As some of our readers may already know, King County Superior Courts in Seattle, Washington have resumed civil jury trials with a novel strategy for minimizing potential COVID exposure: jury selection over Zoom, followed by an in-person trial with a variety of social distancing and other protective measures in place. The King County judges and court staff deserve a great deal of credit for what they have accomplished. I was an early skeptic due to all of the potential complications, but the process they have put in place works incredibly well, with only a few minor bumps in the road.

The concept of anchors for damage awards at trial is nothing new. The research on the importance of anchors goes back decades. Numerous studies have shown that the amount of money awarded by juries is significantly impacted by the amount requested by the plaintiff. For example, in controlled studies where the facts remained exactly the same in both conditions except for the amount requested by the plaintiff, jurors on average awarded significantly more when the plaintiff asked for more. Consequently, many plaintiff’s attorneys have understandably been quick to embrace the strategy of asking for extraordinary amounts. After all, when a

In all of my days working predominantly for the defense in civil cases, my clients have openly longed for “intelligent” jurors who they believed would take the time to really understand the case and see that the plaintiff’s emotional appeals are hollow and that there is much more to the case than what the plaintiff’s attorney would lead them to believe. In short, the belief has always been that smart jurors will see through the nonsense. In Seattle, where I live, this has translated to the age-old tradition of plaintiffs’ attorneys automatically striking Boeing engineers who used to show up

One of the first memorable studies that I read about jury psychology in graduate school was the 1997 study by Neil Feigenson and colleagues on the relationship between injury severity and blameworthiness. This was early in my graduate studies when I was focused on the effects of injury severity, particularly on attributions of fault. My operating theory at the time, which was also a commonly held belief in the field, was that jurors were more likely to blame the defendant as the severity of the injury to the plaintiff increased, regardless of the strength of the liability evidence against that