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I thought I hired my attorney to do what you do, please explain?
Litigation/Jury/Trial consultants have experience and knowledge in something that practicing attorneys do not (in most cases). Litigation consultants have seen mock juries deliberate to a verdict. Experienced consultants have witnessed this hundreds of times. At Tsongas, our consultants have advanced education in the social sciences or communication and then build on this theoretical knowledge with practical experience witnessing what juries actually do in a broad array of venues. In short, trial consultants can answer the question "what is a jury likely to do with this case" better than anyone. Few consultants (none at Tsongas) are lawyers, so it is unlikely that consultants and attorneys venture into each others expertise much. Rather, we make a powerful, complementary team working together.
Do you investigate jurors like in John Grisham's Runaway Jury?
No, we don't investigate jurors for two reasons: 1) it's unethical; and 2) the data received is of little use. Tsongas consultants are among the 535 members of the American Society of Trial Consultants. We are jury system advocates who witness the reliable, consistent, and uncorruptible nature of the American Jury System every day. We believe that investigating jurors runs afoul of our code. Furthermore, we believe a good high-risk juror profile with a well-executed voir dire and/or a supplemental juror questionnaire provides a litigation team with better information to exercise cause and peremptory challenges than the data found in the investigation of jurors.
I'm concerned that you "stack" juries. Do you?
Nobody can stack juries. The American system is an adversarial one. Both sides have a point of view that they share with the jury and the jury delivers justice. Anecdotally, as well as in many studies, it has consistently delivered reasonable, uncorrupted verdicts. Each side has a right to exercise their peremptory challenges to prevent the service of a handful of jurors that they believe have adverse attitudes that would be unfavorable to their case. One person's attitude is another's bias, and ridding the panel of unfavorable bias is the attorney's job in which the consultant assists. The term "jury selection" is actually a misnomer since attorneys only have the power to exclude jurors. They cannot actually "select" them. |
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