Trial Lawyers Stop This Habit if You Want Reliable Case Feedback
Trial lawyers: Did you know that seeking feedback from friends and family might be sabotaging your trial preparation? Join me as I break down why this common practice can be a trap rather than a helpful shortcut. In this episode of Trial Lawyer Prep, you’ll uncover three fundamental reasons why feedback from close individuals is inherently unreliable. From the biased nature of their opinions to the undue credibility they grant you, and how these skewed perspectives can infiltrate your subconscious decision-making—understand why these pitfalls can negatively impact your case.
I’ll also shed light on the significance of impartial jury research, and how recruiting unbiased participants can make all the difference. Discover why feedback from neutral strangers offers a more accurate simulation of a real jury’s perspective and why cutting corners due to time, money, or fear of negative feedback could jeopardize your case’s success. Don’t miss this vital discussion on enhancing your trial strategies with reliable, unbiased feedback!
In this episode, you will hear:
- The dangers of relying on feedback from friends and family for trial preparation.
- Three main reasons why friendly feedback is unreliable: inherent bias, undue credibility, and non-representative sample.
- The subconscious influence of biased feedback on decision-making in trials.
- Importance of impartial jury research and recruiting unbiased participants for focus groups.
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Episode Credits:
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Episode Transcript:
Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Elizabeth Lyric, and I’m so glad that you’re here.
This is a podcast dedicated to helping you trial lawyers get your cases ready for trial, figure out maybe you need to settle, but really we try to dive into the minds [00:01:00] of the jury. And so this episode, we’re going to talk about a habit that I see many lawyers doing. I did the exact same thing until I realized why it was not a good idea because it was really messing with my head and my case preparation.
And this is a habit. You probably learned it from a mentor, maybe one of your first firms. And, um, This habit has been passed down where it’s perpetuated as like a sound practice for trial lawyers to use to get case feedback and it’s the focus group of the family or the friends, right? So this is normally how I hear it.
Oh, well, I asked my wife and she’s, you know what, she’s really, you know, she’s a teacher or she’s really conservative or she’s really neutral. Or I asked my seven year old and this is what they said. Um, I was golfing with my buddies. You know, they’re not lawyers. Here’s what they said. Or I took this [00:02:00] case to, you know, the church group.
All of these are examples. And here’s the simple truth. It’s unreliable and it’s unreliable. And you think, of course I know that Elizabeth, but here’s what happens. Like here’s the, here’s the danger. And we’ll talk a little bit more about the danger is that it’s those thoughts, those, that feedback, it still gets into your subconscious, right?
And it’s still then bouncing around in our brain. We start to keep working on the case. But let me tackle really quickly three kind of main points about why this is unreliable. Like we should not be doing this habit and it really creates a little bit of havoc on ourselves. But the first reason why is that these folks that you’re asking, these lovely people, right?
Who know you, they’ve been around you, right? You probably share some common beliefs and values. They have an underlying bias that’s in your favor. [00:03:00] Even if you try to tell him, well, not my wife or not my husband or not my kids. Like, of course, right? Like you, again, you’ve been around these people long enough, right?
Maybe they depend on you financially, right? There is an underlying bias that is going to be in your face. And the other part of that is. you as a speaker, a presenter, you actually have an automatic level of credibility with your audience, right? You know, these people, they know you, that’s not the actual real setting that we would have in a focus group or even a mock jury or real jurors, right?
They don’t know you. They do not automatically trust you. Right? So There is a little bit of credibility that has to be earned right before we give feedback or make decisions for other people. And then of course, the other thing is these folks are not going to be, you know, your sample size, if we’re going to talk that way is not representative of a jury, right?
They are people who you hang out with. They’re people who are just [00:04:00] pretty well going to be like you. And again, share your common beliefs and values. And that’s just not a, jury that we get, right? We get a jury of the community. And so here we are, you know, polling our audience and talking to them. And the other thing that happens too, is We don’t strive in our, you know, presentation to these folks to be unbiased ourselves about our cases, right?
We know we’re invested in them. We’re going to get information out of people. And so we may give more information. We may ask really biased questions or leading questions. Or do the whole like, well, what about this fact? Well, what if I say this thing? Or what if this person does this thing? Right? So we can, then we really begin to skew that the outcome or the feedback altogether.
And, you know, like I mentioned it, here’s the danger is. Okay. So you go and you ask your family, you go and you ask your group and you get some feedback, right? And it’s bias, [00:05:00] right? We’ve already tackled that. These folks have your underlying favorite in, in your best interests, right? They automatically give you credibility and they’re not really representative.
There’s a bias here, right? So you’re getting some bias feedback and that gets into your brain and it gets into your subconscious and you will rely on it when you make decisions. And you don’t want to make the serious case decisions, settling a case, value of a case, going to trial on unreliable data. And so that is the danger.
It will get in there and stick around, even if you’re thinking, Oh, I’m going to completely ignore this. That’s not the way that our brain works. It takes it all in. And so that’s why, you know, if you look at other examples, any kind of self help they talk about, like turn off the feed of the negative information into your brain because your brain will absorb it.
Whether you think, [00:06:00] Oh, well, I’m not going to, you know, I won’t absorb all that. It does. You really do absorb so much more information than you think. And that’s why we have to be so careful. When we go around and ask people, what do you think about this? Who we’re asking and how we’re presenting it. That’s why when we do focus groups, we work really hard on our presentation to make sure we’re nailing.
If it’s neutral, we’re going to be neutral. If it’s going to have advocacy, then we’re going to figure out, okay, who’s going to moderate, who’s going to present because. When we do research, when we do jury research, we want to make sure it is reliable because it’s going to get in your brain. It’s going to stick there and you’re going to use it to make decisions.
And so if we put things in there that are unreliable, that skew it in your favor, make you think, oh, well, this is great. Or, oh, no one else would think any different than my, me and, you know, my crew of, of personal focus group participants. Right. [00:07:00] You can really get yourself in a pickle because you’ve this unreliable information.
So, you know, one of the things that we really strive, you should strive for in your focus groups, or if you’re going to hire someone is you really want to reflect the real audience, right? You want to reflect the real setting, and then you want to try your best to present neutrally to ask neutral questions.
to really get at reliable feedback. And I know that this is important to everyone who’s listening, all my trial lawyers, because this is the number one question that I get. I get it when we do our webinars. I get it when we, uh, work together. I get it on my free calls, which is how do you recruit and who are you recruiting?
They want reliable feedback. They want to make sure is, are these people from the jury? Is this really going to be reliable? Because I don’t want to risk doing all this work and then not being able to rely on the information because I can tell this is not really the audience I [00:08:00] would see at a jury or we’ve skewed things in the presentation or we’re not really being realistic about our setting and this comes up fairly often where I try to tell people, Hey, you know, When we are going to run a focus group, we do these things very specifically for neutrality for to get the real setting, to get the real audience in there.
And what sometimes happen is I’ll be working with a lawyer and they’ll say, well, I already ran this past. You know, my friends or I ran this past, you know, my spouse and they’ve told me that, you know, this is not as big of a deal. And then I’m like, well, that’s not what we heard in our focus group, right?
So now you have competing thoughts in your mind and it’s like, okay, well. These folks don’t know you, right? This is just them off the basic facts of information, right? Versus having a group that obviously has some bias. And we really want to make sure, again, we really can’t even compare these two things, right?[00:09:00]
Feedback from a group that’s really biased and then feedback from a complete group of strangers. That don’t know you are just looking at things. It’s like apples and pencils. Right? And so this habit that we have can really hurt us way more than we could probably ever detect it. And then stop, right? Like, Oh wait, you know, your brain doesn’t do that, right?
It processes, it runs through things. Even when we’re not actively thinking about it, our subconscious is still always trying to solve that problem for us. And so I always caution people, like, Okay. I hear that you’ve asked some other folks, but here’s the thing. Like how reliable really is that? And the other thing I always ask people too, is like, okay, when you went and told your client that that was the research you’d done, how did they feel about it?
Because again, we’re doing jury research, we’re doing focus groups, like. Most of the time clients are like, awesome. That’s great. I want to hear what other people have to say. And, you know, I want it to be trustworthy because they’re going to make decisions on it too. [00:10:00] So always keep that in mind as well, because they could easily question like, well, wait a second, you know, that’s not really reliable.
We’re asking, you know, your group of friends or your golf buddies, or even people you go to church with, right? Like that doesn’t make it more comforting for them because they’re thinking, wait a second. This can’t be what we’re relying on to make these decisions in our case. And you know, again, I think this habit comes from a place of it’s old hat.
Somebody taught us to do it. That’s the way it was done. You were, you know, the first firm that you did, people would go out and share fire. I mean, I’ve definitely heard people tell me all the time. And When I really see this happening is when people, when lawyers are running out of time, coming up on the big mediation, they’re coming up on trial and they haven’t taken the time to go do any jury research.
So they run their own personal focus groups. And I always ask them, well, how do you feel about that? Because you’re making a [00:11:00] 10, 000, 20, 000 trial prep decision here. Okay. Is that really going to, you know, you’re going to feel reliable about that. And we really just don’t want that to happen. The other thing too, I see is people just have a lot of cases, right?
And again, this can happen to any of us at any time we take on too much. And so then they take another lawyer to lunch. Let me just go pick your brain or they go home again. They, and they ask family, right? Because it’s just got so much going on. And also of course, I’ve seen people say, well, you know, I don’t have time or I don’t have money to even do a group.
So I’m just going to save some money or a lot of people. Don’t ask because they don’t want to hear, right. They’re out of just, you know, fear or just not really scared to hear what other people may say. And again, I get it. It is definitely a hundred percent scary. We are focused in like a laser beam on our case, representing these folks, doing it with our own risk, with our own money and time waiting until we can get paid [00:12:00] till the end.
It can get scary and it can definitely feel like I don’t want to step over that other line to find out what somebody else may say because I could be wrong. Sure. You know, we want to know though. And all of this tells me when I hear people saying like, well, I didn’t, I wouldn’t ask, You know, my friend down the street or ask my hairdresser and, and I, it just tells me that the case is on your mind and it is worrying you.
It’s in your thoughts. It’s taking you away from being present with your family, your friends, taking away a good night’s rest. And I know because I was that lawyer, right? I wasted so much time worrying and that really didn’t stop until I started going to focus groups, running focus groups. to really understand what was going on and know that this is just an integral piece of a case that I’m going to have and it’s going to help me guide everything.
And it’s [00:13:00] also hopefully going to help me stop worrying, uh, cause there’ll be things that you can control things you can’t, but most of the time focus groups are going to tell you, Hey, here’s how to fix this, right? Here’s what we want to see in here, right? Those magical words. And so if you are doing this habit, right?
If you’re in the habit of doing this, You know, just remember we’re planting seeds in our minds and we can plant good seeds or we can plant biased seeds, right? That can tip things one way or the other. And this is the same, you know, this habit of obviously going and, you know, using folks that, you know, as a focus group, it’s really can be very similar to when you do what your own focus group and you begin to put your finger on the scale, meaning.
You asked really biased questions. You present in a way that really skews things and they know that bias, unfortunately, when you do that, though, you’ve just spent time and money running a focus group versus, you know, these other ones are free, but they come at a cost. I will [00:14:00] tell you again, that danger is that that will still get into your mind.
and be something that your brain relies on to make decisions. So be very careful, right? This stuff is very concerning. I would say if this is a regular habit for you, just make sure and, and check and see, like, why am I doing this? Is this something that I’m just running out of time? And they just have too many cases.
It’s on my mind, right? I am worrying about it, but how can I maybe solve this problem in a way where I’m going to get reliable information and stop the worry so I can be present and have good night’s rest. All right. So the recommendation here, like, let’s stop this habit, right? Of, Asking our loved ones for her feedback, asking people that we know that know us really well, right?
It’s just going to end up being a situation where we don’t have an unbiased audience that reflects a jury in a setting that would be even remotely similar to what they were experiencing in a jury setting. [00:15:00] So. Get to a focus group. Stop the worry. You know, it may cost a little bit of money. However, right, it’s going to be way more reliable for you and your client to make decisions on.
All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. If this was helpful. Please share this episode with someone, you know, leave a good review. We’ve hadn’t had any good reviews in a while. So somebody reaches over there and on your favorite apps, you have the Apple podcast, Spotify, wherever you like to listen, just leave a review that helps other people find this podcast.
And until next time, have a good one. Thank you.