suggesting the use of tools like PayPal, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Dropbox. To help you get started, I’m offering a free download of my questionnaire. So hit play and join me in this episode to learn how to optimize your focus group system and ultimately improve your abilities in the courtroom. Don’t forget to leave a review and follow the podcast to help others find it!

In this episode, you will hear:

• Learning from focus groups 
• The value of having a Gmail account
• Setting up and managing focus groups
• Ways to improve communication and directions
• How to select from a diverse focus group participants 

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Supporting Resources:

Please follow this link to download the Virtual Focus Group Checklist: https://fantastic-designer-3528.ck.page/635800b2c4

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Elizabeth Larrick and I’m your host for Trial Lawyer Prep, a podcast dedicated to folks getting ready for trial and preparing cases the better way.

I’m Last episode you met Rhonda, my focus group recruiter, and we talked pretty extensively [00:01:00] about the system that we use to recruit. And I wanted just to hit a pause and take this episode to dive just a little bit deeper into setting up your own focus group system. Because I know that there is still a lot of hesitation out there to running your own focus group.

And I think it’s something that we can totally do and totally handle. And one of the things I’ve heard over the weekend, ran focus group here in Austin with some great lawyers going to trial and I heard through the grapevine about another focus group that costs a set of lawyers 88, 000. Now that’s a lot of cheese.

So that’s why I want to take time and walk through this with you and setting up your own focus group system. Um, because It is so vital. It’s essential. It literally is not a step that you should [00:02:00] skip because we need the feedback and we need the practice. That’s all there is to it is these focus groups are an amazing place to get that feedback to get that practice where you wouldn’t get it somewhere otherwise.

And again, I’m going to go ahead and say again, focus groups, okay, because we’re not talking about. mock trials. We’re talking about doing things and efficient, getting things done in an hour, getting it done in two hours, maybe even getting it done in three hours, depending on what needs to get done, but making it really efficient for you so the cost is efficient as well.

So talking to my trial lawyers here, Which found the podcast. So you know that this is for you and wanting to give basically what I have learned in my eight years with the focus group system that I have set up for me. And remember when I started doing this, I was basically a sole lawyer and I didn’t even have any staff when I first started out [00:03:00] doing focus groups by myself.

So this is a system that has been evolved, but it still evolves, but basically it’s set, it’s easy, we follow it every time. I’ve had many, multiple people, multiple staff follow the system without a problem. And then of course Rhonda has picked up that system and we’ve carried it forward. So focus groups.

Just to touch on that, why would we do focus groups? And let me tell you, every focus group, no matter what, the number one thing I hear from lawyers after we finish a focus group is, I learned something new. And that’s what we need, is that outside perspective and the testing. And these are lawyers who, with years of experience, 30 plus trials, right, they’re telling me, hey, wow, I wasn’t expecting that reaction.

Or, I’m glad I learned to see how people see that fact, because I thought it was different. Or, wow, we’ve got a hole in the case right there that we need to fill up with some facts and information. Let me give [00:04:00] you a concrete example. Doing a testing in a focus group of a damages model. Right, so what the lawyer believes will be a way to calculate the damages in the case.

Generally, when we talk about a damages model, we are talking about that. non economic part of things, right? Economics are easy. We can add up numbers. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the non economic stuff, right? So in some places, it’s mental anguish. In some places, it’s pain and suffering.

Okay. So that’s really kind of what we’re talking about. We want to test it out. Okay. Which is, I think, a great way. We, sometimes we come in with what we want to test it for, what the number is, but really it was the model, how we’re calculating came in with us. Seems super clear, but in the feedback from the focus group, Was just confusion and the way that had been calculated people thought that he was referring to lost wages And so people got on tangents about [00:05:00] lost wages and some people just Because of the level of kind of confusion just turned him off altogether now That’s a pretty valuable piece of feedback.

Now, how long did it take to do that? 30 minutes We’re talking very efficient use of time, and then again, turning and getting that feedback back from focus groups. Another example that I had where we were doing a focus group and testing both sides of a case and the lawyer learned that that one defense argument made a lot of ground with these people.

And that was one thing we kept hearing over and over again in discussion. It was like, okay, we need to eliminate. that argument and give these facts. We have these facts in the case. Always going to learn something new, and again, sometimes it feels really subtle, what you’re learning, but it has a giant impact on the case overall.

And we talked a little bit about this at the beginning of this episode, that [00:06:00] what’s the holdout? What are the problem areas for us? Generally, I hear, well, it’s too expensive. Or it’s too time consuming, or I’ve never done it before. I’ve never even done a focus group at all. So I wouldn’t even know where to start.

So let’s tackle our first top two things, which is it’s expensive and it’s time consuming. This is what this podcast is about. And that’s what a lot of the feedback is on in the blogs and on my website. And even in the handout that I had today is, you set up your own system so that you can control that cost.

And you set up that system to eliminate the time consuming part of things so somebody else can do this for you. Now, of course, you can offload all of these things, but that can increase the cost. And that’s what we’re trying to be really cost conscious for trial lawyers who are out there who are solos.

Maybe you’ve got a mid sized firm. And time consuming because maybe you’ve got a lot of cases on your plate. And being efficient with your time is really something that you need to do. And, of course I’ve never done it [00:07:00] before. Well, that’s, we’re here to talk about, there’s lots of, again, episodes that I’ve done and even blog posts about never done it.

Try this first. And maybe that will be another one that we refresh and bring back to never done before. Let’s talk about it. And I do know that in the month of June, this month, I’m going to have conversation with a lawyer who had never done focus groups before and picked it up and has run with it. And so we’re going to talk about, Hey, feedback on that part of things.

But let’s talk a little bit about a solution which would be never done before. How can we set up the system to make it efficient time wise and expense wise? When I started out in 2015, I had a rough idea how to set up a focus group. I’d had some prior experience with my prior job where we’d run a few focus groups, but we had some staff that was helping us.

So, when I went out on my own, without any staff, I kind of had a few holds to figure out. And, the two main things that I did right from the start, one of them was, um, uh, I[00:08:00] 

And that would be collecting, recording, and storing all the past participants and having it in a program. I use Excel, nothing super fancy, to be able to collect data points like emails and no shows along with the date they attended, the time they were Of course, once we turn virtual, then we add that virtual column in there, virtual person, but collecting all that data from the start is fantastic because that then allows me to search to see who has ever attended before to prevent repeat attendance.

Now, I know that repeats can be used. I do, but what I want to see is I want to see time pass before these folks come back. Six, eight months, sometimes two years. And of course, some people are not ever invited back, but what’s really important is we don’t want focus [00:09:00] group people who do this for a living to join into our focus group because most of the time they’re just parrots.

They just mimic, right? They don’t actually tell us real feedback. They get either really upset or they try to take the opposite view, be a contrarian inside the focus group. You never really can nail down what the actual feedback is or the truth is from the feedback. So that’s why I always try to prevent repeats, especially back to back repeats.

So I track that as well. And then again, of course, I don’t invite people back who don’t show up. Now, there are people who reschedule, or there are people who need to cancel. That’s different than just a complete no show, so we always track that as well. And that just, again, prevents a lot of frustration on recruiting and getting people in there.

And I really harp away about this prevent repeats because of course it’s super easy to invite the same people back, even though it’s a different case, Elizabeth, it’s no, they’ve seen you before, they know what the song and dance [00:10:00] is. You’re not going to get solid feedback, that’s reliable, right? We want to make sure we can rely on what we’re getting, otherwise focus groups are a wash.

It’s garbage in, garbage out, right? So if you put whoever signs up first out the gate, not vetting at all, and then you have focus groups. And you think, wow, that went really well. Who’d you have sitting in the seat? How do we test our reliability? Who was sitting in the seats and then what’d you present?

Because a lot of times we can do a really great job of putting a great set of people in there. And then we get a presentation that argues with people. That’s extremely biased. And we tried to set up things to make sure that we’re being neutral and people, the cover’s blown sometimes people say to me, and it’s just, okay, so can we really rely on it?

But anyhow, the second thing that I did from the start and I took time was that I always wanted to treat all our participants with respect. I wanted to make sure they knew where to go, when to be there, when they would get [00:11:00] paid. I want to make sure that when we were in person we had as many creature comforts as possible.

Sometimes it’s not totally possible to do that when you’re in a limited space or got limited funds. But here’s the thing, I knew from the very jump, running focus groups, I wasn’t going to pay top dollar. Okay, I get a lot of complaints still to this day. I went to this other focus group, they paid me 150.

I went to this other one and I’m like, okay, I hear you, but here’s the thing. The questions that we have to ask you are not personal. We’re not coming in to make people give us. A lot of personal private information. What we’re here to do is get your Feedback on the presentation. And also I know that there’s a budget that we have to accommodate.

Now again, that doesn’t mean I still pay the same amount of money that I did eight years ago. We’ve had to go up, we’ve had to pay more. But again, I still get complaints for that. But also I want to treat people with respect because I run a referral program. Which is basically asking people who’ve attended, had a good time, or a good experience to refer [00:12:00] somebody else.

And in that referral program, I have been able to gain people who are engaged, who show up, and make great participants. So I want to make sure we do that. Also, I’ve noticed, again, when people can’t find the place, or they get the time wrong, and they get super flustered, it’s really hard to get them to calm back down.

To then be able to focus on what you’re saying and get feedback. So I want to make sure to eliminate all those things so we can go over the top when it comes to giving instructions, to giving reminders. If we have a location, we give them, we link it with a Google app, right? Just to make sure we’re going the extra mile so that they know exactly where they’re going to go.

The two things we did right from the start, but I did right from the start to make sure. So let’s jump into really quickly. The focus group system and right up the gate, when you’re setting up your system, the first thing you need to sit down is you need to pick your tools. Some people [00:13:00] fancily call this your tech stack, but I’m just gonna call it your tools.

Cause I’m not a toll tech person. And I’m definitely not with all the up and all how much to talk about things. So it’s your tools. Okay. So for me, it’s Gmail, it’s PayPal, it’s zoom, it’s Adobe, it’s Craigslist. So what did I just list? How do I communicate with people? I use Gmail. How do I pay people? PayPal.

With virtual, what platform am I going to use to host the meeting? Zoom. For my confidentiality, I’m going to use Adobe. And for advertising, I’m going to use Craigslist. And I also use Facebook. So, in all of these things, always be thinking about what is the easiest for participants. You want it to be easy on you as well, because you’re learning this.

But most of these tools We’ve already been using as trial lawyers. I use Adobe for eSignature because it’s a program I already pay for. I use Zoom. It’s a program I already pay for. I also, when I started out, that seemed to be [00:14:00] the easiest platform. And so, I’ve taken it and used it over the years. They definitely improved it by and far.

There are new things you can do and fancy things you can do. PayPal, I chose that one. Just kind of, that’s what I chose. And, um, I see, here’s a couple pitfalls that I see with some of the technology people pick. One is you pick a lot of stuff. Meaning, I know some lawyers who they’ll use whatever payment platform people want.

Some people want Cash Appet, some people want Venmo, some people want PayPal, some people want Zelle. Like, that now becomes a logistical nightmare for your staff who’s going to be paying. So we, from the very start, PayPal, that’s it. If you don’t have it, sorry, you can’t be a part of it. And that makes it really easy when you’re going to go make payment to people that you have one program they log into and make the payment and it’s done.

Is it the best payment platform out there? I don’t know. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. PayPal and Venmo are the same people. But I [00:15:00] still get arguments both ways or either way from people who want to join but don’t have PayPal. I just say, sorry, that’s just the way we use it. I also see as far as picking your tools, I love Gmail because there are So many things inside that 6 account.

Always do the paid account. Please do not skip on this because you do not want any of that information. You don’t, it’s, again, you don’t have any privacy. Let’s just put it that way. You have zero privacy if you don’t pay for it. So pay the 6. It’s totally worth it because you want to make sure that none of this, all this stuff doesn’t get leaked, especially if you are using Gmail as a way to transfer videos.

Okay. To people, to co counsel, or you’re putting materials up in the Gmail for document storage. So pay the 6. It’s totally worth it to have that paid account. Now Gmail of course gives you document storage, like I talked about, or just general online store storage, but it gives you access to questionnaires that you can make.[00:16:00] 

And of course the Google calendar. And we use those for every single focus group and it makes it super easy. It’s all in one place instead of having it in different places. Now again, this is the tool that we use to communicate with people, so we’re using that email and we’re using that Google Calendar to communicate with our folks.

And we are doing a questionnaire form, we call it a questionnaire, to get people to respond to our advertising. Some folks ask people in the Craigslist ad, hey, email me a response to these 30 questions. What are the chances you’re going to get somebody to answer all 30 questions? It’s possible. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but I am saying you may not get very many choices, right?

Because people want it easy. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to apply. And you also want to make sure they’re paying attention, right? So we use our questionnaire form to gather [00:17:00] information about people, but also to kind of run a little bit of a test to make sure are actually reading the ad.

The questionnaire or the makes it super easy for us to manage and seal information in one place, but also learning from Zoe chance and her book influences your superpower, which we did a review with Jason here recently. What’s the easiest, how do you make it easy and having a quick, easy questionnaire, we used to have a ton of questions on there.

I’ve narrowed that down again, out of ice for Rhonda, who talked about that, where people seem to have a hundred questions. questionnaire they have to fill out and then they’re mad when they don’t get picked or they just give up on it. So we want to make it an easy tool to use. Those questionnaires are super easy.

Of course, then it turns into a sheet so you can see everything everywhere. And also, again, it creates a little bit of a. tool to help people. If somebody fills out the form, okay, they’re eligible. If they send an email in response to Craigslist, they’re [00:18:00] automatically not considered because they’re not following directions.

And you got to have people follow directions, even if they’re doing in person, they got to follow directions to get there. Or if it’s Zoom, you got to follow the directions to get into the Zoom meeting. So you definitely want the people who get at least at a bare minimum do that because you want people who are going to actually show up at jury selection.

So part of the system, pick your tools. If you need to vet some tools, that’s good. But basically, like we talked about, you need to have a way to communicate with them. And I will say, having a separate Gmail account is key, right? Because if you’re emailing them from your lawyer account, they’re automatically going to be conjuring up things in their mind about lawyers and what the folks group’s about.

So having that separate Gmail to communicate and have all the other tools with it, calendar, all that good stuff. Pick a way to pay people. That’s helpful. Even today, when we’re doing in person, I still use that PayPal to pay people. I think it’s super easy, creates a receipt for every [00:19:00] person, and I don’t have to fumble with going to get cash.

Pick a platform for doing your virtual, I suggest Zoom. Pick a way to do electronic confidentiality. There’s tons of options out there, Dropbox now offers eSignature, HelloSign, DocuSign, whatever it is. Just Pick one and go for it. And then of course, pick how you’re going to advertise. I use Craigslist and I use Facebook.

To do that, there’s Nextdoor. There’s all kinds of ways you can advertise. Just consider what your budget is. Okay. And. other free ways that you can do that, which would be like one of the ways I use the referral program. All right. So picture tools, and now you need to look at, okay, so what can we automate or even semi automate in my system?

Emails. This is something we’re going to send the same email out for every single FocusScript, we’re just going to change dates, times, maybe the amount of the incentive, right? So emails, that’s great. Gmail will host [00:20:00] templates, right? I know Outlook will do that now too. Easy way to make those templates, get them set up and then just boom, you don’t have to retype those emails.

And again, first email, second email, reminder emails, day of emails, all of that can be put into a template and make it very easy. I will say I’ve tried group emailing and individual emailing. Hands down, do the individual. Because what I have found is people will respond more to the individual one. So I’ll get more people that say, Yep, confirmed.

I will totally be there. Versus if we do a group one. So I know it may save time to do one email with everybody on it. Even blindsees see it. Yeah, okay. Here’s the thing. We use the draft. So we basically draft. All the reminder emails, we draft all our zoom emails so that when it comes time to get it done, it’s just open it, put the email in and go or open it and hit send, you know, it’s [00:21:00] semi automated, right?

So you could use a tool that makes it very automated. That’s going to be more expensive versus having somebody do it semi automated questionnaires. Again, we just copy, create. I used to do a single questionnaire for every single focus group. Of course, that creates a lot of questionnaires. And now we just do one, pretty much one per year.

Or if there are some specific for focus groups, then we’ll create one specific for them. And of course the check in process. You can write that out and have that good to go for in person or in virtual. And it, again, was super easy where you want to check people’s photo IDs. We want to make sure they sign confidentiality and is the technology work, right?

Super simple things here, but again, write it out, have it done. And then you can always have it go back to refer to it. Or if somebody new comes in to step into that role, It can do it very easily. And finally, which would be fine tuning. Part one of your system is pick your tools. Part two is what can be automated or semi [00:22:00] automated, and then go ahead and do that.

So that makes it very easy to reproduce those things every time. And then last one is fine tuning. And that is just. It’s going to happen. There’s going to be something that you forget about that you, Oh, I need to add that. And this happened, of course, constantly. So when we first started doing virtual, we had people show up on cell phone.

That’s not going to work. So we found a way to put that very clearly multiple times. Then when someone showed up on a cell phone, we had a way of saying, Oh, I can’t have a cell phone. We had people who were getting in that didn’t have a PayPal because we weren’t reconfirming the PayPal. And one of the things, too, that we found were just the days that it took us to recruit.

And that used to be a week out. Sometimes we now start at 10 days out. And then just small things that were happening that we were realizing, like, Oh, okay, we need to figure out a way to vet for people who are trying to get in from out of the U. S. It’s not folks that we [00:23:00] want. Most of the time, If you tell people up front what you need, and what is not good, or what you’re not looking for, they generally will not apply.

However, sometimes they do as well. And again, that’s just a matter of, okay, how do we tell people politely, Hey, this is for people who live in the U. S., or this is a study for people who live in California. And then we put that in the questionnaire as well, right? So we want to make sure people Who may breeze past that or read it and breeze past the question.

We have a way to look at that and make sure. And again, that’s all just fine tuning for problems. Another thing that we ran into is, of course, people from outside the U. S. have PayPal outside the U. S., which then has a fee. Who has to pay the fee? We don’t have that in our system. Guess what? Now it’s in our emails.

Just to let people know, if you have, it’s connected to a foreign bank, you’re going to pay the fee, not us. And we haven’t had any complaints for that. Alright, so it’s a lot about the system. [00:24:00] And I know there’s a lot of information, so I wanted to let you know I do have a free download. It’ll be in the show notes, the link to it.

That gives you the questionnaire I used, the tools I used, the confidentiality form that I used. So if you’re curious about that or want to start beyond Scratch, please use that. Get started. And basically what the system puts out for me, it creates a table of folks for me to choose from. In the table, I can quickly eliminate people I don’t want to use, leaving us with people who are eligible.

And I will tell you a big misconception about, oh, okay, I get to this point, I’ll just I’m good to go. There’s still part where you need to pay attention and pick people. And I will say just from having used different staff to do this, one of the biggest things is most people come in and they think, Oh, I’ll just pick the first 10 people and send them an email and we’re done.

Wrong. We don’t want to do that. First of all, you got to vet for repeats, right? You still need to look at the information that’s given [00:25:00] and you got to pick a variety of people. I try to always have a variety of ages, a variety of education, a variety of jobs. Kids know kids, right? And if you pick the first ten people, you might end up having a panel of all single males.

And that might not reflect what the jury poll looks like. So you can’t just automatically pick the first ten, Oh, don’t pick the next ten, right? You’ve got to fine tune at that point and take a little bit of time to stop and look and pick folks. taking that time. Cause you’ve saved so much time on your system and getting people there or getting people to your table, uh, being able to select people is going to help.

So that’s one of the biggest jobs that I do is I go in there to actually select people than put into that email system. And of course, Rhonda helps with that. She vets out people are She’ll say, hey, we’re having a hard time with this person who’s responding or I’ll just say, okay, and we’ve learned I’ve learned if you’re difficult on the [00:26:00] outset, you’re going to be extremely difficult on the inside of the focus group.

So it’s generally a pretty red flag, but get a look and what some of those red flags are when you’re doing it. Okay. I hope that. this podcast episode was helpful. Let’s just stop and recap really quickly. Let’s get you into doing focus groups. Start small. Maybe you do an hour, maybe you do two hours. Set up a system to make it easy on you and your staff to find people to pick.

When you set it up, it’ll be outside your law firm, right? So it won’t be necessarily clued into people that this is a law firm that’s running make it easy on staff. If it’s easy, you’ll do it more. Because once you’re in there and you’re getting that feedback and you’re learning all that good stuff and you’re testing things out, you’re going to see, oh my gosh, this is immensely valuable beyond the expense of 1, 000, 1, 500, or maybe [00:27:00] even 2, 000, right?

Because the value you get out of that is 10x or more because you’re going to learn so many things that you just couldn’t see. We get blinders on, we get into our cases. I really want to stress like getting into this focus group, creating a system for yourself and your staff to start running focus groups.

So I hope that you found this episode helpful and my episode with Rhonda, who is our recruiter to walk through some of those things. If you have questions about focus groups, setting a system, please do not hesitate to call or to email me. And again, we’re going to have that free download of my questionnaire I use.

The tools I use and also confidentiality format free for everybody. It’s going to be in the show notes, but it will take you to another place. Just put your email in and you’ll get an email to you. And again, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review.

That’s a great way for other folks to find me. Also. If you want [00:28:00] to do the plus sign or follow on your favorite podcast platform, that also helps other people be able to find it. And it means a new episode will automatically go into your platform when it is available. All right. And until next time, thank you.

Don’t skip out on measuring the credibility of your witnesses and seeing the power of influence that they have over the decision-makers in your case. And one of the best ways to do that is through witness video clips in a focus group. 

In this episode, we discuss the importance and the usability of witness video clips in a focus group. You can better understand how clients are perceived by outsiders. Focus groups can help you identify areas where clients can improve their credibility and provide insights into how they can present themselves better at deposition or trial.

Let’s dive in and learn how the use of witness video clips is an essential component of witness preparation so you can help make your client more effective. 

In this episode, you will hear:

• Witness preparation is key.
• The importance of keeping a clear mind.
• Understanding the value and power of witness testimony.
• Why start using video clips in focus groups.

Subscribe and Review

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We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.

Supporting Resources:

If you have questions or a particularly challenging client preparation, email Elizabeth directly for assistance: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us this episode.

I want to talk about the importance and the usability of witness clips. And I know I’ve [00:01:00] talked about this before, and I’ve talked about it with witness preparation, doing a clip, creating a clip with zoom of your client, and then playing the clip and then asking questions about credibility words to describe the person and that is super helpful.

I 100 percent think that is super helpful thing for you to do to help prepare your client to see any things that. Focus group members are saying that maybe you don’t see, but what I really want to talk about today was an example for some focus groups that I’ve been running here recently on a particular case.

And what was so dynamic was, we had a setup again, we’re doing a series of focus groups, and that’s because we want to compare the data. We want to make sure we want to tweak things. And so basically set up this 6 hour in person focus group. We had 12 people, 14 people. [00:02:00] 14 people in our focus groups, and we designed the setup to be the same and we did basically opening statements with PowerPoints that included exhibits.

Right? So, a larger, more in depth opening statements and then we played video clips from several of the main PowerPoints. Layers in the cases. Now we did not do experts. Well, I think experts can be helpful. I think most of the time in my experience. It’s the main players that get biggest scrutiny that also way more as far as evidence goes in the minds and how jurors decide things.

But what was impressive was we’ve had to focus group so far, and we’ve run the exact same clips. And we have 1 focus group that felt strongly about a particular client and then switched up and they had the opposite view in our 2nd focus group and [00:03:00] super helpful to know, but we went back and looked at it and I said, you changed your things in the 1st focus group.

Focus group with our video clips. Our theme was much more about personalized, the personal struggle of this person and a lot of their backgrounds is very personalized theme and approach to the opening statement versus when we ran it again, they did not take that personal approach to it. And it really showed that they did not appreciate some of the things that the first focus group said.

One way he was likable He wasn’t so likable, but I think also what really set that home was hearing some of the comments and we had 14 people and they had said, had made many comments about the video and the story. particular style of this person’s testimony. And so I just asked, how many people were swayed by the video?

How many people changed their [00:04:00] minds? And out of 14 people, we had almost about 50%, seven hands went up and said, by the video alone that changed their minds. Right. So just based on 10 minutes of information compared to opening statements and documents that sealed the deal for them and move them to the opposite side.

So, to me, 1, I think we’ve got a couple of good things. Roll around in here and that would be, don’t hesitate to use video clips and focus groups, especially of the main players and do it more than once. Secondly, witness preparation is key because. There was a clear difference in testimony styles, but then they actually hit one of the witnesses for being a little bit coach, but they said, you got to at least set up straight, but I wouldn’t even set up straight to answer questions.

You’re really going to [00:05:00] get so much good detail out of those video clips. And there’s a lot of power in doing that. Clearly, when we look at all the evidence and all the information that was given to these people, the video swayed them the most, right? So they put a whole lot of credibility, a whole lot of weight into that.

So let’s keep that in mind. And then one of the things too, that I think is super helpful, especially in this situation, which was a fact finding that was very complicated and very above. What anyone in the room had ever experienced as a business situation. I think that’s one good conclusion to draw, which is if your case matter and your back pattern is complicated, and it could be all kinds of things, complicate back patterns.

It could be things are long. It could be that it’s drawn out. It could be that it needs several different layers to understand it. It could be highly technical, scientific, medical, lots of things can complicate it. But just [00:06:00] the value and the power of witness testimony, that’s where a lot of people are going to draw a lot.

Their decision making all that to be said, I think overall super successful focus groups that we ran and we’re able to get to some comparison data, but really knowing, oh, my gosh, the weight and the power of the testimony in these particular cases, but also getting this comparison data. between these two focus groups on again, something super simple.

We did not complicate this. We made 10 minute clips of each person. It wasn’t all one side clips, right? It was down the middle, some good, some bad, but definitely flavors to, so the jury or the participants can see all the sides. And the person and then just followed up with really simple questions on a scale of 1 to 10.

How credible is this person? What are 3 words you’d use to describe them? What’s 1 question you want to ask them? And people are very forthcoming [00:07:00] about it. And then in our discussion, this is again, after they have additional information, right? More information came out more videos. They went back and they talked about that without being prompted.

Right? So 1 of the big things we can always draw is what do they talk about? What do they not talk about? Anyhow, my point of this episode today is you’ve got to start doing some of these focus groups where you’re making clips and it may be just clips of your client. It may be clips of key players and put it in front of the focus group, but it is such a valuable focus group.

It’s so easy to do. I do video clips a hundred percent virtually. It’s easy to do. We did our clips today in person. Don’t skip out on that. At least measuring the credibility of your witnesses and just seeing the power of influence that they have over the decision makers in your case. So, I hope that this was helpful.

Super fresh example. Literally today was 1 of our 2nd focus [00:08:00] groups. We’re probably going to run it again. And again, just they’re tweaking their themes. Obviously, that’s what I saw today was a little bit of a tweak in the themes. Anyhow, a huge encouragement to start doing some of these video clips. Make it simple on yourself.

Nearly all of my focus groups that we are doing that are an extended length of time, meaning two hours or even three hours where we’re going really in depth, um, almost requiring that we do some video clip of some witness so that we can give them a real face and a real sound and a real human to look at and listen to when it comes to testimony in the case.

I hope that this was helpful, short, sweet to the point, I hope as well. So if you enjoy the podcast, please like it, follow it on the Apple podcast platform. Apparently, if you go push the plus button on the new application, the new update that really helps other people be able to find the podcast [00:09:00] as well as review.

So I hope that you found this helpful and until next time, thank you.

When you’re going to get ready for trial, and you’re building your team to help you pick a jury, you don’t actually need a lot of people. Perhaps one to three people would suffice. Building a small group will help things become more structured for you. That being said, you’ve got to pick people that match up with your ideology on picking a jury altogether. Then let them in on what would help you best as a lawyer.

In this episode, I’m sharing my recent experience of helping a fellow lawyer pick a jury. They wanted my perspective as a female trial lawyer so I decided to show up. There were a couple of things that happened on the fly that I’m going to share here, which are things you may want to consider as you’re building your own team for jury selection. 

In this episode, you will hear:

• A strategy that worked well
• Different ways of taking notes
• Things to consider when you’re building a team
• The benefits of taking notes and having notetakers
• Why you want to only build a small group

Subscribe and Review

Have you subscribed to our podcast? We’d love for you to subscribe if you haven’t yet. 

We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.

Supporting Resources:

If you have questions or a particularly challenging client preparation, email Elizabeth directly for assistance: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Episode Transcript:

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. It’s Elizabeth, your host, and I’m so glad you’re tuning into trial lawyer prep, a podcast dedicated to you trial lawyers getting ready.

It’s just me solo today. We’ve had lots of wonderful guests, but I wanted to jump on solo and talk about a recent [00:01:00] experience that I had helping a fellow lawyer pick a jury. A couple things happened. I thought, you know, this might be a worthy topic. A couple of things that happened on the fly, I was asked by a friend of mine to come help pick a jury and it’s going to be in what we have in Texas, a county court.

So we don’t have 12 jurors there. We just have six. So the panel itself is a little bit smaller. And so I was asked, Hey, can you please come? I’d like to have your perspective also as a female trial lawyer, your perspective in that sense. So I said, of course, here I come. So load up, and we had gotten some of the jury information before, all that kind of stuff.

So I show up, and there’s several folks. We had about six to eight people who showed up. Imagine a courtroom, which is a lovely courtroom. We have a new courthouse here in Austin, so always gotta mention that. And again, it’s a smaller panel. So I think we had a total of maybe 36 people panel. So 36 people panel.

We [00:02:00] have all the lawyers who are assisting her in the jury box. And there’s again, there’s eight of us and then there’s plaintiff’s lawyer, defense lawyer and clients. And that’s really it. It was a lot of people. And I would say in my vote, too many people for a couple of reasons. One is. That’s a lot of people who have a lot of opinions who might all not line up with what you need as the actual lawyer picking the jury.

So maybe just too many people to listen to. Also like I said, it might be just too many different ideas. Like people have different ideas about, Hey, this is what I’ve been taught and Oh, here’s what I’ve been taught. So again, lots of different ideas about how to do your job. And there’s just not a lot of time.

The judge should give us about 15, 20 minutes to kind of get together. And also what I found was a little bit maybe discombobulating is we’re there to help her pick a jury, but we don’t really know the order for questions. We didn’t even really know what [00:03:00] questions she was going to ask. Now I kind of knew because I’ve worked with this person before, so I knew the flow of where she was going.

But ultimately I just. Um, on the fly, just like the potential jurors hearing things for the first time in my gut, I’m thinking, Oh, well, is that a cause or is that a strike? Did she get it all the way or did she not? What are we listening for? I knew very little about the case as well. So when we get back, again, we’re just trying to toss all this stuff around.

I took notes a certain way. Other people took notes a different way. It is helpful to have extra people again to hear the things you didn’t hear. And we’ll talk about how many people I think is probably most helpful. But also something else that really stuck out that, I know was a strategy that worked and let me tell you why.

So the defense lawyer got up and said, geez. It’s a lot of lawyers to pay, just let alone me over here. Now, we already knew this guy, this defense lawyer scheme, we knew that [00:04:00] that was going to happen, or I knew to an extent it would, even if she just had one person helping her. But he kind of the way that he said it, it kind of worked.

And a juror actually stood up, potential juror stood up and said, I feel bad for you. Like, that’s a whole lot of people to pay and gosh, that was kind of like, wait, what? Whoa, hold on here. And I can’t. The judge had said, even the plaintiff’s lawyer had said, these are people from the plaintiff’s bar who are here to listen and to learn.

Of course, that went right out the window, but it just kind of like, oh man, he actually struck a chord. And if there’s one person who’s saying that, there’s going to be several people thinking the exact same thing. And people didn’t raise their hand, but it was not a very talking panel. So. Long story short, it was kind of a little bit of a discombobulation for her hearing all that and then us knowing that we’ve got to pick some people.

What I would suggest and I think that ultimately the panel that came that shook out that she got There were a [00:05:00] lot of things that just were really out of control out of her control out of our control And there were definitely good things that helped her get her some people struck For cause from the jury panel because we were there helping but what struck me was I’m sitting there next to another lawyer And he said well, I’m really curious.

Like how do you take notes? And do you have a system? And I said, I don’t really have a super clear system. I try to make it really simple and it really is simple. It’s a frowny face. If people are making a frowny face, like literally frowny face. I don’t really want to complicate it. I’ve seen people who have lots of different colors, like some big giant notepads.

That’s cool. What I found super helpful, and when I’ve worked with this lawyer before, what she found super helpful was getting down the words that people are using and saying that can get them struck for cause. That’s negative, right? There’s positive things too. Again, there’s my smiley face. But I don’t really have a [00:06:00] super complicated method for writing or taking notes.

What it really made me think about was what would really help people and what I think would have helped. And again, my suggestion is going to be when you do think about going to trial and you’re building your team. Thinking about how many people you would like to get on a perspective point of view for helping you.

But also having somebody in your corner that knows the flow of what you’re asking. And knows that, hey, this question right here, that’s to try to find those rats. And this question over here is really to find information. Who are some people that we want? Who are people who told really positive stories?

And If you know the flow, you obviously can keep the space on your page or your notepad ready for that. Because what I have found is judges want to hear, well, what did they say? You’re [00:07:00] up there doing your deal. You’re just trying to get people to open up. You’re doing the deal. You don’t necessarily remember, oh, that person said exactly this.

And you really don’t want to take notes. So that’s what your helpers are there for, is to take those notes with those things. Well, this is what they said, judge. Oh yeah, that’s right, they did say that. And generally it jogs their memory. Although, most judges will take notes as well, but my suggestion is you’ve got to find somebody who knows the flow of your questions.

Knows that you’re looking on this question to find people to write down those exact words now I understand we’re not perfect transcriptionists. So most the time it’s just oh, no that person said ABC Just a couple of words or these people raise their hands a lot of times what happened was she’d say, okay Now this question if you’ll just raise your hand for me And we’d take down people’s numbers and that was helpful to kind of group people together, but there were so many of us, right?

There’s eight people all helping. And that was the next thing that I had was [00:08:00] you really kind of want to build a pretty small group, right? You want to one, let your group in. If you’ve got one to two people, that may be enough. These are people that one, you trust, you want their perspective. They kind of have the same ideology on building The jury that you want.

So you want to make sure they kind of line up with all those things and you’re teaching them enough to know like, Hey, here’s where I’m going. Hey, this is the thing that helps me the most. And that’s just going to be a communication thing. But once you have a little bit of smaller group, you guys have a little bit of flow.

Meaning you know where the questions are going and what the purposes are so you can write down what’s needed. And then when you get back there to have that discussion about who do you want and who do you don’t want and what they say, it’s much more structured. Some of the best ways that I’ve seen it done when you have 15 to 20 minutes, sometimes you have less, is basically you run through your list of people who are like, here’s the strikes, here’s this, here’s what these people said.

Here’s my worry, [00:09:00] here’s the worry person I have, and the next person goes, and the next person goes, and then having done that because you’ve got a small group of people, you’ve really got a good amount of knowledge to help pick the people that you want and you don’t want. Because again, if you’re up there doing it, you have a hard time saying, Seeing everything else.

You have a hard time retaining everything. And that’s why you’ve got one to two people to help. Take those notes, record those things, find that body language, the frowning, the squirming. And again I know that 100 percent body language is not going to give us any help. It’s hard to predict what people are doing or not doing but sometimes people are pretty clear in jury selection like they don’t want to be there and They say things and then they match it with their body language.

Let me give you examples. So there was a juror who pretty much every question that she was trying to find the people who would not be fair to either But either party and this guy every time hands shot up every single time. I mean, he just, for sure, won it [00:10:00] off this jury. And then the body language matched right up with that.

And other people have body language that you can’t really tell. You’re not really sure they’re frowning. But we’re not really sure what that means. It’s mostly when people are pairing it together. For example, the guy who wanted to stand up to speak to say, I do have sympathy and I think that there’s too many lawyers over there.

All those lawyers getting paid. That seems like a waste. No, that’s a, that body standing up to tell me that. So again, some of these things are little notes, but. It’s easier to have somebody else taking those little notes for you while you are being present with the jury, asking questions, nodding along and giving your attention.

That’s really where you want to be when you are asking questions of the jury for jury selection. All right, so let me do a quick recap. When you’re going to get ready for trial and you’re building your team to help you pick a jury, you don’t need a lot of people, right? We need to have one, two people.

[00:11:00] Whatever those two people are, maybe three people, and let them in a little bit on the flow of where you’re going. Let them also in on what helps you best, meaning some people have really bad memories, so you writing down those specific words to help them go back and talk to the judge, that’s what they want.

Other people have great memories. But because they have a great memory, they may not be able to see everything else in the courtroom. And so they really want you to be eyes and ears around them while they remember those things. And that may also just come down to, hey, what’s your feel? When you heard that, what was your feel?

Mine was good. Was yours bad? Right? So sometimes we just go, hey, you may have felt that way. Here’s what I took that as. But you want to pick somebody again that kind of matches up with your ideology on picking a jury all together. So you want to pick a small team. But pick a team that lines up with your, your fault, your style.

And then also you want to let them in on kind of the flow so they know about [00:12:00] where you’re going and then what helps you best as a lawyer and as somebody who’s gonna maybe get up and argue those strikes or ask the judge for something specific. I hope that was helpful. I don’t have any real advice on note taking.

I think it really comes down to the person. If you like having a giant notepad and Like taking things down, having out like that’s great. That may work for you visually. I have a pretty good working memory. So for me, having just those little symbols sometimes helps enough. And then sometimes having just those key words that people say is enough for me.

Then again, I think also sometimes it comes down to, well, how much time do you have for jury selection? Some people end up getting days. Now, you’re really going to want some copious note takers. Some people get 30 minutes, right? And that’s. It’s very short amount of time. Do you really need eight people to help you?

Probably not. You’re probably good with just one person. So that also something to keep in mind, how much time you have. I hope [00:13:00] that this was helpful. I hope you think about a few of these things when you’re game planning, getting ready for jury selection to build a good system around you and with your peers to help you pick a jury.

All right. Until next time. Thank you.

Opening statements are one of the best opportunities because we (plaintiff lawyers) go first. The question is how can you take advantage of being first? 

In today’s episode, we discuss the ways that lawyers can lose the advantage of being first. Many trial lawyers have this tendency to have long, overly-detailed opening statements that can bore the jurors. Therefore, you don’t want to lose their attention, confuse them, or frustrate them. 

We also talk about how to craft a great opening statement. An audience will forgive your delivery if your content is good. But they can’t forgive you if both your content and delivery suck. So you want to make sure you’re able to plan out your content really well to make sure you don’t miss anything, 

In this episode, you will hear:

• Ways you can lose the advantage of being first
• The importance of writing your opening statement on paper
• The benefits of typing what you’ve handwritten
• Things to add to your content
• The benefits of running a focus group for your opening statement
• Examples of cases that highlight the power of a great opening statement

Subscribe and Review

Have you subscribed to our podcast? We’d love for you to subscribe if you haven’t yet. 

We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.

Supporting Resources:

Have a topic for a podcast episode? Question for Elizabeth? Email her directly: Elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com 

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome to a new episode of Trial Lawyer Prep with me, your host, Elizabeth Larrick.

Thank you so much for joining us. We are working through a series about trial through the month of February and we had an interview last episode with my good friend Jason and we [00:01:00] talked about direct exam of a client. You may wonder to yourself, Elizabeth, are you going to go in a specific order for your trial episodes?

I’m not. Just so you know, I’m not, but today we are going to talk about opening statements. Just to give you a preview of some of the other episodes that are coming up. We are going to be talking about a template for preparation of a before and after witness. We’re going to talk about cross exam. We’re going to look at trial continuance fatigue.

And I know a lot of folks have been facing that. We’ve got a lot of the people that I work with have cases that are five, four, sometimes even six years old and just having multiple continuances. It’s very frustrating. So I’ve got a good friend, Bijan Darvish, who’s going to come and talk to us about a trial that he had many continuances and just came right up to the edge.

Of starting trial and so how do you keep that energy going? In here, we have a couple of these things coming [00:02:00] up. We’re also going to have a closing and probably just an overall episode about maybe trial management as well. I’ve talked about that in the past. But there are so many detailed things that we could talk about when it comes to trial management, the day to day things.

So we’ll probably do that as well. I think a lot of folks are gearing up, a lot of folks that I know here in my community are gearing up to go. Judges in this community are gearing up and ready to go. Good example of that is we are sitting here right now, it’s February, we had a little bit of an ice storm here in Austin and yesterday the duty judge said, you know what, we’re still going to have that docket call to get ready for those trials that are going on Monday.

So people are ready, judges are ready. That’s why we’re going to kind of talk about trial. So, let’s get to today’s episode about opening statement. I think opening statement is one of the coolest things that we have and mainly because it’s a plaintiff we [00:03:00] go first procedurally. And so I want to talk about how can we take advantage of being first.

I’m not going to talk specifically about a template. I’m going to assume you have a template that you like. If you don’t, there are lots of great templates out there and I’m happy to do an episode reviewing some of those. But today is really just about how do I sit down and take advantage of being first, meaning being the first person to get up and talk, jurors hear from about the facts and circumstances of the case.

And there are lots of ways we can lose our advantage. And what I mean by is we have a tendency as trial lawyers to have long opening statements. And that means you’ve got lots of details that we are giving to those jurors. We’re trying to cover everything in that opening statement. Which can lead to losing their attention, confusing them, frustrating them.

And one of the main parts about an [00:04:00] opening statement is that we don’t want it to be boring. That’s another way to lose our advantage. And I don’t mean boring in the sense of delivery. I mean, boring in the sense of. We are not providing visuals or not providing a change in the way that they’re learning the information.

I mean, it’s really hard to learn information completely verbally. We lose it. So if we have someone who’s standing in front of us, we are trying to learn not only what they’re saying, but trying to gather from them who are from the white language as well. So we don’t want to bore them, right? We’re going to keep their attention.

Another way to lose your advantage. It’s to miss out on addressing what the defense will say. This is one of the critical points. I feel like sometimes we get kind of wrapped up in what our case is and we forget to put some of that information in there. And then that gives a beautiful place for the defense to stand up and say, let me tell you the rest of the [00:05:00] story.

Oh, that plea of hiding things from you and not telling you everything. You knew that they were pulling one over on you. It’s one of the easiest things we can prevent. So let’s talk a little bit about how to prepare your opening statement. And this is a little bit time intensive, but there’s a good reason, a couple of good reasons why I suggest doing it this way.

So there’s a couple of steps, really three steps that I suggest you can go to four or five. But really our first step is just taking out a piece of paper and hand writing it out. And I know you’re thinking that is crazy and it’s going to take me a really long time, a time I don’t have. I understand, but here’s why handwriting is best when it comes to this.

You’re going to use a different part of your brain. You’re going to trigger into more critical thinking. When you have to handwrite, your brain slows down. So you’re much more selective about what you’re [00:06:00] writing down. And you also, you’re going to retain the information salvage better. A lot of this three step, and like I said, you could make it four or five steps, is as we are going back through this information again and again and again, we’re committing it to memory.

So by the time you get to. The jury, you don’t feel completely glued to your paper or the podium because you pertain the information so well, just repetition through these couple of steps. So that’s always the goal is to be able to feel really comfortable with the information. And then you’re going to have a little more freedom when you get out in front of the jury.

Because you’ve committed it so well to memories. First step is to handwrite it out. And again, literally just take that yellow legal pad and just start writing it out. Once you finish that step, and again, you may be thinking like, I haven’t handwritten anything in a long time. That’s okay. You can do that in a couple of [00:07:00] different steps, but I think that first one sometimes helps, even if you’re just going to scope out.

An outline, handwritten, you’ll put little notes in there and other little things. And I think the handwriting, it really does help start getting the ideas flowing, get your brain going, get things out on a piece of paper, then take it and move to the keyboard. Just naturally as we type on the keyboard, we just put more information in there because it’s a repetition.

Right versus handwriting is different, right? It’s different part of the brain gotta make our hand and make the movements but with typing, right? It’s repetitive We’re naturally we’re gonna start just adding more information and as we are typing that’s not it’s really a good thing But we want to get everything out Get it all out of our brain, right?

And then we’ll be able to go back in and edit. As we’re typing through and reading through this pass through again, more information is going to come. Things may leave, but you’re moving it to an actual document on your laptop. And then finally, you want to print it. [00:08:00] And you want to read through and end it with a red pen, or even a straight red pen, but you want to make sure that you have that.

Editing on the computer is not the same, because again, you’re probably going to be more verbose. I also really love having the printed pages in front of me. Laying them out all in order and just seeing the organization from a 30, 000 foot view, which you can’t really do well on a computer, not even if you have a giant monitor.

So that’s one of the reasons why you really want to keep bringing back. Okay. Cause this whole time we’re doing through this whole process, it’s really looking at organization, prioritizing what needs to go. Where in your opening, what the jury needs to hear, what can be trimmed out? What can be simplified with that printed out version, right?

And handwriting in your edits and cross something about, then you go back, make those edits and print it again. And I really [00:09:00] encourage you to take time between the steps. Even if you take a week or two weeks in between, your brain’s going to keep working on it. And when you come back to it with fresh eyes, you’re going to see more.

Oh gosh, why did I write it that way? So I always encourage three main steps are one, first hand, write it out. Two, move the keyboard, type it out. And number three is to print and edit it, hand write. And again, you can take time between the subs, I encourage that. And the next thing within is you’re editing it, right?

So the hope is that you don’t have to constantly create content. The hope is that you get all the content there. And it’s just a matter of organizing, Trimming it down, get rid of the stuff, and simplify it. And that way, once you get in and you’ve got your content, then you can really start fine tuning with what needs to go first?

What’s my strongest point? What is it the jury’s most going to want to know at this point in my opening statement? And then you get to do fun [00:10:00] stuff. Once you get that down, then you can start looking at it and say, Hey, where can I add a visual aid? Is there a chart I can add here? Is there a checklist?

Thanks. Is there a timeline, are there photos that would be helpful to show instead of me trying to describe something? We want to make sure we’re not going too long. We want to make sure that we’re visualizing it to keep people’s attention, but also knowing like a visual aid will help people learn fast and retain the information.

We don’t want it to be too long because they’re not going to retain it. We don’t want it to be boring, lost their attention, confused. We want to make sure that it’s very straight and it’s visually you can use it can. And then like we talked about, am I including the defenses, right? What the defense is going to say.

I can’t wait to call it like my counterpunches. I’ve heard it, right? They’re not going to create something new on the eve of trial that I haven’t heard. I know what the evidence is. So am I addressing that? Am I making sure there’s not going to be [00:11:00] any, Magical wall that they get to get up and have and say, Well, you didn’t hear this.

And so I’m putting that in there and am I knocking it out? I know sometimes we put this in here, but I always want to make sure I put it in and I knock it out. Let me give you an example. We’re hearing an opening statement for a suicide case. Well, the defense assumes That’s their defense, that it’s suicide.

Our theory, our liability is that it’s not. It was a total accident. And so to rule out, so to say, this is what the defense is going to say, suicide. And then you gotta counterpunch it, right? You gotta knock that stunt down. You gotta say, here’s why. Here’s what mom’s gonna say. Here’s what we know about this person.

Here’s all the information about who this person was. Right. And in a really succinct way, knock that out, right? Knock that out of the park. And then sometimes we’ll put it in there, but then we forget to basically [00:12:00] show, like, how it’s just not going to hold anymore. And it can be really simple. Even if it’s just, Hey, we’ve got an expert and this is what they did.

And so, and so we know it doesn’t apply here. And just know, like, again, this episode is really talking about content. We’re going to spend another episode talking about delivery, because I think An audience will forgive your delivery if your content is good. Okay. But they can’t forgive you if your content sucks and then your delivery stinks.

So today’s about content, but making sure you can come up with a way to really plan out that content really well and make sure you’re not missing anything. So many times when we get up to practice this, and that was going to say next is how I encourage people to test this. Is to run a focus group where it’s an opening statement, a plaintiff opening statement versus a defense opening statement.

One of my favorite focus groups because it plays on our [00:13:00] natural desire to advocate. We have lawyers trying to get us to become neutral and deliver information neutrally and not with a group of individuals or focus groups. It’s very difficult. It’s hard. We’ve been ingrained to be neutral. Advocates, so opening is great, plays on our natural ability.

Also, it helps you test contents. You can also test delivery during this. I encourage you to do both, but again, we’re kind of talking about content here today, but it really forces you to prepare. And what I have found when we put these together, somebody’s preparing for trial is so many times the opening statement.

It’s not very put together and it’s not written out. And so I’m always like, Hey, step one, if you write the thing out, I guarantee you it’s going to be much better because you’re going to have taken the time to write it out and then to [00:14:00] organize it. Right. So let, let me talk about why I think the opening versus opening focus groups are so important.

It’s the only thing you do. So first example, had a somewhat complicated fiduciary duty case and it spanned 20 years. So a very long time to cover. So we could get really buried in the weeds here with lots of detail and it’s finances can get kind of boring and it was also the counter, doing the counter punches, right?

So what happened was this was the only focus groups that were done. Opening versus opening statements, and they spanned over nine months, right? So, and this was, that, that wasn’t a sleep by design, but it kept getting continuance, so I said, okay, let’s run it again, let’s keep fine tuning it. And what happened over those three focus groups, where they were able to keep refining that content, they were able [00:15:00] to refine their visual aid.

And by the time they got to that last one, and tested it, it was like, this is it, we don’t need to tweak it, in our opening statement, this is it. And so we’re able to, again, the other part of that is the defense opening statement, right? And putting in what the defense is going to say and seeing, Hey, is it going to hold water?

And always learning new things. And more importantly, what takes the wind out of your sail? What does the defense say that’s the strongest thing? Like I said, that first example, they learned how to simplify it, how to create a visual aid that took a lot of effort to create, but in doing that simple visual aid, it conveyed a huge timeline that they didn’t have to do detail by detail in that opening statement.

So it definitely took a lot of heavy lifting all the way down. The other example that I have, by the way, first example. They went to trial, got a [00:16:00] verdict, 40 million bucks. And they said, one of the things that was off our shoulders was the opening statement. We hadn’t done. So we really could focus on doing other things because we know that opening statement was rock solid because we tested three times and that’s all they did.

Remember, we just did opening statements. We didn’t do mock trials. We didn’t do these other stuff, just those ones. And. That’s pretty much what a lot of people, I encourage them to do because it’s such a helpful focus script content, and then you can work on delivery, but that content piece is so important.

Another example is one I just did recently, and one of the things I really love doing is writing the defense opening or tweaking it to put in all those little things that we hear that generally jurors hang their head on. And so. That’s what we did. And I had a really fun time doing it because I was able to take [00:17:00] all of their points, a lot of points, depends on a lot of points.

So I took all those points. And then I created a timeline and there wasn’t a timeline on the other side, but that allowed the demonstration to see in listening to the focus group where their minds went with the story. And they weren’t really concerned about what happened before the timeline, the defensive bridge.

And that’s the information that really was needed. So it was helpful just to kind of compare all those things. But I put a lot of time and effort into that defense opening because I really wanted to make sure. We were not only testing brain is, but also what those defenses were with ammo. So get a lot of really good mileage out of those opening versus opening focus groups, and I encourage you to do it enough about that.

Let’s recap. We’re talking about opening statement, talking about content, best ways that you can get what’s in your brain out to those jurors. Step one, write it out. Step two, take what you wrote [00:18:00] out, type it out. Step three, print it and edit. At some point, you’re going to start delivering this thing, right?

Talking it out loud. And I can tell you from having written many opening statements, defense opening statements, when I give it to somebody else to read it or deliver it, they always stumble. Because when I write opening statement, I write a little slang I would be speaking in, but it’s in my voice and in my tone.

So when they get to speaking, they’re like, this doesn’t make any sense. And I’m like, well, I guess it does in my head. Same thing happens when I do plan as opening as well. Once you get the content down and you start to work on your delivery, you’re going to realize like, oh, let me switch these words around.

Let me make this a little easier to say. Let me make it flow across the show. Reading an outline is really helpful for working on content as well. I hope that this episode was helpful. If you liked it, please follow on your favorite podcast application, the plus sign on [00:19:00] Apple or the follow button. on Google or Spotify.

So thank you so much for listening and just know that next week we will be going to trial continuance fatigue. We’ve got before and after witness preparation template coming up, cross exam, closing and trial management. All right. Until next time. Thank you.

What do you get from jury research focus groups? Maybe you haven’t had a chance to use focus groups yet yourself. Or maybe you have run a mock trial on a case, but maybe haven’t looked at other ways to use focus groups. In this episode, we dive into some other ways you can use focus groups and why. I’m also sharing a couple of tips on ways to “double-dip” and how you can take and use all the data for an extra squeeze of information.

One of the most common things you get from using focus groups is to learn the result of the case – who wins and who loses? But it’s not just results-oriented because you can learn so much more. There’s witness credibility, evaluating the evidence, looking at case theory, looking at the knowledge base, testing out the defense theory, and just honing your skills as a trial lawyer. You can get a lot more than just trying to have this one target of determining the case value. 

Now, if you don’t have a lot of experience doing focus groups, moderating, looking at it, analyzing the data, I just want to caution you that there are so many other great ways to use it. Whether you spend six hours, three hours, an hour, or even just 30 minutes, the amount of time you want to spend depends on the depth with which you are willing to go into the material and the depth of the feedback.

 

In this episode, you will hear:

• Mock trial vs. qualitative study
• Evaluating the evidence
• Testing your case theory and the credibility of people
• Using focus groups to file or not file
• Testing the knowledge base
• The double-dipping phase: how you can make the most of the data you get

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Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: [00:00:00] One of the biggest questions that I always get about focus groups is what do you get? You spend a lot of time, spend a lot of effort, a lot of money, but really what do you get from a jury research focus group? Stay tuned and we’ll talk about it. 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 to another episode of Trial Lawyer [00:01:00] Prep with me your host, Elizabeth Larrick.

This is a podcast designed and creative for trial lawyers working with difficult cases. Problematic clients and taking those difficult and problematic cases to trial. The goal is to help you connect with juries and clients in order to improve your abilities in the courtroom. In today’s episode, we are going to look at focus groups and answer one of the biggest questions that I get.

What do you get from a focus group? You more likely than not heard people talk about using focus groups in different CLEs that you’ve gone to. More likely than not, you’ve definitely read about it. If you’ve read any kind of trial book or case approach or case strategy book, and maybe you haven’t had a chance to use focus groups yet yourself.

Or possibly, maybe you fall in a category of somebody who has run a mock trial on a case, but maybe hasn’t looked at other ways to use focus groups. And so we want to tackle in this episode, what have we heard about [00:02:00] focus groups? And what are other ways to use focus groups? And why on earth would we do that?

Finally, a couple of tips on ways to double dip, use that data that you get for an extra squeeze of information, and then plant the seed for future episodes on how to, how are we going to do this? Because this is a podcast where I want to give you the how to, I want to show you, let’s talk about it, but then let’s give you the opportunity to do it for yourself.

Because that’s where I started. Focus groups. I had done a fellowship and I learned. Um, so I’m going to talk a little bit about how to use focus groups, how to use them. I did a ton of focus groups. We went to trial on the cases where we’d done the focus groups, and then I came home and had my own law firm and thought, I want to do focus groups.

How do I do it? So we did, I started and here we are now, but I started off in the same place. I had done maybe a few focus groups, not very many before I [00:03:00] jumped into a fellowship and we did tons of focus groups. So I started off doing focus groups in a kind of a piecemeal fashion. Instead of this large mock trial fashion, nothing wrong with that, but that’s kind of a starting place about what have we heard?

We’ve heard about these really large mock trial situations where there’s a really large production. We’re going to hire a judge to come play or have somebody come play a judge. We’ll have lawyers playing opposite sides and then basically put on a mock trial for a set of jurors, right? Mock jurors. A lot of times people set this up in a pretty large hotel where you can have two to three groups going at the same time, everything’s recorded, we’re watching, and we’re learning the ultimate result, right?

Who wins and who loses. And that’s what you get. Another form of focus group is a qualitative study where you have a [00:04:00] scenario in you, a fact scenario that you run by thousands of people online. So you would just gather this giant bank of data again on the results. Who wins? Who loses? What are the, what are the statistics?

How many times is Susie going to lose this case? Those are really what you get when we talk about doing a mock trial or a qualitative study. Now, I don’t want to limit qualitative studies. There’s lots of other things you can do with those, but you get the idea. It’s qualitative. You want thousands of results on that.

So let’s talk a little bit about Excel. So we talked first about results. We can figure out the ultimate question, who wins and who loses, plaintiff or defendant. But we can also look at pieces of the case. So we break our case down to people. Right? We can look at the people in our case and test their credibility.

Super easy one where [00:05:00] we just record people and put it up there and see what they say. But a lot of times we just want to learn, is our witness believable on a scale of one to 10? How credible are they? But you can also test other people in the case, right? Defense witnesses, experts, eyewitnesses. Um, and I think it’s really, really helpful when we’ve got a dispute about how events happen, right?

Dispute on liability. I recently conducted a focus group on a car wreck case where two extremely different stories, right? One story is, The truck’s going straight and somebody pulls out in front or the truck comes from the side and then runs into somebody. So it has to be A or B. There’s no gray area here.

And naturally, there’s lots of witnesses, but maybe they’re hard to find. We had to, took some years to get all these people. So gathered all this up and just showed videos of [00:06:00] these folks describing what happened and then just. Ask the focus group, are these people credible? And then actually like, what happened here?

Right, so this is everybody’s he said, she said, what really happened here? A great way to test our people in our case. Another thing to look at is just evaluating the evidence. Look at what you have. So most of the time in our case, we’ve got lots of deposition transcript, right? So we just talked about that, testing those people.

Maybe we’ve got a bunch of documents, a bunch of medical records. A lot of times people think, Oh, we got this hot doc. This is the one document that’s going to win the whole case. Well, put it in front of them. See if they reach the same conclusion. But another way to evaluate the evidence is throwing together a timeline.

Include key documents to see if that’s reinforcing your timeline. Do you have enough on your timeline? Maybe it’s super confusing. Maybe it needs to be visually a little more appealing. It’s a great test. Looking at photographs and videos. Nowadays, there’s a camera everywhere. And so. [00:07:00] Most things get caught on camera somehow, car wrecks or stores and everywhere else.

So that’s a really great way of just playing that video to see what they say. And again, is it clear? I mean, that’s one of the biggest reasons why I talk about putting it in front of a focus group is if it’s just fuzzy, if it’s just blurry, if it’s just confusing, it may not be this winning piece of evidence that you believe it to be.

or conversely that the defense believes it to be. So super helpful on those elements and with photographs. Sometimes people come to me, Hey, these are the photographs I want to use. And I’m just like, ah, I kind of have a visceral reaction to some of these photographs because I don’t think people are going to like that.

They look like maybe you’re looking for sympathy or maybe they’re Just too grotesque. I don’t know. Let’s not take my opinion for it. Let’s just see what the focus group says. So testing our, evaluating our pieces of evidence, right? Timelines, demonstratives, photographs, records, if we’ve got those, good [00:08:00] way to test those out.

Another way is just, you know, Testing your case theory. Is it good? Is it bad? And I hate to use those words good and bad, but it’s more in the sense of, do they follow it? Does it make sense? Is it too far of a stretch? Is it not a stretch enough? You know, they will help you with that. Also, I like to look at using focus groups to file or not file, right?

So we looked at, okay, so we got results. We got pieces of the case, but ultimately. File or not file. A lot of times people will say, well, I think this is a good case, but it’s a really unusual claim or it’s a really unusual set of facts. And I just want to see what people think about it. Like, should I file this case or not?

And I do quite a few of those. And I think that that’s one. a really good use of information, right? Half of our job as lawyers is to provide evaluations. What’s my case value? And do you think that they’re going to settle or will this have to go to a trial? And do you feel like this is strong enough? We are constantly evaluating and [00:09:00] that’s what people ask us for.

And if you’re having to make a decision about filing or not filing, maybe it’s an unusual case or premises liability cases, a lot of times when they come in my door, I always run it through a focus group to see, should I invest? The question is, is there a way we can invest in this case? I believe it a hundred percent, but we could invest in this case and just realize like, wow, there’s just, the jury’s just never going to go with us.

I kind of want to know that on the outside. And I would think that a client does too. And most of the time when I work with clients and I run through focus group and I just let him know, like the law is really, really thin it’s really, really hard. And also a focus group just was not favorable. Let me tell you things that they pointed out and it’s helpful for me in to explain it to them, but also say, Hey, I want to go the extra mile.

I, you know, I want to make sure and check all the boxes before I tell you, gosh, I just, I just don’t think there’s a case here. So super helpful there. Another place where you can, you know, what do you get would be kind of a knowledge base [00:10:00] asking, what do you know? Maybe finding out the experience level that people have.

Maybe it’s common sense and you don’t need to explain something, or maybe it’s really professional grade and you’re going to have to spend some time explaining things. And that could be medically. Maybe you’ve got some unusual medical situations or unusual, I would say, situations. Maybe there’s scientifically or technically things get kind of complicated.

How much do they know? What’s their blink reaction to some of these things? And that really helps to know how much do you need to have your, Experts explain. How much should you explain an opening? A really good how to on a focus group like this is we ran a focus group recently where there was a lawyer disagreeing a little bit with the client.

Client disagreed with the lawyer about, of course, the facts of the case. And it was an employment case and it all came down to employee, So if you type in oh, let’s, let’s test people on independent contractor. What do you think about it? [00:11:00] So let’s test people on independent contractor. What do you think about it?

So we just, let’s test people on independent contractor. We just selected, selected independent contractor. And then we showed up on the board and people just rattled off. What do you think? And we had people write it down. We talked about it out loud just to get kind of their blink reaction to it and what they thought and ultimately what their experience was.

Had anybody worked as independent contractors? Anybody worked as an employee? And what does that mean? And what do you expect? But we ultimately also put the jury charge, the jury instructions, if you will, in front of them. And ask them, does this make sense? Is this what you thought? Was there anything that surprised you?

What would be confusing or need to be explained? And I love doing that with lots of other jury charges, just to make sure you’re covering all those bases. Because you don’t want to put all effort into every other piece of it, and they get down to that jury charge, and they just get confused. Because they’re confused, they go the wrong way.

And focus group net will tell you what they’re confused [00:12:00] about. Another good way to use a focus group is to hone your skills, to practice, right? To get your craft down and talking about doing jury selection to groups of people or practicing doing opening statement with your demonstratives at the same time.

It’s a really good place to. Practice your inflection, your speaking, your clarity, and also a jury section, like, what are people going to say? What are their responses? Is that question falling flat? Okay, if it does, how do you, how do you backpedal? How do you get out of that place? You know, maybe you get a response that you don’t want or a response that goes off, you

I can tell you from my personal experience, using focus groups has significantly helped me be a better speaker, be a better communicator, and definitely been a better listener. And listening, such a key skill [00:13:00] that we use as a lawyer. And it’s one of the best skills, I think if you want to try to improve anything, Improve your listening skill.

It’s going to help you not only being a lawyer, but being a person as well. But we have to listen so keenly in a deposition, right? We have to listen so keenly when it comes to jury selection and what they’re saying and when to talk and we not to talk, how to process all that information. So listening super helpful folks groups, what do you get Better listening skills for sure.

All right, let me just take a small pause to give a note of caution. One of the biggest things people come to me and ask, I want a focus group, Elizabeth, to find out the case value. I want them to tell me what my verdict is going to be. And I always throw up a really big red flag and I’m trying to tell them like, that’s, that’s really difficult.

It’s not something I would rely on and it’s just going to give [00:14:00] you a very broad brush at it because again, this is a focus group. These people know that they’re not the jury. They know that they’re there for three hours and they’re going to leave after I use the PayPal and pay them. They’re going to leave, forget all about this.

There’s no pressure or oath that they take. So at the end of the day, that money thing can be just like Monopoly money. I try to persuade people away from that and more into kind of things we just talked about. Witness credibility, evaluating the evidence, looking at case theory, looking at the knowledge base, testing out defense theory.

That may get you a lot more than just trying to have this one target of give me the case value. So, big note of caution there. Really lots of other great ways to use focus groups. I would put that way down the bottom and I would caution if you don’t have a lot of experience doing focus groups, moderating, looking at it, analyzing the data, I just caution you just against it.

There’s so many other great ways to use it. Just. Come back [00:15:00] over here. Come over here. And we can talk about later on in a different episode kind of this caution and where this comes from and what my experience is and what I would suggest you do if you are absolutely set on finding out some numbers. We can talk about that.

So let’s just take a moment to recap a little bit about what do you get. We talked about getting results, the yes or the no, who wins, who loses, getting information on witness credibility, testing case theory, getting some clarity on witnesses, getting clarity on pieces of evidence, timelines, photographs, learning whether we should file or not file.

Is this a case? Is this not a case? And then also practicing, honing those skills and becoming much more clear on what the case is about, because that’s one of the biggest things in any of these. that I’ve talked about other than I think knowledge based might be a little bit harder, but you’re gonna get [00:16:00] summaries.

They’re just going to regurgitate information back to you. It may be like, oh man, that’s a lot clearer way of saying things. That would be one thing that you get. And that’s kind of where that moves me into my double dipping phase. This is where you can really work. nerd out on the information. That’s what I like to do.

I think that’s what you should do. If you’re going to run a focus group, great. In that moment, you’re going to get all kinds of feedback, but your brain can’t process all of it at the same time. So get it transcribed. Transcribe that video. and read that transcript again. You would be so amazed at all the things that maybe you didn’t catch because, again, you’re trying to focus on what one person is saying, or maybe you’re just trying to gather on yes no’s, or high points, and just writing things down that you hear.

You will learn so much more if you take that, transcribe it, and read it. And really helpful tip, use an online transcriber. Upload that video. They’ll [00:17:00] transcribe it. Don’t burden somebody in your office with it. Please don’t burden yourself with that. They’ll get it done fast, quickly, efficient, and cost effective as well.

So reading it, you’re going to get a whole other level of analysis. You’re also going to look at it and reading and seeing the language they use. One of the things I mentioned earlier, which was summaries. How are they summarizing this? you. What are they saying? What are they not saying? And a lot of times we get in there, we listened to it live and we don’t hear something at all.

Or we completely mishear it. You know, in our little ears, we hear something like, Oh, and then you read the transcript and like, oh, that’s not what they said. I totally missed that point. So it can also help correct some of your excitement if you hear something wrong. Another way to double dip is to kind of take all this information.

So let’s say you run. It’s a lot of data information. Let’s gather all that into one place. And I’m talking about the people information, that demographics, their age, [00:18:00] education, married, not married, kids, no kids. Are you seeing any patterns or any trends? Are people who are for you, people who are against you, people who are neutral, right?

Can you see anything? If you see anything at all, how come? Like, was there something specific about that focus group? Was there something specific about a piece of evidence that they got there? Right, this is just kind of getting into those weeds and is there anything else I can see here one more time if I’m looking at the demographics?

That’s going to help you if you’ve got to go pick a jury. It’s going to be kind of an outlier. I don’t want you to think like, Oh, let’s be saying like, this is it. I can perfectly craft this. Well, no, but it’s definitely going to help you along. If you’ve got six or seven or 13 focus groups and you can look at all the demographics and also keeping in mind focus group styles and all that, you’re going to be able to see some trends and patterns.

And that’s going to really help you when you get into doing jury selection, right? Versus going cold and blank and not even knowing at [00:19:00] all, What? So, we can use this information, this feedback to the full extent by getting it transcribed, reading it, then also gathering it all up and putting it in front of you to see if there are any trends or any patterns.

If you see something, dig again. Like, what’s the cause there? Was it something that this personally, this person, like experienced, uh, that made them super hot to try, like totally your best juror ever? Okay. Great. But maybe that was that person’s personal experience. Nothing that you said would have convinced them of that.

And that’s kind of where it’s like, okay, if we see a trend, let’s dig a little deeper and make sure like where maybe it have come from on a deep level. Let’s circle back to our original topic, which is focus groups. What do I get? We talked about results. ways to clarify, remove confusion from pieces of evidence, witness credibility, confidence, right?

[00:20:00] Practicing those skills, gaining that comfort, that speaking, listening, receiving responses. How do we manage that when we’re up in front of people? Do I file? Do I not file? Is this anything? Is this a lawsuit? And ultimately, what do they know? What’s this knowledge base on this topic, this subject, maybe this process?

Basically, you can get a lot from focus groups, and that’s what I would totally encourage you to wrap your mind around. It’s not just results oriented. You can learn so much more. You can spend three hours, you can spend one hour, you can spend 30 minutes, you can spend six hours. All of it is going to be about the depth with which you are willing to go into the material and the depth of the feedback.

So, we’ve gathered all this up, now we’re going to talk about in future episodes how, how to get it using focus groups, and we’ll probably break that down into different segments so that we can make it into [00:21:00] bite size information and also with some forms and some templates to help you guys along the way.

Well, thank you so much for joining me today. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love if you could share it with somebody you know. Also, you can subscribe, follow on your favorite podcast app, review, rate it, share it with a friend. And until next time, thanks so much.