What Is the Firm’s History and Process with Running Focus Groups, and How Have They Impacted Case Results Overall?

I’ve been focus-grouping cases since, you know, the day I got out of law school. And what focus groups are, is pulling people from the community, complete strangers to us, just like you get on a jury and trying to find out from those individuals how they see a case right. Attorneys are really bad at standing on
the mountaintop and getting a big picture of what the case is and what really matters. And so we utilize focus groups for communities, people, just like we’d get on a jury to tell us what matters to them, and then we dial our cases into that right. You know, if a focus group thinks something is very important, they need to hear it, they want to hear it, there’s the way to hear it, we’ve got to make sure that that happens, you know, in negotiations presuit or in trial when we get there because we know through focus grouping that matters. And the same thing applies to, we don’t care about that, you know, that doesn’t matter, and as attorneys, we think, oh this is great, and then a focus group says, well no that that really doesn’t matter, it’s not something that we’re even queued in on, we can scrap that. And you know, what we’re trying to do with every one of our cases is figure out how to take the complex mountain of information and narrow it down to the most simplest terms and in the most simplest way that is applicable to a jury. I don’t care if it’s applicable to the  attorneys. I don’t care if it’s applicable to the judge. I want to try my case based on what you,  as a jury, think about the case. And so that’s, you know, why we focus group cases. We want the opinion from somebody that’s not a lawyer, that’s not involved in the case of, you know, what they think about an issue, what they think about a theory, how they label people, how they label companies, you know those kinds of things, and that’s how we develop our cases.