Virtual Focus Group: Face-to-Face Interaction You Can’t Replicate In Person
Virtual Focus Groups give a unique view into juror’s minds and facial expressions. Join me for a riveting discussion about the new frontier of legal preparation. Get an insider’s perspective on how virtual focus groups have revolutionized how we examine participant feedback, scrutinize facial reactions, and dissect video evidence – all crucial in today’s camera-laden society. I’ll guide you through the nuances of camera setups and recording settings on platforms like Zoom to capture every critical detail.
This episode is a must-listen for any legal professional eager to polish their trial strategy with the power of digital tools. Whether you’re looking to access case studies, master presentation tools, or seeking aids for your trial approach, this conversation is a treasure trove of best practices and expert guidance. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to elevate your practice with the insights from our latest session – where we go beyond the screen to bring the court to life, virtually.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Best practices with virtual focus groups
- Importance of close face-to-face interaction
- Virtual focus groups improve video content
- Optimizing zoom settings for focus groups
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Supporting Resources:
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Episode Credits:
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Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Hello, and welcome to the podcast, Trial Lawyer Prep. With me, your host, Elizabeth Larrick.
If you’ve been here before, welcome back and thanks for joining us again. This episode, I’m going to talk more about virtual focus groups and specifically a [00:01:00] bonus that you can’t get in person. And that would be that face to face interaction that you just can’t replicate in person. So who might this episode be for?
Because think in mind, maybe it’s you, or maybe it’s somebody you know who’s curious or on the fence about virtual focus groups. Even today, in 2024, after I’ve run over a thousand virtual focus groups, I still get the holdouts. Are you sure that it works? We’re going to use virtual if you think we can get what we need.
Absolutely. So this might be somebody who’s on the fence. Or maybe you’ve tried virtual focus groups and you really want to enhance it. So at the end, I’ll talk about how to enhance or how to make sure that you have the settings correct. But let’s just back up because I’ve done both in person focus groups for many years.
[00:02:00] That’s really how I learned how to do focus groups from places that I worked, from seminars I went to, when I worked with Mr. Kian, we did all in person. When I started doing my own side hustle of focus groups, I did all of it in person. And it wasn’t until the pandemic that really forced, and it was a force, to get me into virtual, but I’m really glad that I did.
But I totally know that there is a place for in person focus groups and, and mock trials. And if there’s a person out there who needs to practice their presentation, their courtroom presentation, I mean your, your jury selection, your opening statement, even practicing role play of a cross exam is really important to do with a mock jury or with focus group participants because you want to be able to know your body language and your engagement and making sure you’re being engaging [00:03:00] and not turning someone off and walking through that presentation so you get familiar with it.
I know the cues, right? A lot of people want to memorize their presentation, meaning your opening statements, or they want to be able to memorize the questions for a choice selection. More power to you, but if you don’t practice it, right, it’s really hard to memorize it. So, in person focus groups, mock trials, are a great place to practice those presentation skills.
Totally need to do that. But the one thing that stands out for virtual that you can’t get in person is that really close face to face interaction that you get when you use the Zoom platform or if you use Teams or another platform out there that allows for that, you know, camera to be very close to their face and close to your face too, right?
And It’s so important and it’s [00:04:00] such a cool bonus to get with the virtual platform that every single virtual focus group that I have, we make every participant, you know, get on the camera correctly, right? Like we, Hey, move your camera around. Hey, the light’s looking bad. Like we want to make sure that when we’re doing that focus group and we’re recording it, we are getting the best possible look at their face that we can.
Because you don’t want to miss a reaction, right? Like as a moderator, as somebody who is a lawyer watching this, you want to make sure you’re, you can see everyone’s reactions really clearly. And if you are in a room and let’s say you don’t get to sit perfectly in front of everybody at that perfect angle, like you’re going to miss people’s facial reactions, especially if people, there’s just little reactions happening, right?
Not big gasps or, you know, dropping their mouth open. You’re going to miss it, but you would catch that on a virtual focus group because they’re [00:05:00] so close to the face. The other thing that you get when you have this face to face interaction is very detailed reactions. And again, you wouldn’t be able to do that in person because it would require, first of all, you gotta have a professional videographer.
Hands down. I used to do all my own recording. Don’t do that. You’re not made for that. You’re a lawyer. You got a lawyer brain. You need to be working on the presentation. Hire someone else to do the videography because trust me, it will, Well be above and beyond the expense of hiring them because they will get a great video with great sound.
That’s my side plug for, for hiring a videographer for in person. But if you wanted them to get that closeup shot of reactions, they’d have to zoom in on every single face. You can’t do that. Generally have one camera there. Maybe you have two cameras, maybe, but you wouldn’t be able to have that zoom in on every single face.
And that is, the awesome part of virtual because that is what you get. And so let’s just walk this through like where would [00:06:00] this really amplify your feedback on a case? So many people nowadays have a video recording of the incident or what happened in their case because there’s so many ring cameras, every Nearly every building’s got some kind of surveillance camera.
There’s, you know, cameras on 18 wheelers. Now people just have cameras on their cars now, right? There are people whip out a cell phone really quickly and record something. So there’s, there’s a lot of videos out there. No, they’re not all, not all equal. And that’s where the focus groups come in, because when you have that video and you can give them that very close up watch, cause that’s what they’re going to get.
When they watch it on their laptop or their tablet is they’re going to get a really close up view if I couldn’t do that in person, right? And so you want to know, okay, they’re getting a front row seat to this video. What are their reactions when you’re going to see literally their facial reactions really well, but they’re going to be [00:07:00] able to talk more about what they see.
And you’ll be able to go back and rewatch it, right? To see, okay, what facial reactions are we getting? Cause sometimes we have a video, we think, oh man, this video is, it is key. It says everything. It’s great. It proves our case, but then you put it in front of a focus group and they’re not so keen, or they pointed a bunch of things that Are distracting them or they miss it altogether or they just don’t find as much value in it as you do.
So then you kind of learn, okay, Oh, I need to do X, Y, Z for this video. Or there have been times where there’s videos that you just don’t even want to use it obscured, or it doesn’t show what you think it does. Either way, focus group is going to tell you that, but having that face to face interaction in a virtual focus group is something you could not get in person.
And on the same [00:08:00] scale with visuals, and it could, I mean, beyond just thinking beyond a video, just think about if you’ve got a picture of damages that you think is awesome, or you’ve got a diagram of a surgery, you know, and you want to show it, or you want to say, does this visual aid actually show what I, when I want it to show, is it going to get that reaction that I want?
Like, Oh, right. Whoa. You know, those cool reactions were like, yes, that is what I want. I want that first impression of your brain to go. Whoa. And we talked with Annie in the last episode, right? About having, you know, two dimensional, three dimensional, and all those can be put in front of a virtual focus group.
So they can get that really close one on one interaction with it. And that’s what you want. You want, before you spend any more money on a visual or before you, you know, invest a whole lot more into, Hey, this video is fantastic for us. You’re going to get that feedback back before you do those things, right?
[00:09:00] Save time, save some money. And here’s the thing, if they can see more, Meaning if they have that video, they have that visual very close to them. They’re going to be able to say more, right? You’re going to get more feedback than you would if you were in person. Cause it’s going to be further away from, and so I’m such a big proponent of virtual focus groups.
Obviously, you know, that if you listen to these podcasts episodes, you know, that I am a proponent of it. I love it. I think that they save time. Meaning we don’t, if you want a virtual focus group, you can put it together in, in, in a less than a week sometimes, right? You save expenses. It’s very inexpensive to put one of these things together compared to doing in person.
There’s a lot less headache as far as managing the location and feeding people and, you know, there’s a lot less pay when it comes to a participant as well. And participants love it. I mean, they tell me all the time, like, I’d rather do virtual. I don’t want to get my car and drive anywhere. I’m really lazy.
Okay, cool. That’s fine by me. Just show up on the [00:10:00] zoom and, and we’ll, we’ll have a great time. And that’s very different than mock trials where there is a lot of expense and expense of like literally money, but also expensive time, like getting it together, getting where you got to go the whole day out of the office.
The other thing about this face to face is this is how a lot of the big data surveys are actually done. They rely on this close face to face interaction to detect eye movement, detect reactions. They’re using AI to detect all those things and put them into those reports. I’m not making this up y’all if they’re using it.
And that’s obviously on a quantitative, right? So they’re doing thousands of people, right? 2000. They’re doing large amounts of people. Like that’s what they call it. Big data on just a few points, but they’re using that face to face interaction to help them enhance the results, right? They’re using that AI software detection to help enhance those results.
And you can do that too. [00:11:00] When it comes to virtual focus groups, right? That’s just a little more on a qualitative scale, right? Meaning we’re more about the quality of the feedback from this one person and being able to follow up on those questions. And as a moderator, it is so much easier to watch people to be able to catch all the reactions in front of you and then be able to ask questions.
Hey, you know, Bobby, I noticed while you’re watching that video of that witness, you kind of got a chuckle going on. What was that about? Tell me what that was about. If we’re in a large room, I might not have been able to see that. But if they’re on that Zoom, they’re really close to me. I can see that. I can make a note.
I can follow up on it. Just makes it so much easier. So true proponent, obviously a virtual, but this is a bonus that you really kind of can’t get in person and I just wanted to point it out for any of those folks who may be still sitting on the fence, like not sure they’re going to get, are they going to get as much stuff?
Are they going to get the feedback? Is it worthy? It’s totally [00:12:00] worthy. So let me just tell you if you are running virtual focus groups and you are not getting the gallery view, right? So a lot of times when we are running virtual focus groups using zoom, we save it, but it only saves gallery view with shared screen.
What that means is. It gets the shared screen, which would be the PowerPoint presentation. And you don’t get to see their cute little faces the whole time. So be really careful about that because I’ve run into folks who I’ve watched their focus groups for them to help critique, to help them learn more about, Hey, what to do, what not to do.
And, and they didn’t know that was even a possibility. So if you’re running virtual focus groups, if you’re using zoom, please go check your settings. So what you want to do is you want to log in. You want to go over to left side, scroll down to account settings. Now, if you’ve been using zoom for the past three years, you’ve noticed four years, sorry.
The settings have been you over there, just astronomically [00:13:00] grown. So go over to account settings, click on that. You’ll come to a new screen. And what you want to see is there’s actually. A horizontal bar at the top with lots of different settings and you want to go to recording and when you go on recording then it really just brings you the screen of it’ll ask you what type do you want and you just check what you want and for me I do gallery view a shared screen gallery view speaker view I think maybe there’s one other one and I check them all just in case I may need those.
I may need them or I may not need them. But I’ll always have that gallery view where I get to see their faces and what they’re doing, what they’re reacting to those videos every single time. So important. So make sure you go in there and change those settings. And I’m Doesn’t cost any extra, but that’s definitely something that you need to make sure you go and do check it, save it.
And so that next time when you run your virtual focus group through zoom, whether you [00:14:00] record to the cloud, which is what I would suggest. So you don’t take up so much space on your laptop. you will be able to have that option to download that. And that will significantly help you be able to see their wonderful faces and their reactions that they’re giving to you in this, in a one hour, two hour, three hour virtual focus group.
And again, in person can’t get it right. You’d have to zoom in on everyone’s face. That’s just not really possible. So I hope that this episode was helpful if you were on the fence or helpful if you weren’t even sure or knew about those settings that you could change and get there just a nice square of their faces during that whole presentation when you are sharing screen which we generally share screen quite a bit and so you definitely want to make sure you can get those reactions but Thank you so much for tuning in.
If you didn’t know, I actually run and offer virtual focus groups as a service with my law firm each month. If you’re curious, reach out, get ahold of me, interested. The email is in the show notes. Also, I [00:15:00] am doing an email list, starting an email list, which is basically, uh, one email, maybe two emails a month.
Where we got case studies, tools that I use, or new tools that are coming out, downloads to help you prepare presentations, visuals, help with focus groups, witness prep, trial strategy, each month. If you’re curious, if you want to join in, there will also be a link in the show notes as well. Alright, until next time, thank you.