For over 30 years, he’s helped select juries that have returned billions of dollars in verdicts. “He is the guy who gets called on for the highest-stakes cases going,” says host Brendan Lupetin. How does Robert Hirschhorn do it? In this conversation, Robert reflects on his past and describes the “game-changing” future: his AI-powered consulting platform called VerdictHub. Tune in as Robert reveals his powerful questions for identifying ideal jurors, innovative strategies for maximizing damages in states where lawyers cannot give jurors recommendations, and technique for anchoring jurors to substantial awards. Spoiler: Repeating the word “billion” helps.

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1. Robert's career transformed in 1984 when he secured a seemingly impossible not-guilty verdict against a public safety officer charged with robbery – and caught at the scene with an Uzi, sawed-off shotgun, and silencer.
2. For that case, Robert was referred to jury consultant Cathy Bennett, who agreed to teach him her methods on one condition: He would spend an entire year attending all her meetings without speaking but instead observing and absorbing.
3. Robert and Cathy Bennett eventually married. Later, on her deathbed, she made Robert promise to find a way to give his jury selection gift to as many lawyers as he could, a promise he would fulfill with VerdictHub, his AI-powered trial consulting platform.
4. VerdictHub is now developing a “shadow jury" product. Once a lawyer has a seated jury, this product will replicate not one group of 12 using digital artificial intelligence jurors, but five groups of juries. Those five groups, demographically identical to the seated jury, will then be provided the transcript of that day’s court activity, and the lawyers will get their feedback each day.
5. Robert recommends asking potential jurors whether they see the world in black and white or shades of gray, explaining that cases centered on non-economic damages absolutely require "shades of gray" jurors who can think in nuanced terms.
6. Robert advises asking jurors if they prefer the big picture or details, noting that while detail-oriented people are important for certain cases, big picture thinkers are often better suited for cases requiring emotional connection and understanding of non-economic harm.
7. In states where lawyers cannot suggest damage amounts to juries, Robert's strategy involves villainizing the defendant or defense witnesses and finding creative ways to use large numbers throughout trial to anchor jurors' thinking.
8. If economic damages in a case are very low, Robert recommends waiving them entirely to avoid anchoring the jury to a small number when you cannot provide a recommended amount for non-economic damages.

Ready to refer or collaborate on med mal, medical negligence, and catastrophic injury cases? Visit our attorney referral page at PAMedMal.com/Refer. We handle cases in Pennsylvania and across the United States.

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If your case is all about non-economic damages, you got to have your shades of gray. Jurors. You have to know, not you should know it's the 11th commandment. Thou shall know who are the shades of gray jurors. Okay, that's how important this is.

Welcome to Just Verdicts with your host, Brendan Lupetin, a podcast dedicated to the pursuit of just verdicts for just cases. Join us for in-depth interviews and discussions of cutting edge trial strategies that will give you the keys to conquering the courtroom. Produced and powered by LawPods.

It's Brendan with Just Verdicts, and I think you're going to dig, I hope you're going to dig today's interview with Robert Hirschhorn, who is kind of the jury consultant to the Stars. And Robert shares a bunch of really cool background stories, but from usable, applicable trial advice. He really gets into it in the second half of this interview. Talks about jury selection, talks about voir dire and keys to voir dire, and he has a bunch of good ideas on how to approach non-economic damages in states like ours where we can't ask for numbers. And he talks about this really cool product that he has, VerdictHub that I've been working with. I'm really digging and how it works and why it works and we go through my experience with it. So there's a lot of good stuff here. I think you're going to dig it. And with no further ado, here's Robert Hirschhorn.

Welcome to another episode of Just Verdicts. My guest today is Robert Hirschhorn. Arguably and probably some people wouldn't even argue about it, the most accomplished trial consultant in the country today for the last 30 plus years. Robert has advised on some of the most difficult cases in American history, including George Zimmerman, Terry Lynn Nichols, Robert Durst trials, but for all you civil lawyers listening, and that's pretty much all of you, Robert has been on the bleeding edge of the era of the billion dollar verdict. Robert consulted on the Roundup litigation, which resulted in a $2 billion verdict against Monsanto and he helped pick the jury that delivered an $8 billion punitive verdict against Johnson and Johnson more recently from the opioid crisis to massive toxic torts. He is the guy who gets called on for the highest stakes cases going, and now Mr. Hirschhorn is here taking all of that experience and scaling it. Robert is the founder of VerdictHub, a new platform that uses digital jurors to test your case before trial. And I have been using it recently and I'm loving it. And I saw you give a great presentation a couple of months ago, I think on connection. I thought you were awesome. I thought the product looked really cool, so I wanted to try it out. And here we are now talking and we can talk about my experience and everything. And I just really appreciate you being here, Robert.

Brandon, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be on your show and I appreciate all your kind words and I can just tell you VerdictHub is a game changer, so I'm anxious to talk to you about that.

Yeah, and I'm anxious to give you my thoughts and ask you some additional questions on the end product and everything. And I've already got some other ones in the hopper here. But before we get into that, for anybody that doesn't know you as well as they should, I was really impressed and I thought your kind of origin story from how you started off as a criminal defense lawyer and then how life took you to becoming a trial consultant and jury selection specialist. So could you just talk to us a little bit about your background?

Yeah, one of my favorite stories to tell. So I was a baby lawyer in San Antonio, Texas. I worked for an amazing criminal defense lawyer named Jerry Goldstein was fabulous. I'd won or gotten hung juries in my first 12 jury trials and I was convinced I was going to be the next racehorse Haynes. And so one day a client came in, he was a DPS department of public safety officer charged with robbery. Those are right off the bat, never good facts. Cop charged with crime is never good. So he told me the facts of the case and all the first thought I had was my win streak is over. There is no way if I take this case that this case can be won. So I did what any reasonable young criminal offense lawyer. And by the way, we're talking about 1984. In 1984, the largest fee I had ever charged was $5,000.

And I said to the client, look, if you want to get my help, it's going to cost you $50,000, which I kind of figured was more than his yearly salary. And I figured he didn't say, I can't afford it, who can you refer me to? And he said to me, who do I make the check payable to? And I thought, oh my God, you got to do an asset check before you quote the fee as a criminal defense lawyer, you got to figure out what the client can afford. It turns out he came from a very wealthy family. Check cleared. I went to my boss, Jerry. I said, Jerry, what do I do? Here are the facts of the case. He was like, he was caught at the scene I witnessed. He had a DPS bulletproof vest on. He had an Uzi, a sought off shotgun, a 20 with a silencer.

What do you bring a silencer to anywhere for unless you're a criminal? So I told Jerry the facts and he said to me, Robert, you got to plead that case. You can't win that case. And I said, Jerry, I just took a $50,000 fee. Those are the kinds of fees Jerry was charging. He said, okay, you need to call Cathy Bennett. This is 1984. I said, who? He said, Cathy Bennett. And I said, who's Cathy Bennett? And he said, she's a jury consultant, 1984. And I said, what's a jury consultant? And he said to me, Robert, stop asking all these questions. Here's Cat's number. Call her up and talk to her. Talk to Cat. I learned instantly that the insight she had on this impossible case were things that I had never learned in law school. So I convinced Cat to help us work on the case.

She worked on the case, she helped me with jury selection. We tried the case. In my closing argument, there were only two people in the courtroom that weren't crying. It was the judge and the prosecutor. Everybody else was crying. Some of my jurors were crying. We got a not guilty verdict. And I turned to Cat and I said, you've changed my life. What you just taught me in this case are things that I never could have learned, never didn't learn in law school. And so I said to her, will you teach me to do what you do? And she said to me, look, Robert, if you are willing for one year to be a sponge, you can come to all my meetings. You can be with me everywhere I go. Don't open your mouth. Now think about that. Trial lawyers are type A personalities. The greatest music that's ever been composed is words that come out of a trial lawyer's mouth, right?

So we're all type A personality. We want to talk, we want to hear ourselves talk. We want people to hear what we have to say. So for one year, literally one year, I couldn't utter a word when Cat was talking to her clients or the lawyers, I mean whoever she was dealing with. And at the end of that, I thought, man, this has all changed my life. The greatest closing argument I ever gave in my whole life was when I convinced Cathy Bennett to marry me, which I did. And so we spent the next seven years before she passed away from cancer, we spent the next seven years being this team and going all over the country and working on some really big cases and some really small cases because Cat was all about helping the underdog. And that's why I'm here today.

How did she get into it? Robert? What was her

Great question, Brendan. Perfect Cat. This is 1972. She was working at Legal Aid in Georgia and the lawyers came back from a motion hearing to the judge and they had lost it. And Cat said to him, can I go to your next hearing with you? Because she had her background in humanistic psychology. She had her bachelor's and her master's in humanistic psychology. So they said, sure. So Cat would go to them to their hearings, and Cat would stop the lawyers and say, you've lost the judge. You got to move on to something else. Or Cat would say, look, you're not making the right argument. This is the argument you need to make with this judge. And now all of a sudden, these legal aid lawyers are starting to win their motions and the words spread around the legal aid office. And one day, one of the trial lawyers walked up to Cat in 1972 and said, Hey, I heard what you're doing with the judges with the motions.

Would you come with me to try and see if you can help me with a jury? And Cat said, I'd never done it, but sure, I'll be happy to try. And guess what happened. The legal aid lawyer started winning their jury trials. Cat Bennett was just a remarkable soul. I'm going to tell you one more story. When Cat Bennett passed away in 1992, I can't believe it's been now 34 years, when Cat passed away, a, B-C-N-B-C-C-B-S all broke in and said breaking news, Cat Bennett had passed. That wasn't nearly as impressive as what I'm about to tell you. When Cat passed, I got 200 calls, faxes. We didn't have texts back then. Calls, fax letters from people saying, you don't know me. I met Cat Bennett one time on an airplane or at a bar or at the courthouse or at a speech, and she changed my life. There's not many people that I know that are angels walking on earth, but Cathy Bennett was one of them.

Sounds like it. That's an amazing story. And I'm sorry, obviously for your loss even though it was a terribly long time ago. But she sounded like a wonderful person and sort of reminds me of that feeling I have on my wrongful death cases where I worked this whole case up, I learned all about this wonderful person, but I will never get to meet them kind of thing. And just from everything I've heard you talk about your wife, I feel unfortunate that I didn't get to meet her.

You are because she's still with us. It was the greatest seven years of my life to this day, the greatest seven years of my life.

So then as I read, you kind of had to make a decision where you were going to go in life at that point, and you essentially carried on her firm and then it looks like have grown it and have found your way into so many different amazing cases. Talk about that for a second.

Yeah, very blessed. So to this day, 34 years later, when you call my office, it says, Cathy Bennett and Associates, can we help you? I mean, to this day, because every single day I want to be able to hear Cat Bennett's name out there. And that's why I made the conscious decision to never change the name of our company or how our phone is answered. So I've been really, really blessed Brendan because I've gotten to work with some of the greatest lawyers in America on some of the greatest cases, many of the lawyers whose names you've heard of, but there's also a whole bunch of lawyers who you've never heard of that are just phenomenal. So I feel really blessed. What I tell people is I have the greatest job in America except for all the travel. I travel all the time now I'm trying to slow down now.

I got a little 16-year-old, I've got three older kids. I wasn't really around very much for them, and I promised myself that for my last little guy, I was going to spend as much time as I can with him. So I'm really limiting the cases I take on the jury consulting side. But I got to tell you, Bre, I'm working as hard today at 69 as when I was 39. And the reason is because of, and we'll get to it, it's verdict of and everything that that's doing. And I'm very fortunate, I feel very blessed to be able to say to people, I've never worked a day of my life. I love every day of my job.

Now, I guess you could probably use VerdictHub for any type of case including criminal, but to me being several plaintiff's injury lawyer, it is obviously most applicable to the civil side of things. Talk to me for a second how it seems like you've transitioned from consulting on super high stakes criminal cases, like the cases that you would see on court TV and you'd hear every night being talked about on all the cable news channels. And now this was even before I saw you speak a couple months ago, I had heard your name involved specifically with I think it was Tom Klein and Jason Kins, massive verdict from a year and a half or two years ago in Philly. So how did you then pivot into being this kind of star of the plaintiff civil world?

Yeah, great question. So back when I started in 1985, because when Cat passed, when Cat died, I had to make a decision. She'd given me these amazing tools and I had to make the decision of whether I wanted to go back to practicing law or if I wanted to kind of keep Cat's mission and vision and world alive. And I chose the latter that for me was the right path to do. So we started in the beginning, I would say 90% of what I did was civil and 10% was criminal. And that's because the criminal offense lawyers caught on to jury consulting a lot quicker than the civil lawyers did. In the big, really big high profile civil cases, there were jury consultants involved, but the bread and butter kind of cases, they just weren't. And then I slowly started transitioning to about 50 50 and then I would say about 15 years ago is when I went all in on civil. And so now it's literally a flip. 90% of what we do is we work on civil cases 90% of the time and about 10% of the time if it's a high profile civil case and if it's something that I feel is right for me, then we get involved with that as well.

For those listeners who haven't worked with a trial consultant before, and to the extent that you can or are comfortable talking about it on a case, say like that multi-billion dollar j and j verdict or one of the other billion dollar verdicts you've worked with plaintiffs on, what is your role? How do you fit in? Are you helping with doing the research on the case and the background to start to identify the types of jurors that you're looking with as well as helping the lawyers frame the case and come up with the themes and all of that? I mean, I guess in a typical case, when they're all in hiring you, what is your approach and involvement?

Yeah, all of the above. We do everything from help develop what the theme is to the case, to working with the witnesses, to designing the questionnaire, to writing the voir dire questions, to preparing a voir dire PowerPoint. Help the lawyers identify who your challenges for cause are, tell the lawyers who they should exercise their peremptory strikes on. We do the whole thing. Rarely do I stay for the whole trial because I mean, honestly, the fees that we charge are just astronomical. And I'm a little embarrassed by it. And part of the reason is because it's what the market will bear. But that's why because the rates are so high, I typically don't stick around for the trial. But on the cases I help lawyers with every single case. Every night I do a debrief with the lawyers about what happened in court that day and then talk about here's what we need to do with this witness, or here's how we change the narrative.

So I have constant feedback with the lawyers throughout the course of the trial in that sense. But I'm telling you, we do the focus groups, we do the mock trials, we do the surveys, and all of that was done in all of the cases that you just mentioned, the case with Tom and Jason and the big verdict we got in Georgia and another Roundup case. We had done all of that kind of work. But the whole point is I try to teach what the message is and I try to help lawyers figure out a how to craft that message and then who are the kinds of people that are most open are willing to grab onto, accept and run with that message as well. So it's both ends of the spectrum. I teach the message. And who are the people that are open to it?

Robert, are people still doing shadow juries during trial at all or is that fallen out of vogue to some extent?

No, no, they're doing it absolutely. They're expensive. They're really time consuming. A couple of keys to a lawyers have different names for it. We call it a shadow jury. What we do is let's say you've got 12 person jury, I would figure out who are the most four or five that are the most powerful jurors out of that group. And we have a bullpen of jurors that will demographically match those people, and then we will pull from the bullpen, the four or five people that are the closest match to our key jurors. And then so point number one is you got to mirror the actual jury. Point number two is the shadow jurors can't know which side has hired them because people want to please their employers, so they can't know that the plaintiff or the defendant has hired them. So that's the second thing.

You got to make sure you keep it crystal clear the lawyers can't come up and talk to 'em. And then the third piece is you've got to be able to brief the jurors over the lunch hour and at the end of the day, and you've got to give a real short synopsis to the lawyers because they don't have a whole lot of time to read a five or 10 page report. You got to do a one page report and summarize the key points for what the lawyer needs to do in terms of tomorrow or what the lawyer's doing that's working and what the lawyer's doing that's not working Now, that's the old way of doing it. That's having the jurors in the courtroom, the shadow jurors in the courtroom. I'm not sure I've told anybody this on any podcast. So breaking news for you brother. VerdictHub is now developing a shadow jury product where once the lawyer has the jury in the box, we will then replicate not one group of 12 using digital artificial intelligence jurors, but we do five groups of juries and then we run the transcript from what happened in court that day by these five groups of digital jurors that demographically are identical to the seated jury. And we give lawyers feedback every day from our digital jurors on what's going on with their case.

Got it. So you get the daily transcript, feed it to the digital jurors, get five different, essentially shadow jury feedback, and then you give that back to the lawyers on a daily basis,

Not five. Now all 12, excuse

Me, right? Yeah, yeah.

When you're in the courtroom, you do four or five. When you're using a digital shadow jury, you get feedback from all 12 and not one panel of 12, five panels of 12. So 60 jurors that mirror your jury are giving you feedback. It's fascinating. Now the downside to it is it's expensive. It's not like the surveys that you and I are doing together, but it's a great product for the right case. Those tend to be the much higher profile, bigger in terms of value, bigger value cases,

Right? The case value has to support the cost of the I get it. You mentioned a couple different distinctions here and I want to kind of dig into the underpinnings of Verti top and I want to hear the origin of that. I'm curious how you came together with, it seems like the Silicon Valley people to create this product, but obviously you can't look anywhere. You can't go two feet without hearing somebody talking about ai, importance of AI and everything. And I think that there's a lot of lawyers that are still very resistant to anything ai, and I get that. I try to always be an early adopter. I try to be a skeptic, but I want to be an early adopter and not necessarily VerdictHub, but we're going to talk about that in a second. But just generally, yeah, I'm using it throughout everything I do basically in my practice these days.

And so that takes us now to where we are with VHS VerdictHub is you guys are using digital jurors. And I will be honest with you that when I first heard that, but I want to try everything. I'm skeptical and I think that people will always be somewhat skeptical of, well, how could a digital essentially almost an AI avatar of a particular makeup, of a potential juror, how could that really be an accurate representation of a human being that I could rely on these results? So to the extent that you can elaborate on that a little bit, why do you have confidence in your digital jurors?

Okay, first let me tell the story of how I got into this.

Yeah, yeah, I haven't heard that. I'm interested how this even came about.

Okay, you ready? I got a call from a reporter from Bloomberg Legal, this was literally 13 months ago, and he said to me, Robert, what is the intersection between jury consulting and artificial intelligence? And I said to him, really simple. There's two kinds of jury consultants. There's one kind of jury consultant where what they do is they do focus groups and surveys and they give lawyers a profile of their favorable and unfavorable jurors. That's one group of jury consultants. And then there's another group of jury consultants like me that, yeah, we look at those tools, but we make our decision in the courtroom on instinct and intuition not profiles because I know that jurors make decisions based on value system and life experience, not on demographics. Okay? I said to the reporter that first group that does the jury profiles, they're toast within one year they're gone because everything that they do artificial intelligence can do.

Now the second group, the group like me and Lisa Blue that use instinct and intuition, we're safe for a while, like a short while because it's just a matter of time before artificial intelligence can figure out instinct and intuition. It's coming. Now here's the first thing I want to say to everybody. Artificial intelligence is here to stay. Don't be afraid of it. Look, you can either sit on the sidelines and let the train go by that artificial intelligence train go by or you can jump on board and figure out how artificial intelligence can help you and your clients, how you can do a better job helping and representing your clients. So there's lots of benefit to artificial intelligence. Here's the thing, you got to be real careful trying to do it yourself because of hallucinations. So unless you're really good at prompting, prompting is the question or the inquiry that you give to the artificial intelligence for it to come up with the answer.

Unless you're a master, a whiz at prompting, okay, you can't do it. You got to rely on professionals to do it. Okay? So the article in the Bloomberg News appears reporter calls me up about a month later, literally December a year ago, and he says to me, Robert, I got a couple of artificial intelligence guys that want to talk to you. Do you have any interest in talking to him? I said, sure, I'd be happy to. So we set up a call and these two fellows, AV and Swoop said to me, Robert, we've been checking you out. We know the kind of work that you do. We understand you got a national reputation, got all that. We know you do focus groups, we know you do surveys. What if we told you that with artificial intelligence we can replicate any venue, whether it's the venue is a thousand people or a hundred million people.

We can not only replicate the demographics of the kind of people that show up for jury duty in those venues, but we can also mirror the types of people like what they do for a living, what their mindset is. And I said, fellas, you are either two of the smartest guys I've ever met in my whole life and I've met some really smart people, or you are two of the biggest bullshit artists I've ever met. Now I don't know which category you two fall into, but let's do a couple of tests and find out. So what I did was I had given them the exact same information. I had done what E jury, I had done big data. I didn't give them the results, I only gave them the same input, the same case materials that I had used for them, but I did not give these guys, I didn't know who they were, I didn't trust them.

So I gave them just the input, not the result. And every single time the results they came back with were either the same as or larger than or smaller than. I mean they were very, very close to what the e jury and the big data people were doing. So I said to 'em, boys, let's have a deal. Let's create a partnership, but here's a couple of conditions. Condition number one, I have worked for 40 years to develop a stellar reputation. I think there's very few people that can say a bunch of bad stuff about me. So I really want to protect my reputation and my entire career. So we cannot have a single hallucination. In other words, we've all read about those cases where lawyers use artificial intelligence to help write a brief and it ends up citing a case that's fake. And that's because artificial intelligence, if it doesn't know the answer, unless you put in the correct guardrails in your prompting, it will make information up.

And that's why all these lawyers are getting caught getting called out because they didn't put in the correct guardrails. Okay? So I said, number one, you got to protect my reputation. Number two, we are not going to have any hallucinations. So we literally spent four months, four months beta testing this product with case after case, after case after case. And finally at the end I said, let's go live now we've been live for five months and in five months, 125 law firms in 35 states have used VerdictHub to help them with their cases. Now let me answer the second part of your question. The second part of the question is, Robert, how do we know that the information we're getting from Verica VHS from the VHS we do? How do we know that it's going to be accurate? Alright, I want to show you a slide I got that I had ready.

Okay, so here's what we did. This is a case where we knew we were going to do a live focus group. The way I do my live focus groups is we bring in 20 people in the morning, we present the case to 'em, they deliberate, and then after they deliberate, then what'll happen is that we will debrief them and then we bring in a new group of 20 people and repeat the process. Okay? The column with the dark green all the way to the left, that's all the way at the top. This was a whole case about apportionment. Can we get the jury to put the majority of the blame on the target defendant? Alright, so that dark green was what the VHS predicted the percentage would be that the actual jury is going to put on the target. I think it was like 60%.

Alright, so the lawyers took the information from the VHS report, the 20 page report, they made the same arguments because they wanted to see if what VHS was predicting how it played with real jurors, focus group jurors live jurors. So that light green, we ran it in the morning and that's what the apportionment was in the light grain. And then we took what we learned from that morning focus group, we tweaked it up, we knew how to get even a higher percentage on the target, and that's that white column, that's the column that after the second time, remember in our live focus groups we have a morning group and the afternoon group, that white column is where we ended up after the second group. So we had three different approaches and where we ended up, I think it was like 65 or 68% on the target.

It was fascinating. Now this is not a one-off we're seeing this time and time and time again. We had a case where a lawyer out of a great firm, the Panish firm out of la, fabulous lawyers, one of their lawyers, Spencer had a case up in Tacoma that went to trial. I believe VerdictHub predicted 12 seven was what we predicted the verdict would be, and I think the actual jury came back with 13 five. So it's a remarkably accurate tool to give you a read on liability, apportionment, damages, themes, evidence, ranking jurors, your favorable and unfavorable jurors. So look, Brenda, you did one, tell your audience what your experience was.

So I love the product so far. First off, the turnaround time is amazing because it was like, I think I gave it to you guys between Christmas and new and you had some people out with the flu, and I think I still got the final result on January 3rd or fourth. And I think typically you guys have been talking about maybe a three to four day turnaround tops. So that's cool. Really quick turnaround because we're all kind of junkies. We want it now. Number two, I loved that. I mean I'll talk about the report in a second, but what do I get? I get a really awesome audio from yourself. So I get Robert Hirschhorn himself giving me a five to 10 minute analysis of everything about the case. Here's what you want to focus on here is what your themes and key concepts for framing purposes.

Here's how to address some of the biggest landmines in the case and so forth. So I love that I get my five to 10 minute verbal summary sort of debrief. Then I get this report and one of the things I want to talk about, and I have a couple questions that I would love some clarification on in a second, but for a moment, one thing I thought was really cool is that at the very start of it, this was 500 digital jurors, but the idea is that this reflects the demographic makeup of Allegheny County where this particular case is that I had done, and I can't go into too much detail because this case is scheduled to probably to try this year, so I don't want to divulge too much, but the age distribution, race, ethnicity, gender education level and political affiliation are all broken down there.

And initially this didn't occur to me, but then I realized that that is all reflective of what the general makeup of Allegheny County people is. And so if someone to run this case in Philadelphia or LA County or Texas, it's going to be different, which I thought was a really cool way from kind of a statistical approach to do that. So some questions and then I'll kind of continue on with my experience with VHS so far. Number one, I believe that you have, and I don't dunno if it's the website or yourself as referred to this as a survey rather than a focus group. What is the distinction there?

So back in the day, remember I've been doing this, Cat did it since the seventies. I've been doing it since the eighties. If we want to get a jury profile, if we want to do a change of venue, the way you would do it back in the day is you would hire somebody. We literally in the old days used to use old phone books, the white pages, some younger viewers don't know what that is, Google what white pages are, but we would like five names down from the bottom and every single page, the fifth name down from the bottom, we would call those people and ask them questions, right? That's called a survey. And then the next thing we would do is then it went to doing the same thing online where you'd get a case submission and then you'd present that to people online and they would answer it and then all that information would get compiled in a report would be written.

That's what big data is doing. But they kind of changed everything because instead of calling it a survey, they called it an online focus group. And in my world, a focus group is when people deliberate, you make a presentation, then you have people deliberate. Well, there's no deliberations in these surveys, okay? What we're doing is we're just simply using artificial intelligence to run a case by these digital jurors. Think of 'em as artificial intelligence agents that replicate your venue and they're the ones that here. So the difference between a survey and a focus group is survey is asking questions only. No deliberations. A focus group is where you're asking questions and then you're getting people to deliberate on those questions. Everything is all kind of messed up now because the vernacular has changed, but what we're doing are surveys.

Now your partners who approached you, the tech ai whizzes, so they must have been looking for somebody like you. They sort of had this in mind and they needed your expertise as the focus group and jury selection guru. So what was their background that they must have already had? I mean this subject matter expertise in creating these digital people or jurors or they become jurors because of the context we're using them, but they clearly were working with digital avatars of people or something. What was their background that then this appeared to be a logical extension of what they were doing?

So I never thought that VerdictHub would come about because here's part of the reason why. So after these guys convinced me they were legit, I asked them a little bit about themselves and here's what they told me, all of which I'm about to tell you is true. They both went to the Wharton School of Business, one of them got a PhD in computer science, and that guy has 30 patents in this arena. So that's Swoop and Goov is equally brilliant on the business side of everything. He's also very technical as well. So the guys brought it to me and I said to him, look fellas, and this is why I didn't think this company would ever get off the ground. Remember I'm dealing with Wharton School of Business guys, okay? I said to 'em, fellas, here's the deal. We're not offering this to big law.

We're not offering this to corporations, we're not offering this to insurance companies. And unless you agree to that, I'm out because what you guys just showed me, this is a really powerful product. We're not going to help corporations screw little people. We're not helping insurance company screw little people. We're not going to help corporations. The people that have the sore back injury, the traffic wreck cases that are worth a hundred thousand dollars that can't afford to hire a Robert Hirschhorn, this is a tool that they can use because it comes within their budget. So we're not going to do this partnership, fellas, unless you agree that we're not doing this to corporations, big law or insurance companies. To my partner's credit, they agreed to go along with that. So to this day, and for as I own VER hub, we will never be offering this to corporations, insurance companies or big law.

That's number one. Number two, I really thought my Wharton guys were going to balk at this and say, Robert, you can't do this. I said, guys, let's talk about what it's going to cost to use this product. And I said, look, and I'm going to tell you a backstory. I want to make it affordable to a really wide, wide range of lawyers, alright? Not this very skinny group that can afford to hire me. That's not why I'm doing this. I want the average lawyer that has a case that's worth a hundred thousand dollars, $50,000, 250,000 or more to be able to do this product. So I'm telling you guys, I want to come up with a price that the average lawyer can afford to do in their cases and to their credit, the guys agreed to do it. That's why Mark Lanier, who a lot of you have heard of Mark Lanier's, only criticism of VerdictHub is that we're not charging enough money and that's another whole story. We'll talk about the why I picked the price that we did, but the idea was I want to even the score, I want to make sure with all the money and all the power that these corporations have that we want to really try to even things up and that's what VerdictHub can do, not only in the big cases but in those much smaller cases

As well. Well, because I have the attention span of a gnat sometimes and I'll forget. So can you talk about the price and the way that it works? So I, this is another aspect of it that I like a lot.

So the first thing I want to tell you is, so we run the survey, it's 500 digital jurors. You get this written report, Brendan, you remember how long the report was?

I'm looking at it, it's 30 pages and just so you get a sense of it, it's an overview and then it's the number of jurors, then it's a breakdown of the parties and some of the key issues in the case. Then it gives you a breakdown of what your percentage of the demographics of the 500 digital jurors are. Then it gets into key findings, which is was the defendant negligent factual? Cause was the plaintiff comparatively at fault, percentage wise, fault apportionment? Then it gets into digital jurors finding liability only excluding zeros for total damages. You get your different ranges and then it's all 500 digital jurors ranges including zero awards. So now you get your mean, your median, your range of likely verdicts you get. Then there's an award distribution by award value. I'm only on page eight. Then you get award distribution by demographic group, which is very cool because then it breaks down the numbers based on gender, education, age, race, ethnicity, political views.

Then there's more of that key findings about juror tendencies. There's a whole section on that. Gender impact, age impact, race, ethnicity impact, political affiliation impact, statistical reliability measures. There's a whole section on that. I don't mean to skip because I know there's a bunch of good stuff here, but what I really liked also was towards the end there are the responses to a bunch of specific unique questions separate from the verdict slip is set up. Then we get into strategic recommendations, and this is always what I really like and I've tried and worked with every different big data and focus group everything, and I always love getting more information as trial lawyers. What do we want? We want key takeaways, strategic recommendations, so we know all that. So who are the types of jurors that I really want to look for and that I don't want? And then you get into emphasizing the different issues like here are the messaging, here's how you deal with this problem, fact, here's how you better frame this, good fact and so forth. And that's all last basically four to five pages. So it's a 30 page report and that's in addition to your audio summary, which I thought was pretty cool too. So got that for, I don't even think you've said the price yet, right?

No, I haven't. Okay, so that was the report. Now after you do the first survey, you look at the results and you think, oh man, I should have asked for more money because I see that this is resonating with jurors and my ask wasn't high enough. I wish I could run this again and do it again, but this time ask for more money. Or if you didn't get a good result and you now know what is the key evidence that's impacting your case negatively, man, I wish I could run it again, but change the negative facts and see if I can address them and get a different result. You can run it again at no additional cost. You can run it a second time and a third time you get the original survey and three free reruns at no additional cost. There's no nickel and diamond.

If you want to have a conference call with me, you're not getting a bill from me. I'm not charging for my time. In fact, right after this podcast, I'm going to talk to a lawyer about a VHS. We had run for him. He wants to kind of talk through the same way you and I are now. So the point is you get all of that. Now, if you did a live focus group with me, one live focus group where we bring in 20 in the morning, 20 in the afternoon, it's going to cost you $75,000 just for the focus group. Then probably another 10 or 15 more for that 30 page report. Okay? So it's about a $90,000 product when you're using me as the jury consultant. But when you're using VerdictHub, the cost $3,000, not each time, one time $3,000 and you get the three free reruns.

Now look, the way I was raised, my dad said to me, if something is too good to be true, it probably is okay. And I always remember that to this day. So here's what I tell lawyers, look at our report. If after reading the report, listen to the audio file, read the report. If at the end of that you say, man, that doesn't teach me shit, I didn't get any value at all. There was nothing there that helped me. All you got to do is tell me we won't charge you. Okay? You're out some time. You will not be out $1. Here's what I can tell you, 125 law firms that have used VerdictHub up to this point, not one lawyer, not one has come back and said, not valuable. So the question then has to be, Robert, why are you charging that amount of money for this?

What's the deal? Here's the deal. I like to kind of end where I start, right? Primacy and recency. I know I'm getting off topic, but that's me. Voir dire. In Texas we call vada voir dire opening statement, direct examination, cross-examination, closing argument, primacy and recency. Start strong and strong. Do not start voir dire. Do not start opening statement with Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Again, let me introduce myself. You're ruining primacy. Start with something strong. We're here today, jury selection. We're here today to right a wrong and we need to find 12 people to help us. Something like that. Okay, primacy, recency, start strong and strong. Okay, so I want to end up where we started. Y'all know about my late wife, Cat Bennett, who I loved and adored greatest seven years of my life. We picked the jury in the William Kennedy Smith case. We got the not guilty verdict.

Six months later, she passed away. When Cat was on her death bed when she knew she was going to pass, Cat said to me, Robert, you've got this gift. Now I need you, Robert, to figure out a way how this gift that you have to give it to a large number of lawyers because this is something so important to me. I want to make sure that we're helping the little guy and we're getting this out to as many lawyers as we can. And Robert, I want you to see if you make me a promise that you can try to figure out a way to get this out to lawyers. So look, for 34 years, I kept looking for what the answer was. I wanted to keep my promise to Cat. We always do pro bono work. Yes, we did that we would always cut our fees for lawyers that couldn't afford us, but really wanted our help. Yes, I did that, but that's not what Cat had in mind. And when those two guys called me up and talked to me about artificial intelligence and what is now VerdictHub or VHS, I said to myself, I can now keep my promise to Cat Bennett. And that's why, A, we're not selling it. We will not give this to corporations. Insurance companies are big law, and B, that's why the price is $3,000.

How did Lanier respond when you told him that's why we're charging 3000 bucks?

Yeah, Lanier, mark knows me well, I pick Lisa Blue and I pick every one of his juries and he knows that for me, it's not about money for me, it's all about doing the right thing. So as soon as I mentioned Ka Bennett, he immediately knew that's what was driving the price.

So I only have this limited period of time with such a wealth of knowledge as yourself. Can I be a mooch? And your assistant, what was name Jenny? Jenny sent me this beautiful PowerPoint with a bunch of cool stuff in it that I really wanted to just ask you a couple of questions about. So could we just run through some of those points real quick and I could pick your brain?

Yeah, absolutely. But for the audience, if you guys want this PowerPoint, all you got to do is email Jenny jn@cbjury.com. There it's right there. There's Jenny's email address. Now look, here's the caveat. If you work for a defense firm, if you work for big law, if you work for a corporation, if you work for an insurance company, do not send us an email and ask for this PowerPoint. You will not get it. Okay, so now the only thing I ask Brendan for the podcast, we can do every slide, but don't do that one right there. Let's stay away from the opening statement one. Skip through that one. We will send it to all the plaintiff's lawyers. I just don't want defense lawyers to have my five tips for an opening statement.

That's fine. We'll skip through that one.

Alright, let's go through these. You ready?

Yeah. Top five voir dire tips from Robert Hirschhorn.

Number one, a liability jury and a damages jury. Do not look the same. Just because somebody is a really good liability juror does not mean they're a good damages juror. Just because somebody's a great damages juror does not make them a good liability juror. So you have got to decide ahead of time, am I picking a liability jury? Am I trying to get the yes? Am I trying to get the bulk of the blame on the target defendant or am I picking the damages jury? They're different. Okay? It impacts the kind of voir dire that you do. It impacts your opening statement. It impacts a lot of things. Okay, so number one, liability or damages. Juror number two, this is really important. For 30 years I have been advocating the use of questionnaires. I'm no longer a believer in the use of questionnaires, and here's why.

All those corporations, big law insurance companies, they are using artificial intelligence and other products now do really deep dive on your juries. So you don't want to give them those data points for them to do those deep dives. Okay? Now this generally applies to the bigger cases where the insurance companies or the corporations will put that kind of money into the AI driven research on who your jury is. But I'm just telling you, I tell lawyers, unless you've got a difficult liability case, we don't even use questionnaires anymore. I want you to rethink the use of questionnaires. Number three, all people are visual learners. We learn with our eyes, not our ears. And the most powerful message is when it appeals to both eyes and ears, you have to do a PowerPoint in your voir dire, unless your local rules or your judge doesn't allow it, you always want to use a PowerPoint because you'll keep people engaged and you'll keep their attention for a much longer period of time than if you're just up there talking next in every single jury selection going forward.

You have to ask these two questions. And again, if you send Jenny an email and you want to know what the two questions are, you want to see it in a PowerPoint slide, just tell Jenny, can I get Robert's PowerPoint and can I get his two questions? That's all you've got to say. Jenny knows exactly what you're looking for. Okay, here are the two questions. Number one, you have to do this in jury selection. You have to do it with a PowerPoint because it won't work if you use a flip chart. It won't work if you just say the words jurors have to visually see it. You want to find out are you a big picture person or are you a detail oriented person? Big picture or detail oriented. They are two totally different types of people. There are times when you want big picture people.

There are times when you want detail oriented people, but you have to ask that question. Here's the next one, and I'm going to give the defense a little hint right here. Okay, I don't want to, but I have to do it. I got to get this message out to my plaintiff's lawyers. The next question you want to ask is, do you see the world in terms of black and white or black and white and shades of gray? And the reason why that's important is because if your case is all about non-economic damages, you got to have your shades of gray jurors. You have to know now, you should know it's the 11th commandment. Thou shall know who are the shades of gray jurors, okay? That's how important this is. That's how you get those really big verdicts. And by the way, while I'm on this rant, do not let defendants ever in jury selection, opening statement, closing argument, ever use the words nuclear verdict.

Don't ever let them say those words. The verdict is a fair verdict, a just verdict, a right verdict. Don't let defense lawyers say nuclear verdict, because if they say those words to a jury, that's going to limit them from wanting to award a large amount of money. There's some kind of negative connotation with a quote, nuclear verdict. Don't let defense lawyers get it away. Alright? The second question is, black and white or black and white. Shades of gray. Shades of gray. Award money for mental anguish, an and suffering loss of consortium. They're really good at that. Black and white jurors, if you've got a strong punitive damage case, black and white jurors are who you looking for because there's a rule, it's in writing, the defendant violated it. They have to be held accountable. So black and white, if you're looking for a punitive jury.

Shades of gray if you're looking for a non-economic jury. Alright, and finally, you have to ask two to four scaled questions. For those of you that know me, you know that I've been advocating scaled questions for 20 years. Now, scaled questions is where you ask a question, if supported by the evidence and allowed by the law, could you award millions of dollars in damages if allowed by the law and justified by the facts? Zero is I absolutely could not do it. 10 is I absolutely can do it or any number in between. That's an example of a scaled question. You want to ask liability scaled questions. You want to ask damages, scaled questions, right? Two to four is all you need. If you do any more than that, you're going to just start getting rote answers. Alright? Now, here's why you want to do the scaled questions.

The scaled question not only gives you ability to rate that one juror, but it gives you the ability to rate them compared to the other jurors. That's the beauty of this. When we're using our peremptory strikes, let's say you have six peremptory strikes, four of them are always clear, it's crystal clear who the four, the problem becomes. Who should we use our last two strikes on? That's where the problem becomes, and that's why these scaled questions become really valuable. If you email Jenny, ask her for a scaled question chart on a single page, you can keep track of everybody's answers to the scaled questions, and then you just add up the numbers, and that way you'll know exactly who you should be exercising your peremptory strikes on.

Amazing. Let me ask you one question and then we'll wrap up. This has been terrific and it's been awesome. So commonwealth of Pennsylvania,

Can't ask for damages, can't ask for, yeah, I keep forgetting, I'm in Pittsburgh. Hey, by the way, I'm really sorry about the Steelers brothers and sisters Steelers nation. Okay, you're going to be coming back. It just won't be this year. Okay?

Will it be this millennium?

Yeah. So here's the thing. In Pennsylvania, you cannot, you all ought to try to change that rule. We're trying to

Figure ways out. Believe me, it's a hot topic

It's worth fighting for. This is such an important issue. Keep trying to fight and try to get this change made. So listen, all you've got to do is two things, alright? In Pennsylvania, every single case, every single case, I don't care how big, I don't care how small, every single case has a victim, your client, a villain, and a hero. And the hero is always going to be the jury, not your client, not your client's. Family members are taking care of that person who's now a quad. The jury is going to be the hero. You got to find the villain. And this is my point if you want, since in Pennsylvania, you cannot give the jury a recommendation of what the damages should be for the non-economic damages should be. What you've got to do is villainize the defendant, either the defendant themselves, or you might have a defense witness that only testifies for the defense that has written some kind of bullshit report. Or is misstated fact make somebody the villain On the defense side, if you can't make the corporation the villain, that's how you get jurors to award a lot of money. The other thing I want you to consider, Hey Brendan, you can't give them the numbers for economic damages, right?

Correct.

Okay, here's what I want you to consider. If the economic damages are really low, I want you to consider waiving it.

Yeah, I do that all the time.

It's what you got to do. Because if that economic damage number is low right now, you've anchored the jury to that low number, and since you can't give them a recommendation for the economic damages, they're going to key off that number because that's the only number they've heard, right? So here's the other thing you can do In that monster verdict that we got, in that case in Pennsylvania, I think it was seven or 8 billion. The only numbers Jason and Tom ever used in trial were a number in either the hundreds of millions or the billions. So whether it was parts per billion, they kept using the word billion over and over and over. And guess what kind of verdict the jury came back with? Billion because they kept hearing that number. So be creative and think about ways in your direct or cross-examination that come up with big numbers, and that's how you get big numbers in the state of Pennsylvania until y'all change the law. And by the way, Brendan, I'm sorry that I didn't come to your podcast with very much energy today. Sorry, my energy level was so low.

I love it. Love the energy, love the interview. I love you taking the time to share all this with us and love VHS, man. It's really cool. Like I said, I'm already running another project, can't wait until I'm going to try these cases. I'm going to see how that plays out. I want to talk to you guys about submitting some old cases, either a verdicts that I got to do comparatively or other ones I did big data studies on, just sort of more of that kind of verification, but I'm loving the product. I think it's great. Would commend people to check it out. And you can find it at what verdicthub.ai, correct?

Yes, sir. Verdicthub.ai. Or if you want to get ahold of me, it's R bh. At C Bju, I've got an AI email, but I'm an old guy, so I can only handle one email at a time, one wife, one email. That's it. I got two last points I'm going to make real quick if you don't bear with me. Number one, the greatest verdicts you will ever get in your entire career are the moments you spend with your family. So I want to remind every one of y'all, please, if you want those great verdicts, spend time with your family. Those are the true great verdicts right there, number one. Number two, I'm about to give you the key to be a great trial lawyer if you want to be a great trial lawyer. Really simple. Be a great person, be a great dad, be a great mom, be a great child, be a great uncle, be a great neighbor. Be a great boss. Be the very best person you can be. Make 2026 the year where we all work on trying to be the very best people that we can to those people around us. And I'm telling you, juries can pick up on that and juries reward that in their verdicts.

Agree. Love it. Sage advice. Robert Hirschhorn, thank you so much for being here. Jury consultant extraordinaire and VerdictHub, founder, and doing a lot of good. And again, appreciate you joining us on just verdicts and look forward to talking with you more in the future on different cases. We do. Okay.

Thanks Brendan. Thanks for having me, brother. I appreciate it all. Y'all out there, go get 'em. This is our year. We're going to do it.

If you enjoy the show, please subscribe to the Just Verdicts podcast on your favorite platform and consider leaving a review. And if you're interested in co-counseling, local counseling, or referring a catastrophic injury case, we'd love to work with you. Call us at two eight one forty one hundred or visit our attorney referralPage@pamedmal.com slash refer. Thanks for listening.