Use your jury research in negotiation & mediation

A great way to leverage your investment in pre-trial jury research (such as focus groups and mock trials) is to have your trial consultant appear with you at the mediation. By the time you get to a mediation, you have lived with the case for a couple years, and have beaten opposing counsel over the head with the same list of facts and legal interpretations that you can probably recite each other's lines. So mediation is where you can repeat the same thing to an outsider and have that person do it for you-- great, right? Well, what if you could change the playing field altogether?

We have gotten really beneficial results for our clients by making a 30-45 minute presentation that includes:
* A 10-minute piece explaining the methodology used in designing the focus group; describing the recruiting process for participants (that they mirror what we expect to see in the jury in that venue), etc.
* A summary of THE OTHER SIDE'S argument, assuring them that they were well represented. Obviously, this will be the first point of serious resistance on the part of your opponent-- "You guys didn't tell them this... nor that." Well, yes, we did. Let us tell you how.
* Then a summary of the key findings that favor us: things we learned about OUR case, strengths we might have discovered, weaknesses we learned how to address, decision paths, and so forth. (We don't really discuss verdicts as they are dangerously unpredictive of outcome, and we don't say anything invalid or untrue.) (Seriously.)
* We show a selection of video excerpts. This is a great moment. Opposing counsel gets to see laypeople discussing his or her baby for the first time. It's a nice bolt of reality therapy.

Does opposing counsel swoon at our feet and offer to settle at whatever result we name? Well, I'm hopeful that will happen sometime but it hasn't happened yet. Rather, what does tend to happen is that opposing counsel is moved from the "facts & law" debate into the mindset of getting serious about predicting what the verdict is likely to be. That is what makes outcomes calculable at that stage of the game, and that starts moving the process. The next week or two after the mediation will bring much better results.

Same goes for negotiation. We'll prepare some talking points of valid conclusions from the research for counsel to share with the other side. Again, it shifts the debate from "you think/I think" to "we've done our research, and here's what forms the foundation of our conviction." It also sends the tacit message of "We see no reason to change our position until you show us some better research."

Give it some thought & get in touch if you want to discuss it.