Be sure to check out the new post at Trial Behavior on how best teaching practices can help lawyers to better persuade juries: http://www.trialbehavior.com/2016/09/13/teach-your-jurors-well/
And follow them @trialbehavior on Twitter.
Wednesday, September 14, 2016
Friday, September 9, 2016
The Blog is Back! (Sort of....)
After an almost two-year hiatus, this blog will be back in the coming week! Well, sort of.
As many of you know, I left teaching and academia about a year and a half ago to pursue a job that, at its best, is law and society in action. As trial consultants at Trial Behavior, we use social science to predict what arguments will be most effective for a lawyer's case, what story will best marshal those arguments, and what types of jurors will be most (and - more importantly - least) receptive to that story.
Focus groups early in litigation help to clarify what issues jurors will find important and help us point attorneys to aspects of a case that may have been overlooked, or to aspects that are getting more attention than merited by what jurors consider critical. We use mock trials to test as many aspects of lawyers' arguments as we can and to gather data about how potential jurors react to those arguments. Often, we then use that data to build a statistical model that helps attorneys harness social science and enables us pick the best jury we can for their cases.
So what of the blog? Well, here at Trial Behavior, we're going to start more regularly posting on our own blog about what our jobs entail, how we do them, and about some of our findings. For fans of the "old" LawAllOver, I hope this will be a different look into the same ideas. What differences emerge in how different people view the same case in disparate ways? And how can we use social science to discover, measure, and test those differences? For those who are more interested in the practical applications in law, we will also look at how social science can improve many different aspects of lawyering.
I hope that you will all find it interesting and engaging! I encourage you to check out our website at www.trialbehavior.com, and to follow us on Twitter @trialbehavior. I'll post links here to our new material, starting this Monday with a post on how lawyers can use best teaching practices in court.
Thanks for reading, and welcome back!
As many of you know, I left teaching and academia about a year and a half ago to pursue a job that, at its best, is law and society in action. As trial consultants at Trial Behavior, we use social science to predict what arguments will be most effective for a lawyer's case, what story will best marshal those arguments, and what types of jurors will be most (and - more importantly - least) receptive to that story.
Focus groups early in litigation help to clarify what issues jurors will find important and help us point attorneys to aspects of a case that may have been overlooked, or to aspects that are getting more attention than merited by what jurors consider critical. We use mock trials to test as many aspects of lawyers' arguments as we can and to gather data about how potential jurors react to those arguments. Often, we then use that data to build a statistical model that helps attorneys harness social science and enables us pick the best jury we can for their cases.
So what of the blog? Well, here at Trial Behavior, we're going to start more regularly posting on our own blog about what our jobs entail, how we do them, and about some of our findings. For fans of the "old" LawAllOver, I hope this will be a different look into the same ideas. What differences emerge in how different people view the same case in disparate ways? And how can we use social science to discover, measure, and test those differences? For those who are more interested in the practical applications in law, we will also look at how social science can improve many different aspects of lawyering.
I hope that you will all find it interesting and engaging! I encourage you to check out our website at www.trialbehavior.com, and to follow us on Twitter @trialbehavior. I'll post links here to our new material, starting this Monday with a post on how lawyers can use best teaching practices in court.
Thanks for reading, and welcome back!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)