Random sampling is a key component of the scientific process. Failure to use a random method of juror sampling can invalidate the whole jury research process.
It should now be clear that all litigation support firms are not the same. The same is true at the individual product/service level. For instance, all jury research is not equal.
Almost all jury research firms fail at the first, and we believe, most important, methodological component of research: Sampling. The mock jury sample utilized must be random to be meaningful.
The sample is the single most important factor affecting the validity of jury research. Until the courts start recruiting jurors from classified ads or market research firms, we will continue to randomly sample ours.
That means that a mock trial conducted in front of jurors who were recruited by responding to a classified ad, were hustled from a temp agency, or, worse still, are professional jurors, is a waste of time and money. It is a waste because the results cannot be trusted, and a trial strategy based on such results might sound very convincing but could in fact be counter productive. Mock trials conducted in this fashion do provide seemingly interesting and important insights into the case from what appears to be a random cross-section of the venue. But that is precisely why the methodology problem is so insidious. Because the insights come from a distinct and homogenous subset of the population, not a random sample, they can be misleading. This is not to say that, if a non-randomized jury thinks a particular issue is important, a randomly sampled jury would disagree. But how important the issue becomes might change--it might become a positive and helpful issue for the trial team to develop, but it might take a back-seat to another, undiscovered issue and therefore ultimately lose out.
This is not just scientific mumbo jumbo. This is common sense. Who you use as your “voice of the community” has to actually be a picture of the community, not just a picture of a specific group within that community. A glimpse into the minds of jurors, who happened to be reading the same newspaper, the classifieds in particular, on a certain day, who happened to see an ad looking for mock jurors, decided to respond and were selected, is not a picture of the community. You do not hear from those who don’t read a paper, read a different paper, or don’t read the classifieds, or read the classifieds and didn’t see the ad or weren’t interested, or who were interested but weren’t selected.
That is a huge segment of the population to deselect, a segment that might relate to the case in a totally different manner than your test group.
It is worth repeating that using jurors found through the classifieds, temp agencies, or market research firms is unreliable.
If all you want is to understand how one specific subset of the population views your case, then non-random sampling is fine.
If you think testing your case is a useful and important part of high-stakes litigation, then the sample matters--we believe more than any other variable, even the experience of the research team. Nikon’s slogan states, “If the picture matters, the camera matters”. This is true for litigation as well—if the case matters, your team matters and the tools matter. We believe that methodology matters most, and that our methodology is unmatched in its rigor.