As a follow up to my previous post pertaining to things I love about my job, among my favorite work tasks is writing a survey. (Another of my favorite tasks is analyzing survey results, but I have written about that in a prior post.) Not only is writing a survey intellectually stimulating, the mere fact I have a survey to write means we have important work to do for a client. Hooray for client work! The activities involved in my survey preparation are: (1) read copious amounts of legal documents, provided by the client, about the case on which we

I love my job! I truly do! My dear friend, Bob, has called me a workaholic since we met in 1980. I am a person who really likes to work! Being bored is not for me. I decided to think about the top 10 things I like about my job as a jury/trial consultant, which I have been performing since 1989. Here they are, in no particular order: 1. I like to help people. When Magnus’ clients contact us, they always have a problem they cannot solve without our help. It is rewarding to me to be trusted to

The trigger for this post was my need to prepare some paperwork for a client recently. It had been a few months since I had done this particular paperwork and, I’ll admit, I felt rusty. Rusty in the sense that it wasn’t as smooth a process as I would have preferred. When I realized it felt rusty, Neil Young’s phrase, turned album title (1979), Rust Never Sleeps came to mind – that’s just how my mind works sometimes. With acknowledgment of Mr. Young’s contribution, I wanted to talk about this phenomenon. It is difficult for a person to always

For a number of years, Melissa spoke to law students at Stetson University at the invitation of the late Professor Mickey Smiley. Professor Smiley did his students a favor, which I hope they later appreciated, of inviting successful trial lawyers, and at least 1 trial consultant, (Melissa) to speak to his trial skills class to bring some real life to academia. He was present to introduce the speaker and to facilitate questions afterwards. In an introduction of Melissa he once said, “Litigation involves risks. A Trial consultant helps calculate those risks.” I liked that. I wrote it down and

Many years ago an attorney shared with me why he liked conducting mock trials on his cases. He said that litigation without jury research is like driving in the dark without headlights. I’m not willing to say that trial lawyers are always driving in the dark, but I agree with his premise: mock jury research (or mock mediation/arbitration research) illuminates the problems in a case. Seeing, or being aware of, the problem provides an opportunity to diffuse that problem or remediate the impact of a problem in the case. Few cases are without “warts.” Sometimes it is an imperfect

I’m writing this post after having recently received a solicitation from an attorney group asking for speakers for a big annual event. The “invitation” included a price list of what they expected speakers to pay. Despite the fact the audience would be perfect for us, marketing wise, Melissa immediately rejected the idea as something prohibited by the American Psychological Association (APA). Who knows when the pay to play issue heated up in the academic world, but it was in the last 25 years or so that it seemed to grow when university professors were paying to publish academic papers

As trial consultants we try to stay current by reading lots of newspapers, journals, and magazines. Recently, I’ve noticed people writing about the composition of juries post COVID-19 (not that COVID-19 is over, “post” in this context merely indicates a world where COVID-19 came into being). Because of the politicization of COVID-19, vaccines, masks, etc., and because of the CDC guidelines, courthouse closures, the world of jury trials has been shaken. The practice of law has changed in many ways, some permanently. The willingness of ordinary citizens who are called for jury duty has been impacted as well. People

A client recently told me about a continuing legal education program he attended and the new information contained in the seminar. He kindly shared the information on the use of visual evidence and my reaction was, despite his enthusiasm for this “new” information, it isn’t new. What struck me is how often, in the more than 30 years of working with and around lawyers, this phenomenon occurs. Sometimes it is a search for a short cut to get certain results. But, often it is an indication of how far apart the fields of law and psychology remain. Meaning that,

Do you have an alibi? Do you need an alibi? We’ve all seen it on TV. If you are innocent, you have an alibi. If you don’t have an alibi, you are suspect #1. What were you doing on the evening in question? Do you remember? Probably not. In life one goes from hour to hour, day to day, doing whatever things one does. Unless there is something exceptional, one probably does not remember the activities that occurred on any particular day. The exceptions become salient and memorable; normal and routine activities are not. A creative research study illustrates

Magnus Research Consultants recently worked in Miami, where we have worked numerous times throughout the decades we have been in business. Most of the time when we are conducting mock jury research, the research participants/mock jurors are respectful toward one another, the Magnus staff, and me. Once in a while, however, one or more of them will overstep the line of decency, which is a guarantee they will be sent home, immediately. On this day in Miami, one of the mock jurors, who had volunteered to be the jury foreperson, refused to follow the instructions he was given by