The Jury Vetting Process

Our Jury Vetting process is designed to be virtually invisible to the trial court. Our jury vetting team works outside the courtroom in their own private offices. Before voir dire begins, we establish a communications link with a member of the trial team, usually a paralegal. We call that person our Courtroom Connection.

Then we share our Trial Spreadsheet via Google Sheets and our Visual Jury Report via Google Docs. Both of these tools allow us to send and receive critical information in real time during live voir dire.

Next we wait. Usually, there are motions in limine and other court business to be completed before the jury comes in. Sometimes, our Courtroom Connection can get a jury list from the judge early. More commonly, we just have to wait for the list.

Once the list comes, our Courtroom Connection fills in the Trial Spreadsheet with information provided by the clerk on each juror, and they can supplement this information in real time with information gleaned during voir dire. In some trial settings, the Courtroom Connection is able to provide us with scanned or photographed copies of the jury list, and our team can help complete the Trial Spreadsheet.

That’s when our investigative team goes to work. A typical trial may have three to six Jury Vetters working at one time, depending on the demands of the trial. We use a suite of online tools that help us manage the workflow and aggregate the data we find. During a typical voir dire, one Jury Vetter is responsible for accessing public records while two to three Jury Vetter’s scour social media.

Once the data on each juror is discovered, authenticated, and curated, it is included in our Visual Jury Report. The Google Doc populates in real time as we build the report, and the trial team generally starts seeing information on the first jurors within 15 minutes. As a general rule of thumb, we are usually able to provide information on ten jurors for every hour of voir dire. Most of the voir dires we are involved in last five to six hours (not counting the waiting), allowing us to report on up to 50-60 jurors in a day-long voir dire.