REPLAY: DIY Focus Groups with Clint Schumacher
Imagine being able to improve your trial practice by utilizing DIY focus groups – well, that’s exactly what our guest, Clint Schumacher, has been doing. As an attorney specializing in eminent domain cases, Clint shares his fascinating journey of implementing focus groups to enhance his practice, and how Zoom has become an essential tool in facilitating them. We also take a deep dive into recruitment strategies, discussing the importance of finding the right participants and sharing the tips and tricks Clint has learned along the way.
When it comes to condemnation cases, people’s emotional reactions are often at the forefront. Clint and I discuss the complexities of these cases, the inherent bias against the government taking property, and how to gauge the emotional value of a particular property case in order to better communicate with the jury. We also explore the scaling question, which measures how much people care about the case, as well as the importance of communicating facts clearly in focus groups.
Setting up a virtual focus group may seem daunting, but we cover everything you need to know, from the geographic area to be sampled to the recruitment process and the electronic confidentiality form used. We also discuss the challenges of finding participants in rural areas and how Clint and his team have been successful in using Facebook ads and Google forms for recruitment. Finally, we touch on the challenges of virtual focus groups, the strategies needed to handle them, and the undeniable importance of focus groups for trial lawyers. Don’t miss this engaging and informative conversation!
In this episode, you will hear:
- DIY focus groups for trial lawyers
- Measuring emotional engagement in focus groups
- Virtual focus group process and challenges
- Managing remote meeting disruptions
- DIY focus groups for lawyers
Follow and Review:
We’d love for you to follow us if you haven’t yet. Click that purple ‘+’ in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. 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:
My interview on the Eminent Domain Podcast – https://www.eminentdomainpodcast.com/118-witness-preparation/
Clint Schumacher
DAWSON & SODD, PLLC
8333 Douglas Avenue #380
Dallas, Texas 75225
Email: clint@dawsonsodd.com
Phone: 214-373-8181
Fax: 214-217-4230
Licensed in Texas and Oklahoma
The Eminent Domain Podcast – http://www.eminentdomainpodcast.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:
Hi there, Elizabeth here. I wanted to pop in before our episode begins to introduce our very wonderful guest, Clint Schumacher. Clint practices in the eminent domain area. Specifically, he helps individuals and companies who are having problems with [00:01:00] the government taking their property. So Clint has been doing this really specialized work for the past 20 years.
He has his own podcast. If you were interested called the eminent domain podcast, Clint reached out to me about focus groups. He started his own focus groups and had some questions and I was happy to help him. And then I said, Hey, why don’t you come on the podcast? So I hope you enjoy this interview with Clint.
Hello and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Elizabeth Larrick. I’m your host for Trial Lawyer Prep and this is a podcast dedicated to lawyers preparing for trial or preparing cases better to get better results. We generally like to talk about focus groups, and so I’ve brought a guest on here who has started his own DIY focus groups, which I know I encourage people to do.
If you’ve been tuning in here lately, the past couple episodes we have really been trying to talk about focus groups, setting them up. I heard from my recruiter, we had a replay about like when to do focus groups, six good times. So I hope this is helpful, but I really wanted to bring Clint [00:02:00] Schumacher on because he has started his own DIY focus groups.
And I thought it would be great to bring him on to talk about it and see how it’s helping his practice. Hello and welcome to the
Clint Schumacher: Well, Elizabeth, thank you. Thanks for having me join. I have been a avid listener to your podcast. They’ve been extremely helpful to me. So hopefully I can pass something along to your audience that may be helpful to them.
Elizabeth Larrick: I appreciate that. Now, as you all probably heard in the intro, Clint has his own podcast. It deals with property, which was one of my worst classes in law school. So I can’t quite say that I can help with that at all. But I know that you are here to give some good advice and some sound feedback on doing your own focus groups.
But Let’s get started from the very jump. What even got you interested in doing focus groups? How does that mesh?
Clint Schumacher: I do have a really specific practice niche. We represent property owners that are having their property taken by the government condemnation or imminent domain cases. And so early in my career, I had some excellent Mentors [00:03:00] who, when the case was right, encouraged using a jury consultant and have had a lot of experience working with jury consultants in the past and have done focus groups and mock trials with jury consultants.
But Elizabeth, as you and your audience know, that can be very expensive and not every case warrants that expenditure. And so I have seen the value of it, but have often shied away from it in all, but the largest cases. Because of the expense associated with it, then during the pandemic, you know, everybody’s life changed a little bit.
And as I started networking and listening to really personal injury lawyers who had very good practices, I listened to them talk about how they were doing their own focus groups. And. That you could do it a lot more economically and get tremendous feedback. And then as the country started figuring out how to use zoom and lawyers started to [00:04:00] incorporate using zoom in their focus groups or a similar tool, Microsoft teams, whatever, into their focus groups and the added.
Convenience the additional shaving off of cost. I was intrigued and I figured out this is really powerful. You get a lot out of it. And if I can figure out how to do it at a price point, that makes sense for cases that I might have and be able to do multiple of them, then wow, that could be really impactful to the.
Practice and really helpful to the clients. And so as we, and my team are starting to figure out how to do that, we’ve actually found your podcast and listen to some of the tips that you had for doing it yourself and they have been enormously helpful. I think we, and my team reached out to you even, and you’re very helpful to give us some specific tips and that’s been very helpful to us.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, we reached out about recruiting and that’s probably one of the number one questions that I always get, which is like, how do you find these folks? Always happy to help. And I’m excited to hear that. I think a lot of people learning zoom in the pandemic [00:05:00] was already a challenge. That was already new for lawyers.
So then. Learning the second layer of doing focus groups online virtually is a whole nother one. So how do you feel like you’re doing? How do you feel like the team’s doing as far as putting on the focus groups?
Clint Schumacher: So definitely a learning curve. As you said, I think recruiting is probably the most intimidating part of it.
Figuring out how do we find people that are qualified and helpful. We started. Really do and do it yourself, I would say a year ago, and we’ve gotten better as the year goes at figuring out, okay, what works, what doesn’t work, how can we get the right people in? And I think we’re obviously we’re still continuing to learn, but we’re really starting to hit our stride.
And we try to do at least one a month. I know there’s probably people that do more, but one a month seems about right for us. And we’re starting to get it figured out. It’s not as hard as it may seem.
Elizabeth Larrick: It can be a little scary. I can remember my first one. We had three people
Clint Schumacher: understand.
Elizabeth Larrick: But we did a short one.
We just did two hours, I want to say. [00:06:00] And it was like, okay, that felt a little painful because you got to get through. It’s not just, okay, get them in there. Like it’s navigating the technology and keeping people engaged and keeping the flow of conversation going as well. So you’re setting up a system, but also you’ve got to learn moderating and putting stuff together too.
So how is, as far as. Do you normally do the moderating or do somebody else in your office do it? Or how do you guys split up that work?
Clint Schumacher: So when I was coming up watching jury consultants do it, the jury consultant would do it. So that was the model that I was used to when I first started trying to do it self focus groups, I was doing it in tandem with another lawyer here in town.
I practice in Dallas, and there was another lawyer I was having this conversation with. He’s, yeah, we’ve been doing these for a while. I would love to moderate yours. You can come participate in mine. And so he moderated ours. For a bit, we’ve tried it with kind of another, there’s another, I would say, jury consultant that works remotely that we’ve had moderate one [00:07:00] recently, but I’ve gotten to the point where I feel like it’s best if I moderate them because I know what questions I want to ask.
And I can hear what the. Focus group is saying and direct questions into things that I know are going to tie into the case. The obvious downside to doing that is remaining neutral. And I don’t always do that perfectly, but I’ve gotten to where I’m most comfortable just moderating them myself. And I know that I can get it.
If something comes up in the focus group, that’s unexpected. I can adjust a lot more easily than if there’s another moderator that’s involved.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, I would say when I was talking to another friend of mine about focus groups and one of the gems of doing focus groups consistently and. Even if you are just listening, right?
Being moderating helps, but you get into a really good habit of taking bad news. Because you’re inevitably going to get, like, you, and you get to where that fight, that, that real, that fight, that defensiveness [00:08:00] that comes up, that urge to convince, it just goes down and goes to a point where you can listen, stay curious, stay curious.
And not get completely, Oh, I want to, I want to convince this person, but yeah, you get used to hearing bad stuff every time. And I’ll
Clint Schumacher: tell you the last time I did a Vordire and forgive me for all your non Texas residents, but Vordire is how we say it here. So forgive me if I am not sounding, that doesn’t sound correct.
I noticed that I was a lot less, I’m going to say inflamed. I’m not sure if that’s the right word, but when that juror is giving you something that you know is not going to be good for your case, I think we probably all feel our temperature start to rise and the anxiety start to rise. And I noticed the last four dire I did, I was a lot Better at keeping that feeling at bay.
And I think it was because I had moderated some groups before then. And as you say, you get used to hearing the bad news. You’re not taking it personally. And you learn, gosh, when you’re doing the board, are you that that’s gold? If somebody is [00:09:00] going to tell you they don’t like your case, that’s gold. And not being able to get overly passionate and to remain dispassionate, to be able to hear with them, deal with that, figure out who else feels the same way, that was a big help.
Elizabeth Larrick: Absolutely. It’s a very good skill to learn because in litigation, you’re always going to hear the bad news from the other side and sometimes it can be legit, but you’re such an advocate. So I always think focus groups help you prepare for hearing bad news, being able to listen to it. Stay curious. You don’t have to take it like you said, don’t take it personally.
But then when jury selection comes, it’s like, Oh, cool. I’ve heard this before. Oh, cool. Another one of those people. Cool. Weird. Tell me a little more about that. Like you said,
Clint Schumacher: do you, do you moderate your own groups?
Elizabeth Larrick: Oh yeah. Oh definitely.
Clint Schumacher: Okay.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, and I, of course, it’s been several years and I do several months, but yeah, so it just got to where it was just like, oh, okay, okay.
You know, like I hear bad stuff all the time, and what I always strived for when I started [00:10:00] was just staying curious and also. You got to nail down that poker face. You’ve got to nail down that. Okay.
Clint Schumacher: Oh
Elizabeth Larrick: yeah. Okay. And then you just kind of like, okay. You know what I mean? And it’s, you start to, okay. And you can always tell somebody who, and again.
I’m just saying, throwing this out there. If you’re having this issue, just so you know, this is kind of where it’s coming from is I’ll have people who come in and I’ll set a focus group and people will come use my space or we’ll do the virtual focus group and the followup that always gives the little cringes, what if you heard, and you’re like, Oh, like your bias immediately comes out.
So it’s just a skill to learn. And I think it really makes you. Such a more well rounded lawyer just in practice and just probably in life to hear like, Of course people are gonna disagree with you and do you really need to try and convince them of your But tell me a little bit about, let’s get back to yours.
So how, tell me about [00:11:00] how has focus groups or how have focus groups helped your practice? in particular.
Clint Schumacher: So probably not anything that’s earth shattering. But gosh, what I’m going to say is not earth shattering. The information we get sometimes is, but it helps me see things that I’m blind to. Right. So I inevitably almost every time they ask questions or think about things that I had not ever focused on or thought were important.
And so that’s always a big takeaway to hear their feedback on that subject. But then a lot of times, if there’s a key. Issue in the case or two or three key issues in the case to get their feedback, not only on how they feel about that, which is obviously important, but if someone were to present evidence about that at trial, who would you expect to talk about it?
In other words, Is this going to be a fact, is this going to come out of a fact witness or is this going to come out of an expert witness? And what is their expectation about that in what we do, which is very heavily expert [00:12:00] driven, that’s been a really helpful thing to hear that, Hey, that’s something that really our client or whoever the fact witnesses needs to cover as opposed to having our expert evaluation person talk about that.
So that’s been a big piece of it too.
Elizabeth Larrick: I would assume, and again, this is my assumption because I don’t know any, that a lot of what you’re trying to understand is what do people even know about condemnation and what are their kind of attitudes about it, and have you found any kind of universal assumptions people are making?
Clint Schumacher: Absolutely. So there is generally a bias against the government taking property, and There are a fair number of people in the population that don’t think that’s even allowed or permitted. So they’re surprised to find out that can even happen. But then inevitably, one of the things that we always try to gauge in our focus group is how passionately do they feel about it in this particular circumstance.
And so if you’re taking property from a family and that land has been in the family for four [00:13:00] generations, you can imagine people. They have a sense of emotion that’s tied to that, and it’s very different from, say, a commercial piece of property that someone has owned for 10 years and their business is on it, or they rent it out to someone else.
Those can elicit different sets of feelings, and so one of the things that we or I say, should say I, I kind of subscribe to the reptile theory even in our property cases, and inevitably if we can communicate with the jury at an emotional level. That’s going to help us and one of the things I’ve got to gauge in every case is how emotionally connected does this group feel to this set of facts in this particular piece of property.
And so that’s always helpful to us to see, do we have a case that really drives that or is this one that they’re like, eh, it’s not a big deal. Are
Elizabeth Larrick: you scaling that or are you? Doing a word association with that, give us a little bit more. And I’m happy to share how I gauge emotional, the emotional value or the emotional engagement, if you will, with folks [00:14:00] group,
Clint Schumacher: actually, I really want to hear your feedback about that.
Cause I don’t know that I have a good system to do that. It’s really, I feel right now it’s just my field, like how involved are they? So how much feedback are they giving me? And we normally will do a two hour focus group and we’ll have two different cases. And you can tell they’re a lot more emotionally connected to one than to another.
But I don’t know that it’s systemized. And so if there’s a way to do that, I am all ears.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. I did not create this by the way, to totally did not create this. It’s just a scaling question on a scale of one to 10. How much do you care about what happened here?
Clint Schumacher: Oh, that’s a good idea. Yeah, that’s a good idea.
Elizabeth Larrick: And you can always follow up with people. I love doing it online or doing it virtually with zoom and having a chat, having them chat it to you, and then just saying. Hey, Ralph, you put nine. What does that nine mean to you? And there, here comes a little more gold coming in there. Now it also helps you really decipher.
Occasionally some people will say, just what happened, this person was just so sympathetic. [00:15:00] Yeah, that’s not always going to push the boulder, right? We need to, we really wanted them to be impassioned about what the government is taking from people, what the defendant’s action was. So it’s helpful, but yeah.
And I do you care your Carol meter on a scale of one to 10 generally helps. Decipher and you can just do a follow up. What does that nine mean to you? What does the two mean to you? But like you said, a lot of times people will just have heated, very heated reactions, or you can always check the words people are using as well.
Clint Schumacher: So where, that’s a really good idea. Where in your focus group do you do that?
Elizabeth Larrick: At the end.
Clint Schumacher: At the end, okay. Mm-Hmm? .
Elizabeth Larrick: It’s generally the last question I ask.
Clint Schumacher: Okay. That’s a great idea.
Elizabeth Larrick: After they have everything, right? You’ve got nothing else to give them or no other questions. And how much do you care what, what happened here?
And you can tweak it. I don’t, this was given to me when I learned focus groups and I’m sometimes of the, I may not make something better. Okay. This may be good. Okay. You don’t have to add [00:16:00] to it. I always tell people like, you don’t need to create everything on our own. Yeah. You need to create a focus group system that works for your office.
But there are some questions people want to, you know, why would I put my own twist on this? I’m like, why? Another thing that we get from doing so many focus groups is how to clearly communicate. Because the way that we communicate things can get so confusing to them. And so it’s really, focus groups help you, you give it to them and they’ll give it back to you in a much clearer way.
Generally, every time versus what the way you’re describing a fact pattern or how something happened. So, yeah.
Clint Schumacher: How much time do you say for that last question? How much time do you need to,
Elizabeth Larrick: Sometimes we’re running out of time. That’s why I love it’s a scaling question. Just throw it out there. Blink reaction, put it in the chat for me.
Or if we’re live in person, I just go around. I say, I’m going to ask every person individually and then just go around the room and popcorn it. And if we have time, somebody is a one. And do I really need to follow up with the one? I’ll follow up with an eight or a seven or a nine. [00:17:00] Something that I really want to figure out.
Why was it a nine for that person?
Clint Schumacher: Interesting. Okay. See, I’m learning stuff. This is good.
Elizabeth Larrick: Some people are super passionate about their case. Most people are, right? You’re building it. You’re creating it. You believe these people. Your heart and soul is in what we do. Most of the time, I say most of the time, sometimes it’s not, and you want to help everybody else is just as passionate about it as you are, and sometimes they’re not.
And you kind of want to know that before you start, like you said, getting those experts in there and pushing more money into that case, expensive column that people care about what’s happening here.
Clint Schumacher: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Elizabeth Larrick: Okay, so let’s get down to the nitty gritty here because I know there’s a lot of folks who listen who haven’t tried virtual focus groups.
And so let’s talk a little bit about your system. Kind of. Pieces of it, how you guys like to do it and set it up.
Clint Schumacher: Sure. I think you, you had a recent episode where you have a remote person that helps you. [00:18:00] And I would start there. My paralegal does it because she’s got the capacity to do it and she enjoys it.
But having somebody to help do all that backend work, I think is absolutely critical, unless you just are blessed with. More time than I have, and you know, we’ve kind of decided in our practices all over the state, and so we’ve got to be able to make it work in different jurisdictions. And sometimes because of the nature of our work, we might be in a very rural jurisdiction.
And so we’ve got to decide, can we sample inside that county without? Running the risk of ruining a potential jury pool. And so we start with figuring out, okay, where are we going to draw people from? What’s the geographic area that we need to draw from? Can we sample inside the County or do we need to hit surrounding counties?
And if it’s surrounding counties, can we match the demographics of the County that we’re in? So we go through that process and then she really starts recruiting. And our process right now has principally been in Facebook ads. We do a little bit of. Craigslist, but probably we’ve had the most success doing Facebook ads.
And I think we’re [00:19:00] continually trying to get better at doing that. I don’t think we’re far as long as you are with regard to your Facebook page for your jury consulting business. And that’s probably something ultimately we would. Like to get to just because it’s a, it seems to me to have the effect of having a common anchoring point that you can bring people in, but we’re mostly using Facebook ads.
And then she has a Google form that we can use pretty much for every case that helps populate the information from the various consultants or various participants. And as you have pointed out multiple times, one of the challenges is to make sure you’re really getting somebody from the jurisdiction that you want to pull them from.
And we have figured out a few helpful questions to let people that maybe are not in the right jurisdiction. So that we don’t have them included on the panel. And so that’s, that’s largely the process that we’re using. Although, as I say, we’re continuing to tweak it and hopefully continue to get better at drawing people in.
And the other thing that we don’t have, you’ve got a great advantage, I think, just because you’ve been doing it longer and you’ve got [00:20:00] more participants. And so we’re still at the point where we’re. At the genesis of not having a huge group of people that we’ve worked with in the past, we don’t have a lot of repeat participants yet, but obviously my hope is, as we do this more, we’ll have people that we can go back to and use every twice a year, three times a year is probably not too much.
So we’re still working on that.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Yeah. So do you guys do an electronic confidentiality form?
Clint Schumacher: Yes. Yeah. So, yes. So she’s got an Adobe form that people can assign that we use. And as I think you’ve suggested, I think we’ve do it just exactly like you guys were talking about on the show the other day, your kind of entry into the zoom is you sending that form back the morning of you send the form back, we send you the zoom link and then we’re good to go.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Yep. Yep. It’s all building in the hurdles. I always feel like it helps your people are going to be there. Cause that’s always my fears. Two people are going to show up to talk to me. It’s a long [00:21:00] conversation.
Clint Schumacher: And I think my guess is that anybody that does this has probably had that situation. And I think we had a panel or we had a focus group is in the last couple that we’ve done, where we had three people, we were having trouble drawing, we’re in a small county, we’re having trouble drawing.
She told me at the outset, she’s like, I got five people. Two of them are really, I’m not sure they’re going to show. And so we had three and you know what, Elizabeth, even with those three that I got a lot out of that, cause we got to get really deep with what those three people thought. And so it probably wasn’t as statistically valid, but.
Because we had that small number, I got feedback at a deeper level. And so I really got a lot out of that, even though we didn’t have very many people. So it’s not, it wasn’t the end of the world. Yeah.
Elizabeth Larrick: It’s, and it’s not. And I think that if you end up with three folks who want to talk to you, you’re good.
If you end up with three that. We’re the folks that don’t talk very much. It’s
Clint Schumacher: brutal. [00:22:00] No, you’re correct. These were three talkie folks. So that helped a lot.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And it’s, have you had the situation where you’ve had to let someone go yet out of a group?
Clint Schumacher: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a learning moment. So yeah, the person who won’t turn their video on or the person who gets in and you figure out they don’t know how to speak English and we needed to, we had to put something or some.
Guardrails in place that helped us tell them, Hey, here’s our expectation. We expect you to have your video on. If you don’t, we’re going to boot you off. We’re not going to pay you. So yeah, that was, yeah, we learned the hard way on that.
Elizabeth Larrick: We expect you to, we’re doing a zoom focus group. You’re we’re going to need to see you, but some people just, they don’t, you got to just line it out there every chance you get, and then we’ve just gotten to where it’s like, and that’s the other thing too, I think.
If you don’t have that talking to everybody out there listening, you have to have a way to say it to where you’re being polite and [00:23:00] it’s okay, but you’re kicking them out. Yeah. You don’t want to disturb anybody else. You don’t want to become like the taskmaster because then people won’t want to share who are left.
They’d be like, wait a second. I don’t, I don’t, that wasn’t nice. But I’ve had it one time where this person was just. I mean, off the wall answers, they’re making people uncomfortable. And so I just had to like, politely kick them out of the meeting, and just paid them for their time, but, and then just moved on.
But yeah, it’s a challenge sometimes.
Clint Schumacher: So my paralegal will sit in on these and she’ll handle, not the person who’s rude and out of sorts, right? That, that one’s probably on me, but if you’ve got somebody whose camera’s not on or whatever, she handles that. Is that how you do that or how do you approach that?
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. So she’ll start the meeting or we’ll both be there. We both start the meeting and then we have kind of a 30 minute check in period where we got check the IDs and then we check the technology. And the goal is to get all of that done in that. 30 minutes [00:24:00] before. And so if she’s struggling with somebody and because I’m generally there at work, like technology wise, and we just can’t get it to work, then I’ll come on and say, Hey, I can see it’s not working.
Can we just reschedule you? I apologize. We got to have you. And we have all the backup, right? We need to see you. So blah, blah, blah, whatever may be. And then generally people are like, okay, I’m sorry. I’m like, Hey, no big deal. But I generally come in as the second, like reinforcer of that. So that it’s. Like people understand it, but yeah, we had, we, and then, and the fun thing is what this is when you know, you’re going to have a good focus group.
It’s like somebody gets on and like, they’re having a glitch. Let’s say it’s their video. Or we had this poor person who had flipped his video. So he was upside down and we were, I couldn’t keep a straight face because he was upside down and I’m just like, Oh my gosh. And another participant like put in the chat, like, Hey, here’s how you fix that.
And I was like, okay, we’re going to have a good focus group. People are trying to help each other out. So we did get a fix, but it was like. [00:25:00] Everybody wants to help and figure it out. So it’s, we’ve definitely had hurdles. She generally tries to go first go around, but I’ll come in second and see. And if there’s something specific, for example, we have to ask people, hey, we can’t really see you, can you turn a light on?
Or, looks like that you’re on a cell phone, do you have any other device? You’re not gonna be able to see the presentation. It’s gonna be too small. Oh gosh, we’re gonna have to get you rescheduled. It’s really important to see what we have to show you. If they can’t get it worked out, then, then we’re just gonna reschedule.
Clint Schumacher: That makes sense. Yeah, that’s good advice.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And we just, we’ve just gotten to where, I think I’ve just about run into, I know, Knock on some wood here. I’m sure there’s probably something else that’s going to come out there and impress me, but I’ve had people do some very interesting things with the camera on.
I’m just like, Oh, baby, turn your camera off for that. But
Clint Schumacher: yeah, I can’t say that we’ve had that. So, yeah.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Just [00:26:00] get, just in case,
Clint Schumacher: just get ready. Okay.
Elizabeth Larrick: That’s right. That’s right. All right. So what advice would you give some folks out there who are thinking about it? They’re on the cusp. Most people, we know it’s important, but we know it’s this expensive thing.
So we can’t necessarily hire someone to do our focus groups. So what would you, what advice would you give folks are on the fence about getting started doing their own focus groups?
Clint Schumacher: That’s a great question. I think, and you prefaced a part of this, but I think it’s the place you have to start, which is, I have never left a focus group, including the ones we’ve done ourselves, and go, that time was not extremely well used.
And because we always learn something about our case, it’s some of the best, it’s some of the most valuable time I spend on a case. And it’s hard to put. A price tag on that place that takes your case from a C case to a B plus case, it’s hard [00:27:00] to figure out what that is worth. And it’s worth a tremendous amount.
And so the amount that we spend, I know, is coming back to us and more importantly, our clients many times over. And so I think you start with, if you have something that’s that helpful to your case, okay, now you just got to figure, now you got to find a way, right? How can I figure out? How to do this. And that was finally the point that pushed us over the top, which is I knew it was important.
I knew it could be valuable, but it just seemed too big a hurdle to get over. And once you thought, okay, there’s from a time standpoint, I can figure out how to make this make sense and be efficient. And from a money standpoint, I can absolutely figure out how to make this work and be efficient and then just get in there and not be afraid.
To screw it up and just know, Hey, these first couple are probably going to be screwed up and that’s fine. And just the sense of learning and continuing to get better. That’s ultimately where we got to and where we’re going to. And like I say, it’s, uh, it’s not as hard. It’s like most things in life, probably.
It’s not [00:28:00] as hard as it seems is that first step’s the hardest one. And once you take the first step and you go, okay, I’m going, I’m going to do this. Now I just got to figure it out. There are resources out there. Yours being very helpful to me that have helped us get down that path.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, so not telling us your numbers, how are we talking about with our value proposition here, right?
Our return on investment here, we talk about five times, sometimes 10 times, like how would you equate that one hour focus group that expense you may have to the case as far as value and return of investment?
Clint Schumacher: Yeah, so we try, I’m not sure I can answer that question specifically. So I’ll give you, I’ll give you a, I’ll give you a story.
So we tried a case in February. And it was one of the first cases we had focus grouped ourselves. We did a zoom focus group and then two weeks before trial we did an in person focus group. And we did both of those were do it yourself. We found the people did the whole vineyards. And my, the jury came back and gave us [00:29:00] 880, 000, I’m sorry, jury came back and gave us 680, 000, which with pre judgment interest turned into like 880, 000.
I really think that There are probably 3 key things that we learned in the course of those 2 focus groups that took that case from a 350, 000 jury verdict to a 660, 000 jury verdict. And so, I don’t know, maybe we spent 5, 000 doing those 2 groups, probably not even that much, but let’s be honest.
conservative. And you know, whatever that math is, that’s what I think happened on that particular case. Maybe not all the cases have that same effect, but I think I would guess we’re seeing 10 to 15 to 20 to 25 times return on what we’re putting in to the focus groups on our cases.
Elizabeth Larrick: That’s awesome. That’s what you want.
And I think You nailed it with your example, which is, and that’s what I hear all the time from people, even if they just run one focus group, they’re like, we heard this one thing that turned [00:30:00] Our case into a million dollar case, right? And it was this one thing. We didn’t even know about good friend of mine example.
They had a propane gas leak in a house and they never even thought about clearing the air that no one was a smoker in the house. And it’s the 1st in the folks group said, and they said, oh, my gosh, thank goodness. We never would even said a word about that. And the jury would have gone back and assume just that 1 like you said, those 3 nuggets.
Doubled the case back.
Clint Schumacher: Yeah. And in this case, there was one fact that scared us that we thought was potentially the outcome determinative facts. It was a bad fact for us. And in both of those focus groups, not a single person cared about it. Could not care less, which completely stunned us. But that helped us then figure out how to try the case and we realized we don’t have to be afraid of this fact.
We don’t have to make a big deal of this fact. We need to explain it and then the jury is good with it. And the ultimate jury felt the same way.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, that’s awesome. And I think again, having some [00:31:00] confidence to know I don’t have to spend so much time on this. It was my worry only, not their worry. Awesome.
I, Clint, I really appreciate it. Is there anything else, any other resources you would suggest for folks who are listening, who are thinking about doing focus groups, any other resources that you would suggest that focus. Lawyers go check out.
Clint Schumacher: Yeah, sure. The other place that we’ve learned a lot is a lawyer in Las Vegas named Sean Claggett.
Sean does DIY focus groups too. They do, I think he does one every Friday in his office and he’s got a lot that he’s written about and has put out there for public consumption about how they do it and what they do, and that’s been very helpful to us as well.
Elizabeth Larrick: Sean reptile and edger as well. Yeah. I think they have a whole company as well.
They do. They have a pretty, they have a pretty cool space too. I’ve gotten to go to that space before.
Clint Schumacher: Oh, I haven’t seen that. You’re a step ahead of me.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. This is well before the pandemic, so many moons ago for sure. Awesome. I think no matter where you get the information, please just start looking. I think that’s step number one is take a look [00:32:00] around.
It’s not nearly as complicated. And I think the beauty of it is so many people are used to zoom. It’s not a foreign concept for participants who are out there trying to find some extra money, gas money or whatever, maybe.
Clint Schumacher: Absolutely.
Elizabeth Larrick: Clint, thank you so much for joining the podcast. I hope that you enjoyed your time here with us.
Clint Schumacher: Elizabeth, I did. It was a great pleasure to get to visit with you. And like I say, we owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude for what you put out there publicly and then what you’ve helped us with when we’ve emailed you here over the last several months. And so thank you very much. And I hope I was able to return that favor just slightly by sharing something with your audience.
Elizabeth Larrick: Absolutely. It was a pleasure to have you. And I hope that everybody else enjoyed Clint. We’re going to put his. Contact information, the show notes. If you have questions for him about his DIY focus group system, or if you have an imminent domain case, am I saying that right? Condemnation case.
Clint Schumacher: You got it.
Elizabeth Larrick: Definitely puts all that information there for you to contact Flint for anything. Thank [00:33:00] you all so much for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, please like and review it on your favorite podcast platform. So other folks can find this as well. Until next time. Thank you.