Archives – Page 22 – The Red Well

Combat “Partial-Picture Paralysis” in Your Mock Trial…And Your Real Trial Too

February 6th, 2023|

By Dr. Ken Broad Bahm: It can be a common experience during a mock trial. You have a mock juror who ends up being way too focused on what they don’t know. They understand that there are limits to how much detail you can get into within the constraints of a shorter trial simulation, but end up becoming obsessed with the witnesses they didn’t hear from, the documents they didn’t see, or the law they have not completely reviewed. So, despite you having spent a day or more conveying detailed information to them, and despite your goal of getting a

Litigation Management Success Tips

February 2nd, 2023|

I am a bit behind in my reading and I just finished a September 2020 CLM Magazine article by James McKeown entitled Rules of the Road: Five Tips for Successful Claims and Litigation Management. Mr. McKeown wrote this article aimed at claims professionals and the attorneys involved in the defense of claims. His 5 tips are: 1) Write your claims notes like you may get abducted by aliens on the way to your deposition. (His point is to be sure someone could pick up where you left off if necessary.) 2) No surprises please. 3) Manage Expectations. 4) Don’t

Why I’m a social psychologist

January 31st, 2023|

In my almost 4 decades of being a social psychologist, few people have asked me why I decided on a career in social psychology. Maybe it’s not too interesting to find out why people choose a career, maybe there’s something else to discuss, or maybe the topic never occurred to the people with whom I interact, but whatever the reason, I have only had a few occasions to explain my career choice to anyone. For this reason, I will take this opportunity to tell the world why I decided to become a social psychologist. Like many undergraduate students who

The “Poverty of Attention” at Trial

January 30th, 2023|

On a recent Armchair Expert podcast, host Dax Shepard paraphrased a quote by Herbert Simon, the gist being “…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…” Wanting to get the quote just right, I looked it up and while the simple paraphrase is fantastic, there are too many gems in the full quote to not repeat it here: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information

Practice Moral Reframing

January 30th, 2023|

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: The pandemic has been a lesson in a lot of things, including the challenges of using persuasion to build common agreement. In some ways, the past few years serve as a social science laboratory that litigators can learn from. For example, believe it or not, early on there was an issue that Republicans and Democrats nearly agreed on: 91% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans agreed on staying home as much as possible to stop the spread of the virus. That was in April of 2020, and it changed quickly. The six-point gap became a

Show, Don’t Tell

January 26th, 2023|

Melissa and I wrote employee policy manuals and other training materials before we had employees. I am thinking about those today because I added a small update to the policy manual yesterday, thinking that it had been a long time since I had added anything. But, while the policy manual is pretty well set, the training materials require much more effort to keep up to date. Why? Well, we have modified our protocols over time, added components, and removed others. For example, our procedure of using cassette recorders as a back up to our video recordings was discontinued long

Expect AI to Change the Nature of Legal Work…and Soon

January 26th, 2023|

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Chances are good you’ve heard about “ChatGPT” in the past week or two. Just speaking for myself, my newsfeed has included many articles, including some with ominous titles like, “Will ChatGPT Make Lawyers Obsolete? (Hint, Be Afraid).” If the topic is new to you, a quick definition is that ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence assistant that was made open and free for the public at the end of this past November, and it is way beyond Alexa, Siri, and the online “help” bots you’ve frustratingly interacted with in the past. ChatGPT provides an open service where you can make

Psychologists Don’t Get Cheap Deals in Vegas – Lawyers Can

January 24th, 2023|

As a follow up to my previous post about psychologists and lawyers seeing the world differently, one particular distinction between people in these 2 professions is their understanding of statistics, including probability, and the impact of this distinction on the conferences they attend. I’m sure the reader is wondering what statistics and conferences could possibly have to do with one another, so let me explain. Because psychology is a scientifically based profession, graduate school includes courses in statistics. Even clinical psychologists and similar practitioners are required to study statistics because they need to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatments

Catch Up in Voir Dire: Ten Questions to Ask when a New Face Suddenly Joins Your Panel

January 23rd, 2023|

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Here’s a scenario that I’ve dealt with quite a bit recently. Counsel for plaintiff and defense both question a panel of prospective jurors, and in the process, we end up learning a good amount about the panelists’ experiences and views on the issues that might relate to the case. The individualized information we are getting provides a solid foundation for cause challenges and for the later exercise of peremptories. Then, when one member of the panel exits due to a hardship or a cause issue, another individual is pulled from the gallery and placed into

Is expert remote testimony less credible than in-person testimony? | Online Jury Research Update

January 19th, 2023|

Attorneys use a variety of communication modalities to present expert testimony to jurors and judges, including telephonic, recorded, video-conferenced, in-person (in-court) and transcribed. Trow Jones (2023) examined the influence of in-person, telephonic and video-conferenced testimony modalities on jurors' judgments of an expert's credibility and the weight jurors assign to an expert's testimony when reaching verdicts....