EP 615- 12 battle tested rules for Voir Dire Part Two

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer (00:01)
Welcome to The Jury is Out, a podcast for trial attorneys who want to sharpen their skills and better serve their clients. Your co-hosts are John Simon, founder of the Simon Law Firm, Tim Cronin, personal injury trial attorney at the Simon Law Firm, and St. Louis attorney, Erich Vieth.

Erich Vieth (00:19)
Welcome to another episode of The Jury is Out. I’m Erich Vieth.

Tim Cronin (00:24)
I’m Tim Cronin.

John Simon (00:25)
I’m John Simon.

Erich Vieth (00:26)
We’re going to continue on with 12 essential rules for a var dire. This is part two.

John Simon (00:31)
Rule number seven, focus on the worst part of your case. I think the most important thing to do in voir dire is find people who are going to be bad for you and get them off. I think the most direct and best way to do that is take the one, two, three, four, you know, God help you if it’s more than that, worst things about your case and use those to identify the people that you want to get off and get them off.

And let me give you examples. And it’s real easy. You don’t have to use your imagination. Get a piece of paper out and write down what are the three worst things in my case. My client was drinking as blood alcohol. My client drove into the back of a truck that you could see in broad daylight. That we’re suing for product liability. And the company that made the product complied with all the federal safety standards.

Tim Cronin (01:23)
I

everything else we’ve covered up to this point are guidelines, tools to be able to be effective when you get to this. This is what matters.

John Simon (01:33)
Yes.

so, you know, and I will give you, you know, just a couple examples. We do a lot of product lie, automotive product liability cases and every one of those cases for the most part, mean, almost every one of them, what, is it issue? You know, the, the, the, whether it’s rollover, whether it’s a seatbelt issue, whether it’s a post collision fire, fuel integrity issue, every car on the road, if it, if it doesn’t meet all the federal motor vehicle, you know, safety standards, it’s not going to be on the road.

And so what you’re going to hear in that case is you’re going to hear over and over again, you know, a hundred times, we met all the federal standards, we met all the federal standards, we met all the federal standards. And so what I do is I flip that and turn it around. You know, that’s the defendant’s best argument in my case. We met all the federal safety standards. Well, when I’m board-diring, I will say, you know, the vehicle in this case, we have a case and we’re going to ask you to consider not whether or not the design of this vehicle

was defective and unreasonably dangerous and there’s no dispute in this case, no dispute at all that this vehicle met every single federal motor vehicle safety standard, period. Who here, you know, thinks that the fact that it met all the federal motor vehicle safety standards would cause them some difficulty and even considering whether it is defective and unreasonably dangerous?

Tim Cronin (02:51)
or thinks, you know, if it met all the federal regulations, what are we doing sitting

John Simon (02:56)
Who

are we doing sitting here? Who would have difficulty? Would it cause… and you know, you’ve got to be careful how you argue that one because it is evidence of whether or not it’s defective, right? That they can consider the fact that it passed the standard, but it’s not dispositive of that.

Erich Vieth (03:11)
I’m looking at the title, you know, from 10,000 feet up, focus on the worst part of your case. And my gut instinct, every time I think of this idea, it’s to invite chaos. And it’s dangerous to your case. But then you think it’s much better than not knowing what they think about these.

Tim Cronin (03:29)
They’re

gonna hear the

John Simon (03:30)
They want to hear it from you. You want them to hear it from you. If you’re sitting there talking, pumping up your case during Vordire, you’re cruising for getting killed. You got bad stuff in your case. You got to get it out. You got to bring it out and ask people whether that’s going to bias them. The alcohol example is perfect. Johnny tried a case last week. This week? This week. His client had a very, very high alcohol level.

Tim Cronin (04:03)
He got enough. He, he hit somebody didn’t hurt them, but he obviously, if he had, would have been his fault. They got out of the way. He didn’t get out of the way. And then somebody came barreling through a construction zone who was also high and two crashed into him. like anybody here who just isn’t given money.

John Simon (04:21)
And think he had 60 or 70 jurors, potential jurors, and maybe 35 or 40 said, we’re done. We don’t care what the evidence is. And our case was really, he was drinking, but he was stopped on the roadway. He hit somebody in front of him.

Tim Cronin (04:39)
He, what he did was wrong. He paid the price with his life. Anybody willing to consider what the other driver did? And the people were like, no.

John Simon (04:44)
Right.

And part of this too was the other attorney, from what I heard, didn’t bring up at all in Vor Dire the fact that his client was under the influence of some drugs. And so when the jury’s hearing the opening, and I think you want to go into the case, the really good Vor Dire’s that we do, that I’ve done, we go into the trial and the opening and the jury, I hope, thinks

These guys don’t have a prayer. The plaintiffs don’t have a prayer. I’ll them a chance.

Tim Cronin (05:15)
And then two minutes into opening, they’re like, wait.

John Simon (05:17)
What the? Right. Lower the bar. Lower the bar for yourself. You know, don’t want to come out of order at any time in the case. You don’t want to raise the bar. You want to make the jury think, okay, well, it’s, you know, we barely have a case, but we’re still willing to listen. And then when they go in and they hear, you know, wow, this is a pretty strong case.

Tim Cronin (05:34)
I didn’t hear about that stuff from that

John Simon (05:36)
Right, right. So it sounds kind of, what’s the word? Counterintuitive. But you don’t want to spend the Vordire pumping up your case. You want to do the exact opposite.

Tim Cronin (05:46)
I the suicide thing I just mentioned. You better address that.

John Simon (05:50)
And we had a case where we represented the passenger in a vehicle that the driver was drinking, drove into a tree, the car burst into flames, and our passenger burned to death in the vehicle. It was a 15-year-old young man. That was the case. was not a real high-speed impact into the tree. Our theory was this should never have been.

you know, ignited and exploded, kind of like if you can survive the impact, you shouldn’t burn to death in the vehicle. And so that was our theme in theory. I didn’t put out any of that stuff in Vor Dire. My first question in Vor Dire, first substantive question was, who here thinks it’s okay to buy a car, crash it into a tree and then sue the company that, you know, and they were drinking actually. The driver was drinking and it was even worse. was who thinks it’s okay to buy a car.

get drunk, get behind a wheel, crash it, and then sue the manufacturer for a defect in the vehicle. No hands. And right. And so we emptied the room. But, you know, we didn’t say, well, now, but we represent the passenger and they weren’t driving and there’s, know, so you really want to, you want to use those things. And why do we, why are we, why are we saying that? It’s because it doesn’t matter what the evidence is.

Erich Vieth (07:07)
You there’s a word for that. You’ve heard the word straw man, like a straw man argument. Yes. you weaken the argument before you destroy it. And this is called steel manning. You’re actually it’s the converse, but you’re making it so bad because you’re if you survive this, you’re in great shape. Right. It’s a test to your pressure testing your case.

John Simon (07:27)
Another example, we represented the family of a young woman who was hit and killed walking out of an urgent care facility. She was a nurse and the individual, the young man who hit and killed her ran into the building. He was high on nitrous oxide and we had a case against the manufacturer of the nitrous oxide who sold it to head shops, who sold it to this kid who inhaled and passed out and ran into the building. And while you talk about a tough case, that’s a tough case.

And so I just jumped on that whole issue about what I just said. You know, this young man bought stuff that he’s not supposed to inhale nitrous oxide cartridges. He inhaled them. There’s a warning on the box saying don’t inhale it. He did it anyway, passed out, drove across three roads into the building and killed our client’s daughter. We’re suing him, but we’re also suing the company that sold it to him and the company that made it. Who here has some trouble with that?

And everybody had trouble with it, but you know, to one degree or another, but had we not done that, we got a nice verdict in that case, had we not done that, I think I did Vordire maybe for a good part of a day and probably 80, 90 % of it was on that issue. I went through with everybody on the panel.

Tim Cronin (08:45)
In almost every case, have one or two of these issues. So we can tell war story after war story, right? But you like you better, you better get the worst part of your case out there.

Erich Vieth (08:54)
What do you feel like, you you’re the attorney, you just put the worst part of your case in and you’re seeing the room deflate.

John Simon (09:02)
That’s wonderful. That’s great. You know what? I love it because I want them to deflate in front of me when I can still question them and get them off versus deflating in the back in the jury room or when there’s any evidence in trial.

Erich Vieth (09:14)
Number eight, embrace bad answers.

John Simon (09:17)
Eric, just asked about that. You know, how do you feel when somebody says, you know, if somebody says, would never, that’s crazy. You know, they were drinking and drawing the key. That’s the end of it. Thank you so much for telling me that. Thank you. Elaborate on that, please. Tell us why. How long have you felt like that? And then, then pivot to other folks and say, let’s go a row at a time. And you know, who else feels like that? Tell me about that. You know, tell me why you feel like that. And, and what you’re doing is you’re, you’re, you’re eliminating people who

won’t give you a verdict no matter what the evidence is.

Tim Cronin (09:50)
Don’t

get mad at them. Don’t try to shut them down. Don’t try to change their mind and push back. Then you have just violated what we talked about earlier, where there’s no such thing as bad answers and I’m not trying to change your mind and we just want your honest opinions. Then if you push back on bad answers, you’ve just shown yourself to be a liar who can’t be trusted, who’s not being transparent, who’s just trying to win your case. So you want the bad answer.

John Simon (10:16)
Actually the case that I was just telling you about one of the jurors in that case He was an older guy and he’s got his arms crossed looking at me, you know bad body language and you know I expected it, you know, lot of people were gonna feel that way and and he said I think this is just a money grab. Yeah, you know just a money grab and I said little louder, please Yeah, I want everybody to hear that for the room. Could you stand up, please? And what’s your name? Okay. Yeah, you think this is a money grab, right? It’s a money grab greedy lawyers and

We’re trashing the heck out of it. Now, 20, 30 years ago when I was practicing, was, you never wanted to poison the panel. was quote, poison the panel. Got news for you. Half the panels already poisoned against your case. If you’re doing personal injury stuff, you got to find out who they are and get them off. That’s whole thing. whole goal. And there were 10 or 15 people in the room who said, yep, I agree with Mr. Smith. And boom, off, off.

Tim Cronin (10:59)
the whole

Who else feels that way? And then you go boom, boom.

John Simon (11:09)
and get them off.

Erich Vieth (11:10)
Have either of you ever run out of jurors? What happens then?

John Simon (11:12)
yeah. Yes.

Well, you call up another group of jurors ⁓

Tim Cronin (11:19)
day. Might throw your schedule off but you’d rather do that.

John Simon (11:22)
So here’s another thing too, and you’ve got to be aware of this, is if you have an issue like alcohol in the case or drug use in the case or you know, some issue that you think is going to be overwhelming that’s coming in, you need to bring that to the court’s attention and say, you know, I know you usually get 60 jurors or 45 or whatever it is, we may need a few more because of this particular issue in the case. And I think that, you know, I’ve never had a situation where the judge hasn’t accommodated us and got more jurors.

Tim Cronin (11:52)
Number nine, lock them in. So once you get somebody to do what you asked them to do and they open up and they give feelings or opinions on a matter that indicates, you know, they may not be starting out even for your client or the other side. You don’t just stop, you make sure you develop ammo for your cause challenge to say, they said this, they said this, they said this. And we have lots of different ways that we do that. Right.

Erich Vieth (12:21)
Can we do one like with a nurse example, say a nurse juror, a prospective juror says, I’m not comfortable with this case against the doctor. How do you lock that in?

Tim Cronin (12:31)
I’d say that’s perfectly understandable. Is that based on your life experience of working in the medical profession? Yeah. So you’re not a big fan of medical malpractice cases. Fair to say. Yeah. Felt that way for a long time. Yeah. Nobody’s going to change your mind. No, somebody getting up and saying the judge is going to give you instructions and you can be a fair person. That isn’t going to change that. Is it? You’re a fair person, but on this type of case,

you’re probably not right for.

John Simon (13:01)
I’ll even go further sometimes and say, now, or, you know, you’ve told us how strongly you feel about that and nobody’s going to change your mind no matter who asks you or how they ask the question. And I will say, I can guarantee you that my friend over on the other table here is going to get up and he’s going to ask you the same question I’ve been asking you six more times. And I’m assuming your answer each of those six times is going to be the same thing that you’re telling me. And, and yeah. And then they, of course, they won’t ask it.

Tim Cronin (13:04)
We’re not starting outy.

The judge, the other lawyer.

John Simon (13:30)
at all, they’ve already said that. But you really want to lock them in. you know, I like starting with the worst part of your case. It’s a really good way of dealing with the issue, finding out who, you know, because of that issue isn’t going to be able to, you know, actually follow the law and listen to the evidence in the case and get those off. The next thing, the next rule is introducing your theme or frame, introducing the frame of your case.

What I like to do is I don’t like in board dire, know, shoving anything down anybody’s throat. I like doing it like touching on. Sometimes I won’t even touch on.

Tim Cronin (14:10)
think we used to do this more than we do now. We kind of do this a little more lightly than we

John Simon (14:14)
Yes,

right. And it’s, know, not not jumping in and saying, well, you know, they didn’t test here and anybody have a problem with, you know, with testing and how do you test? What you want to do is you want to sort of foreshadow what the case is about. And that’s what Tim was saying earlier. Like, for instance, I had a case where somebody went multiple times to an emergency room, actually never saw doctor, saw a nurse or nurse practitioner, ended up going to a different hospital and some was some really bad consequences as a result of the misdiagnosis and the delay.

What I’ll do is I’ll pick somebody and say, you know, somebody, anybody here has ever gone to the emergency room, okay, when you have emergencies. And then ask somebody, who did you see? You know, did you see a doctor? Or, you know, who here thinks…

Tim Cronin (15:00)
Even better, somebody says no and starts getting real mad.

John Simon (15:03)
Right. So I don’t know what was. In one case I had, it was about a doctor not seeing the patient, not talking to the patient, like the doctor saw him for 20 seconds or something and missed the diagnosis. And so I started a conversation in the panel about who here thinks that doctors don’t spend enough time with them, their own doctor. And you’ve been going to the same doctor for 30 years. You like them and all of this. Do they spend enough time with you?

And like most of the hands went up that they don’t spend enough time. And one woman in particular, said, you know, what about you? And she said, you mean you actually get to see a doctor instead of the amount of time.

Tim Cronin (15:42)
Here’s another example, and it can kind of springboard off you something you said earlier, like a bad issue like met all the federal regulations, right? Well, those federal regulations are created by the industry that lobbies for them and lobbies for what to have and not have. And sometimes they won’t address particular types of safety testing for a reason. And so you can both identify that bad issue and get people off and then try to reframe it by going, is there anybody here who thinks

You know, if there’s regulations in place about what kind of testing companies have to do, but there’s other safety issues they know exist, they don’t have to do the testing. Anybody here who thinks there should never be a claim for them not doing the testing or anybody here who thinks, you know what, I think companies should maybe test their vehicles for all potential safety issues.

John Simon (16:34)
Right, and one good way to do that, I’ve done this before, is when one of the theories in the case was failure to test and no test was required for the particular component or issue that we had. so what I said was some people think that it’s okay. Some people believe that car companies should test their vehicles before they put them out on the road. Other people think it’s okay for them not to test and just start selling them and see what happens.

Yeah, know, and of course, it’s a silly question. And then, you know, then it begins to, you know, the swell, the wave starts building against what did they do? No, did they test the

Tim Cronin (17:11)
best example I’ve ever heard of, of this, with the biggest problem you guys had in this case, that you and Johnny tried, is your Tide Pods exam. I thought it was absolutely brilliant, John, and the way you timed it and flipped the whole room with a very difficult issue. You talk about that.

John Simon (17:31)
Yeah,

so that was the case I was talking about earlier where the you know, the nitrous oxide company was selling their nitrous oxide cartridges, which which are not supposed to be inhaled. They’re only for, you know, food preparation. And they put warnings saying don’t you don’t inhale these. They’re not to be inhaled. And then they sell them to smoke shops and all their customers or smoke shops. Kids buy them and hail them get high and bad things happen. And so, you know, that was the one where I first went through literally the entire room.

and identified about half of the people in the room who said under no circumstances can I even listen to this case if this kid took a box of nitrous oxide cartridges that said do not inhale, inhaled them, got high, passed out and drove into a building. It’s just not going to happen. We’re not going to award any money against the manufacturer. That was the same case where the guy said it’s a money grab. And I was a dozen people saying Mr. Simon, it’s a money grab. And I didn’t fight them. I acknowledged, thanked them. Wonderful. It’s a money grab. You’re off the case.

I found one woman who I thought was very open-minded and I said, and she was like, yeah, I can still listen to the evidence. You know, it’s going to be a little tougher for me, but I can, I can listen to the evidence and have an open mind. What I did is I introduced a claim. are Tide Pods and I don’t know if any of you know what Tide Pods hypothetical case. I introduced a hypothetical case with Tide Pods and I had a bag of Tide Pods there for washing your washing your clothes. throw it in the washing machine.

Tim Cronin (18:47)
for cooking.

John Simon (18:56)
And apparently these Tide Pods are very colorful and they look a little bit like candy and some kids were, you know, little kids were, were, you know, eating them. There’ve been a couple cases, but more so teenagers were actually, they called it the Tide Pod Challenge. I didn’t know where there was such a thing, but I found that out before we tried the case. And so the Tide Pod Challenge is kids going online, videotaping them, eating the Tide Pods, which are horrible for you, can get you sick or kill you. You know, putting it on the, putting it on

YouTube or putting it online. And I mentioned that and a few people in the room knew what Tide Pods were. Some had heard of the Tide Pod challenge. And I said, OK, what if who here believes that if some teenager bought the Tide Pods, ate them, videotaped themselves and died that somebody that proctor and gamble the manufacturer should be responsible? Everybody in the room said, no way. Angry, angry, like ready to throw stuff at me. you kidding me?

No way, no how. And I said, you know what? I agree with you. A hundred percent. I don’t think that they are responsible at all. And then I picked a woman who I thought was fairly open-minded and I said, let me change one fact. What if Procter and Gamble sold those Tide pods in candy stores? And she went, what? Where were they selling these At that point we hadn’t told him, you know, we hadn’t told him where he purchased the car. Which head shop.

Tim Cronin (20:14)
And then everybody starts going.

a hedgehog.

John Simon (20:24)
And so I saved that till later in the case because I wanted to get the, I wanted to get the jurors off first with the bad conduct. so people were asking me and I said, I’m not going to answer that. You’re going to hear that. Maybe that you hear that from defense counsel and the whole case, the whole room flipped, the whole case flipped, and we got a tremendous verdict in the case. And it was because we kind of spooned it out a little bit of the time.

Tim Cronin (20:35)
You hear that from-

Then reused it to get people off, then reframed it in a way that made people realize, okay, I’m on board.

John Simon (20:56)
Right.

so, and then when the other lawyer got up, of course, people weren’t listening to his questions. They were asking him, where did they sell that? He didn’t answer it in poor dire. And one guy, the woman actually that I asked, I believe she said, that would be criminal. You know, that would be criminal. And we said, went, well, you know, okay. All right. Thank you for your answer. We’re not trying to argue with you. We’re not trying to change your opinion. but again, you know,

You got to figure out what your case is about, what your theme or frame is, and it depends. Sometimes you want to be a little more subtle with it. Sometimes you want to be a little bit more direct with it, like we did in the case with the Whippets case.

Erich Vieth (21:41)
deal with damages.

Tim Cronin (21:43)
We try mostly personal injury cases, right? And almost in every case we try, it’s pretty important whether somebody is going to be willing to consider damages in the range that we’re hoping to gather for our client, which is always as much money as we can get. And so that’s kind of a tricky thing to address, but you better talk about it because if somebody is just not willing to go to types of damages that you’re asking for or to the range that you think is fair for your client, you got to find that out.

And so there’s different approaches we have. John, what’s one of your favorite ways?

John Simon (22:15)
What I do a lot of times is, and you need to have a case or your law with you because you’ll get an objection to this, in Missouri you can ask, not for a specific, you can’t get a juror to commit to a specific amount of you You can’t do that, but you can certainly test a range of damages. And what I like to do is go from zero to whatever. For instance, if you’re gonna ask for $50 million or $100 million in punitive damages in a case and

Tim Cronin (22:28)
$10 million in this case.

John Simon (22:45)
You know, the way I would do it is say in cases like this, I’ll talk about punitive damages and I’ll say in cases like this, you know, on the evidence, jurors can award, you know, award, you know, damages, punitive damages in the amounts in anywhere from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars, from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars. And then I’ll say, does anybody here feel that no matter what the law says, no matter what the evidence is,

Tim Cronin (22:52)
depending on the

John Simon (23:15)
Yeah, well no matter what the law says or the evidence is, that they would not be able to consider an award between zero and say $500 million. And so what it does is it gets people talking about the numbers.

Tim Cronin (23:30)
And then I often will interject, especially on compensatory, the burden of proof with it. Like you’re really, if you are asking me in a case for $10 million or $20 million, man, you really gotta be, I gotta be absolutely convinced, regardless of what the evidence and the instructions are, you think like, you really can’t consider an award of 10, 20, $50 million on it, if it’s just more likely not, more likely true than not true.

John Simon (23:55)
or you’ll say you’ll have somebody say well you know it depends on well everybody will say it depends on the facts well they should then they should yeah and I’m saying that’s true but would you would you be able to at least consider it not knowing what those facts

Tim Cronin (24:09)
Is there any range where you just can’t consider it no matter what, regardless of the facts?

John Simon (24:13)
And the

other, I think another way to do this is, you know, pick a type of damage if you don’t have punitives, for instance, emotional distress. And a lot of people are, you know, don’t like that. They’re like, wait a pay the medical bills and, you know, give them their lost wages and everybody have a good day and move on. And so you want to combine that also probably with, you know, who here has a problem generally with damages for emotional distress.

Tim Cronin (24:39)
in the tens of millions of dollars.

John Simon (24:42)
sports

or pain and suffering. And so what you don’t want to happen is what happened to me in my first or second or third year of practice when I had a case and it was a pretty good case, good liability. was an auto case and I was trying it in the city of St. Louis and it was going great. The jurors were, you know, as a young lawyer, I was getting along with the jury. They were nodding. Everything was wonderful. And then in close, I asked for, I think, $150,000 and like several of the jurors, like, you know,

made it like went what? You know, like that because you know, the number I asked for was way more than they had anticipated. You know, they’re listening to the case thinking, okay, he’s going to ask for $20,000 or $15,000 and had no problem with that. And I didn’t cover that. I didn’t cover that in my board dire. You don’t need to tell them exactly what the amount is, but you need to prepare them for what your demand might be at the end of the case.

Tim Cronin (25:35)
And then the last of our 12 essential rules is inoculate good jurors. So there’s some issues we know defense counsel is going to get up and they got a job to do, obviously. And before they get up, there’s a few key issues that are very effective at getting off potentially plaintiff friendly jurors. And so I think you have to try to address those and get out ahead of them before the other side talks about it first. The first one is sympathy, right?

And it’s usually the last thing we do, right? Is stand up and go, now, sympathy is feeling sorry for somebody, right? Empathy is the ability to try to understand what somebody is going through. You can’t base your decision on sympathy. You can have empathy. In fact, it’s required to consider damages. I want to be very clear. We are not.

Asking anybody to base their decision in this case on sympathy. The time for sympathy is over. That’s not what we’re here for. We don’t want you to base it on sympathy. Can everybody hear promise? Raise your hand. You will not decide this case based on sympathy and then go down and have everybody confirm it. It usually works. I’ve seen very, very good defense counsel get up and go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about the seven year old little boy who’s severely injured and that’s.

and they’ll still get it, do your best to try to.

John Simon (27:03)
You know what I do and I’ve had situations where I’ve done exactly what you said and still a good defense lawyer will get up and say, now let’s be real here. You know, just like you said, you got a young child who’s horribly injured and everybody feels sympathy and it’s going to affect you and they’ll work on getting some people off. And so what I’ve done is I’ve gone one step further and I will do exactly what you said, Tim, you know, talk about, we don’t want any sympathy. You got to promise me that you won’t decide the case on sympathy. And I literally go,

I divide the room up, then I’ll go to the jury box and then the next section, the next section, and I will literally have them raise their hand or stand up to get a commitment that they promise not to do it. And I start that out or end that with, can everybody promise me, I’ll end with this, can everybody here promise me that if we don’t prove our case, if we don’t prove our case, you’ll dump us? Can you promise me that? If we don’t prove our case, you will decide against us. And people, you know,

when you first hear that, it’s like, what the hell is this guy saying? He’s representing the plaintiff. I think it, of course, we have a submissive case. I know what the facts are in the case. But it really helps with the defense lawyer getting back up and undoing what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to inoculate them against them getting them off for sympathy.

Tim Cronin (28:26)
And so other issues you can do this if you have a really dislikeable company, like some particular companies that a lot of people may hate, that make chemicals that have infected our entire food supply, or just a big corporation in general, things like this. So when you’re doing it, you’re trying to get a commitment, you’ll decide the case on the evidence from the stand, you’ll treat them the same fairness, you’ll treat our client, get a sincere commitment. And yeah, get them to actually physically say it or raise their hand and commit that they’re

John Simon (28:55)
I was doing Vordire in a chemical exposure case. It was a chemical exposure cancer case and it was a big, huge chemical company that did not have a particularly good reputation. And we were talking about exactly that. were talking about, you know, people in the room verbally didn’t like the company. And they were very, you know, outspoken about that throughout the course of the Vordire. And what I did at the end is I said, look,

You all filled out questionnaires. We had an in-depth, detailed questionnaire and part of that questionnaire was what they thought about trial lawyers, what they thought about personal injury lawsuits, what they thought about personal injury lawyers, and also what they thought about the defendant company. And so I said, a bunch of you, and they did, I said a bunch of you said you didn’t like lawyers. You hated personal injury lawyers. You thought all these suits were terrible and bad and you’re still here. And that you’re here because

You promised to only decide this case, not on whether you like me or you like personal injury suits, but the evidence that comes in from the stand. Well, same holds true for this company. Now, I know you might not like them. Some of you might hate them, but everybody can promise me that you’ll do the same thing and only decide this case based on what you hear in the evidence, not how you felt about them when you walked in the room or how you feel about them now. it was, you know, I spent a little bit more time on that and drew it out.

but they didn’t really rehabilitate a lot of people and it was fairly effective. Those are the 12 essential rules for voir dire. And just to kind of summarize, one, get them talking. Two, be a great listener. Three, establish your credibility. Four, make them trust you. Five, lower the bar for admitting bias. Six, don’t ask if somebody can be fair. Seven, focus on the worst part of your case.

8. Embrace bad answers 9. Lock them in 10. Introduce your theme or frame of the case 11. Make sure you deal with damages and 12. Inoculate your good jurors

Tim Cronin (31:06)
This has been another episode of The Jury is Out. I’m Tim Cronin.

Erich Vieth (31:10)
I’m Erich Vieth

John Simon (31:10)
I’m John Simon, we’ll see you next time.

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