June 2020 Bar Bulletin
The single most important lesson about strategy development for trial attorneys is that there is a distinction between persuading jurors and achieving the desired verdict. This may sound like an absurd distinction, but it is an incredibly important one. It is quite rare that jurors have unanimous leanings at the start of deliberations, even when they ultimately reach a unanimous verdict. Instead, a few favor the plaintiff, a few favor the defense, and the rest are somewhere in between. It is not always evenly divided. In fact, the most common scenario that we see is the one where there is a majority leaning that comes a couple votes...