Selecting a Jury without much time or cause challenges

In theory, the best way to select a great jury is to spend hours of probing voir dire discussing all the issues with each juror and to excuse all of the worst jurors using cause challenges. But in practice, more and more judges across the county these days are imposing strict time limits on your voir dire time, limiting what you can ask in voir dire, and denying motions for cause challenges on even jurors who admit bias. So is it possible to consistently select juries capable of huge verdicts without hours of voir dire or the luxury of cause challenges? The answer is yes… and in this seminar, jury consultant Harry Plotkin will teach you how to do it.

You will learn why relying on too many cause challenges is an unnecessary mistake… and how to stop over-diagnosing bias on your jury. You will learn ways to keep your best jurors, instead of letting the defense dismiss them for cause. You will learn to stop judging jurors by their demographics, their occupations, and their knee-jerk reactions to the superficial nature of the case. Instead, you will learn how to properly assess your jurors’ values and conscience, without relying on your jurors to (unreliably) self-assess themselves. You will learn to re-think what conventional wisdom has taught you to think about jurors, stop wasting voir dire time on topics that don’t matter, and be much more efficient in your voir dire. You will learn to stop wasting unnecessary peremptory strikes and build better juries.

During the webinar, Harry will demonstrate the voir questions and jury selection approach he used in three recent verdicts of $60 million (in a TBI crash/injury trial), $41.5 million (in a wrongful termination/employment trial), and $45 million (in a school district/bullying/abuse trial) in which the lawyers were given less than 60 minutes of voir dire time, granted no cause challenges by the judge, and in which jury selection was finished in less than one day.