We help you understand the outliers, the wild cards and the advocates

We Help Identify Risky Jurors

Assessing whether a potential juror is biased against your case is no easy feat. While there are a number of questions that can elicit clear bias for, or against your case, it is important to remember that sometimes risky jurors can be difficult to detect. JuryMapping is adept at identifying these jurors
who could end up energizing a vote against your client.

A Typical Scenario

Observing 50 people in a room who are about to decide your outcome can be a bit overwhelming. A quick glance, and your own intuition reveals only so much. A good guess would be that 10 are initially against your case, 10 look very favorable, and the remaining are questionable. At the end of the day, each side winds up with a handful of people whom you’ve had the chance to meet and whom have answered some questions.

Translate juror responses into juror rankings

Through proven statistical techniques, JuryMapping can identify and quantify biases ahead of time that may not be apparent during voir dire.

To help you gain an understanding of your potential jury pool and frame the landscape, prior to your case, we conduct surveys of hundreds of potential jurors in selected districts, gathering critical data. We then analyze the data to identify the most effective voir dire questions, as well as providing a simple Juror Ranking Tool that quickly assesses risky jurors.

We build a sophisticated algorithm from hundreds of surveys about your case and put it at your fingertips during trial.

Simply enter a juror’s response into your phone, tablet or laptop, and we will instantly generate a “risk score” on that juror (i.e., the statistical likelihood that someone giving those responses will find biased against your client).

How analytics can support your current process

There are many parts of voir dire that will always require a lawyer’s skill and intuition. How you position a question, and how you present yourself and your client to the jury can have an enormous impact on shaping jurors’ views. Similarly, a juror’s behavior as they listen to and answer questions can provide important insight into how they feel about your case, and how they will interact with other jurors.

However, there are parts of voir dire that are better managed with a statistical approach. Our analytical tool allows us to determine complex relationships between different pieces of information. By making it simple to record a juror’s responses and understand how those answers translate to bias in seconds, our platform gives you information about your jurors and provides an objective second opinion about who might be a risk.

The value of combining responses

You may arrive prepared with fantastic voir dire questions, however combining a jurors’ responses and ranking each juror against his or her peers can still be challenging. Most either rely on a “deal-breaker” question, where a certain answer is grounds for a strike, or on a tally system, where the attorney counts the number of “good” and “bad” answers a juror gives.

However, relying exclusively on “deal-breaker” questions misses out on a huge opportunity to incorporate information that can significantly change the likelihood that a juror will be receptive to your case. While a tally approach allows for more nuance, it ignores the fact that some questions are more informative than others.

An Illustration / Example / Sample Case

An approach that combines responses can turn modest predictors of juror behavior into strong recommendations about which jurors are the most detrimental to your case.

Finding the right voir dire questions

Whatever approach you use to evaluate jurors relies upon questions that act as meaningful predictors of an unfavorable juror. When we survey hundreds of potential jurors in your jurisdiction about your case, we have the opportunity to test a wide range of voir dire questions. We hone in on the best questions that are varied enough to catch as many biased jurors as possible. The results are often surprising. Some popular voir dire questions are not predictive of biased jurors in a particular case, and sometimes seemingly small changes in wording have a huge impact on the value of the question.