Expert witnesses testify in the vast majority of trials (see, for review, Jurs, 2016). Research conducted over three decades involving jurors in actual trials with expert testimony produces highly consistent results about what makes an expert witness persuasive to jurors. In the 1990s, Champagne and colleagues (Champagne et al., 1991; Shuman et al., 1994) surveyed jurors about the characteristics necessary for an expert to be effective in court in four different cities. Jurors reported that....

The law regarding jury selection in civil cases varies widely across trials, venues, judges and court systems. Voir dire can be fast or slow, done by attorneys and/or a judge, and focus on biographic, experiential and/or attitudinal information. Three types of voir dire are common in civil cases...Campbell and colleagues (2020) examined the effect of basic, minimal and expanded voir dire on 2,041 mock jurors across three different civil cases....

The biography and character of a criminal defendant are legally irrelevant factors in the determination of guilt, particularly the definition of a crime. While jurors' attributions of blame often consider a criminal defendant's history and character, judges are expected and trained to decide guilt according to the facts and the law, and to ignore legally irrelevant factors such as sympathy.....

Punitive damages are meant to punish a defendant and deter similar conduct in the future. The U.S. Supreme Court suggests that the ratio of punitive damages to compensatory damages generally should not exceed 9:1 (State Farm Mutual Auto Insurance Company v. Campbell 538 U.S. 408, 425 (2003)). The specific amount of money that punishes a defendant and deters similar conduct, however, is subjective and left to each case's decision-maker. Conklin (2021) examined whether a lump sum request (for the total amount desired) or a per diem revenue request (asking for a specific number of days of the defendant's revenue) yielded