I Wish I'd Thought Of That

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Are you reading Mark Herrmann and Jim Beck's Drug and Device Law Blog? If not, you need to start, even if you plan to retire without ever touching a case about pharmaceuticals and medical devices. This week, for example, you missed two good posts about jury questionnaires.

The first post, by Herrmann's Jones Day partner Richard Stuhan, explains why you want a jury questionnaire. The reasons are clear and copious, enough to convince not only you but also your client and maybe your judge that questionnaires are a good idea. (Stuhan knows this stuff; he was behind the survey last year suggesting that prior inconsistent statements aren't nearly the devastating cross-examination we think they are.)

"A single sheet of paper"

The next day, Herrmann and Beck followed up with a post modestly titled "A Thought On Jury Questionnaires." What a thought:

Aim for a questionnaire that consists of just a single sheet of paper, printed on two sides.

A single sheet of paper? Are they kidding? Here at Deliberations we collect jury questionnaires. Some are very helpful and some are less helpful, some are creative and some are rote, some are insightful and some are kind of dumb — but none of them are short. A single sheet?

I'll let Beck and Herrmann explain how to do it, but it sounds like it would work. They explain why they think it's a good idea — easier for jurors and thus easier for the judge to approve — but I'll try it next time for a different reason. Even when a long questionnaire is approved by the judge and carefully completed by the jurors, you still have to manage all the information the questionnaires contain. Standing in front of a bunch of people waiting for your next question, you can't be thumbing through a 30-page questionnaire with lots of blanks for long answers. You need summaries of the questionnaires, and a chart summarizing the summaries. With each summarizing step, you get farther away from the juror's handwriting and actual words.

If the whole questionnaire were on one sheet, you'd work with it differently, more closely, more easily. This is a good idea.