Trial Lawyer Resource Center

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Last Summer at the ATLA Convention I met Adam Rosen of JuryTest. Adam  has an interesting business in that he conducts on-line focus groups. I was giving a presentation on in-house focus groups a month later and had a case coming up for mediation, so Adam offered to give me a sample focus group on the same case if I shared the information from our live focus group for him to compare. We had a case with strong damages, but we were concerned about liability. The results were rather interesting. The ‘live’ and ‘online’ focus groups tracked each other much closer than I thought they would. Here are my thoughts regarding on-line focus groups:

Pros

• Fast and Easy to Set up – It took about 5–10 minutes to set up the presentation. I e-mailed Adam two or three pictures and one or two scanned pages of medical records. I then gave a 3–5 minute presentation on the phone.  That’s all it took.
• Fast Results – JuryTest can get the results within 24 hours of when you give them the information.
• Tremendous Breakdown of Results – The results are online in a spreadsheet / pie chart. You can very easily sort by age, income, gender or other demographic considerations. I had never been a big fan of demographics until I saw the breakdown on our case. We had a nearly unanimous consensus on liability except for men over 40 years old making over $50,000 a year, who were only 50/50 for us. Good stuff to know before picking a jury (especially in South Carolina with our limited voir dire).
• Inexpensive – The cost is scaleable based on the number of  jurors you have, but I think you can get 8–12 jurors for about $500. Additional jurors don’t cost that much extra. Call Adam for pricing, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but it is a very modest fee.

Cons

• No Juror Interaction – A great function of focus groups is to see how the jurors interact, how they respond to other’s arguments and what sways them. How strongly do they hold their beliefs?  All of this is absent in the online focus groups. People sign up for $10 and answer a 10–20 minute questionairre on the internet. Adam was going to work on this, trying to implement videoconferencing with webcams in the future, but it’s still not the same.
• Jurors Do Not Accurately Reflect the Jury Pool – Adam can limit the respondents somewhat for demographical features and location (call him and ask him if this is a concern), but you are not going to get focus group members drawn directly from your jury pool. Also, the on-line focus groups is a skewed subgroup, because it does not take into account people that do not get on the internet.
• There is No Video – One of the things that I like best about doing focus groups is taking snippets of the deliberation video and putting them into a mediation presentation. Even in the worst cases, there’s normally a few 5 second clips that will make the defense attorney and insurance adjuster wince.

Summary – I was surprised at how closely the on-line focus group information tracked the responses from our live focus group. However, the lack of interaction and videotape bothers me. I still think it’s a good tool when you have limited time or expenses. I also think an on-line focus group might be a good idea in the initial stages of a case to get general impressions and help formulate your discovery. I would not use an on-line focus group as a replacement for a live focus group, and would not rely on one for making critical case decisions. But I do think they are a valid, cost effective tool if you remember their limitations.