Legal Research

Want to find out how members of your jury really think?  Google them and read their blogs and social networking pages.  The National Law Journal reports that increasing numbers of litigators are turning to the Internet in order to get a better handle on how to craft arguments that will win over jurors.  Attorneys are also using Internet research to help them select jurors. 

In one example discussed in the article, a jury consultant was hired to work for the plaintiff in a products liability case involving a worker who was injured when he was forced to climb inside of a machine.  The consultant discovered from a potential juror's MySpace page that he was in a claustrophobe's support group.  The jury consultant urged the attorney to keep the juror on the panel, the claustrophobic juror ended up as the jury foreperson, and the plaintiff prevailed. 

Of course, some jurors may not take kindly to such tactics, and at least one litigator quoted in the article worried about the ethics of prying into jurors' online lives.  Until the profession better defines the parameters of permissible research about jury pools, it's safe to assume that litigants are going to take advantage of search engines and social networking sites to help them prevail at trial.