What is the most cost effective way to do jury profiling?
To obtain a reliable jury profile, you must conduct research on a group of 50 or more people. The most cost effective way to do this is by conducting a telephone survey in your venue that probes people’s attitudes and experiences relevant to your case issues. We can develop and conduct such community surveys on sample sizes of 100 to 500 people for a very reasonable cost. Another method of developing a reliable jury profile that enables you to also test case themes, witnesses, and evidence is to conduct a large sample mock trial, with 50 or more jurors. We do analyze data from mock juries of less than 50 and develop jury profiles, but we take those results with a grain of salt. We match the results against our experience and against selection models from other cases of similar types in similar or the same venue. When the stakes are high and jury selection is key, however, we always recommend either conducting a survey or doing a mock trial with a large number of jurors.
