“The neat thing about studying lots of cases is you see what works and what doesn't,” says John Campbell in this visit with host Charla Aldous, where he and his wife, Alicia Campbell, reflect on their journey pioneering the use of big data jury reports. Fresh from their 1,300th study, the Campbells share trends they’ve documented along the way. As Alicia explains, big data helps attorneys by showing how different variables could affect the outcome of their case. And if you think your case doesn’t demand “big” data, check out big data’s “little brother” called “Fred.” Learn more on “The Fred Files,” Alicia’s podcast available on TrialPods.

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☑️ Charla Aldous, Caleb Miller, Eleanor Aldous

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More likely than not, that 0.01% is all it takes to tip the scales of justice. Join us as inner circle legend, Charla Aldous, Eleanor Aldous, and Caleb Miller walk you through the critical moments, big decisions, and bold strategies that win high stakes cases and show you how to turn that 0.01% into a game-changing verdict. You're listening to the podcast where winning is more likely than not. Produced and powered by LawPods.

Hello, welcome to our podcast More Likely Than Not. I'm Charla Aldous, and today I have two good friends of mine from Madrid, I might add, John and Alicia Campbell at Campbell Law. How are you guys doing at what, five o'clock in the evening there or what time?

Yeah, that's about right. It's 4:00 in the evening and we're in the afternoon and we're doing pretty

Good. Yeah, we're doing well. And I just rolled out of bed and rushed in here. And Lucy and Loretta, my two dogs are out on a walk, so we're not going to have to worry about them interrupting us. You know, we call them our four-legged restraining orders. Oh, that's hilarious. They rule the office. I was thinking about it, John and Alicia. When did I first meet you guys?

So I think that that would've been somewhere around 2015, late or very early 2016, because I was at the University of Denver. We were in Dallas and we came up to your office and met then. I think that's the first time maybe we met in person. I

Think that's right. I think I remember that. It was my old office. Yeah. Your mom lives in this area.

Yeah, I'm from McKinney, and so I'm from just north of Dallas and still go back and see mom some, and we were in town.

So I knew y'all back when before you were super, super uber famous.

I will tell you, Charla, I looked the other day thinking about this podcast, and I think the study we did for you was the fourth study we ever did. And now last week, I think we did our 1300th. So yeah, you knew us back when.

Are you kidding me? Ours was the fourth. Wasn't that the asphalt?

Asphalt

One?

It was an asphalt case.

Oh my gosh, that was Darrell Allen's case.

I still remember how just horrific and bad that case was and trying to figure out value and all that. And when we did that, we didn't have a business. We had kind of stumbled into studying studies because two of the studies before that were Alicia's case and a case John Simon had going to trial. And then right after that, we started hearing from people here and there to say, "Hey, could you do a study?"

I did not remember it was Daryl Allen's case, Alicia, that he got third degree burns over 98% of his body.

I remember. It was my introduction into terrible,

Terrible images. Yeah. I will never forget the day I went to visit him in the burn critical care unit. And I thought, I don't know how somebody can withstand that type of pain, but I'll tell you good news and bad news about Daryl. Darrell did great after, and we got him money where he got all the treatment he needed. He bought the farm he had always wanted, was thriving. And then he passed away from COVID, if you can believe it.

Oh no.

I tell you that horrible, horrible, horrific burns he had didn't get in, but COVID did. But I'm still close to his widow, Lisa and his son, Zane. Zane just graduated high school and they're all doing well. So that's how far it takes us back. And we were the fourth case, big data study that you did. Wow, that's amazing. You first of all said, John, something that I wanted to make sure our audience knows is you were a professor when I met you at the University of Denver. Why don't you first tell us about your career path and how you became the guru, you and Alicia of Big Data Studies?

Yeah. Well, it's like a lot of things in life. It's probably more luck than anything else, but I won't go all the way back, but my career path was, and Alicia and I have this in common, we were both high school teachers before we were lawyers. We decided kind of independently of one another we wanted to go to law school and then had to say, "Well, how do you do that? " So we went to law school at night while we taught during the day and became lawyers together. And I then started at the Simon Law Firm. I was working on, John Simon's a wonderful lawyer. I know he's a member of the Inner Circle with you, one of your Inner Circle members. And then-

And he's in St. Louis.

He's in St. Louis. And John was good to his word. When I hired on, he said, "You're going to get a lot of experience and we're not going to hold you back." And that was true. I tried a case four months out of law school. I had my license four months and I was trying cases. It turned out that I ended up running a class action department there and still dipping into injury cases. So I kind of got to do complex litigation, but also try injury cases and work on injury cases. And then Alicia had started her own firm, and so we were in St. Louis. And then we had our first son. And when our second one was on the way, to me, it seemed like I needed to do something else for a while. Long story short, I ended up being hired by the University of Denver to be a law professor.

Wanted to publish while I was there, but I didn't want to publish about esoteric things. I wasn't smart enough to write about constitutional law. So what do you do? What I did know was I knew a lot about the nuts and bolts of litigation and trial. And as I started looking at people who were studying jury behavior, they were very smart people and some of them were starting to use online samples and they were figuring some of this out, but most of them had never had a client. They were people that were Ivy League educated. And if you looked at their studies as a trial lawyer, you thought, "This is really interesting work, but this isn't a scenario that actually exists." Hey, we're going to assume liabilities admitted and only do damages, but it's a hotly contested liability case or we're going to assume the jury things that don't really happen.

And so my sales pitch to these folks was sort of, "I know questions we can study that you can publish, but that real lawyers will be interested in. " And my sort of internal math was, "And in exchange, I want to learn from you how to do this right." And so in that path, I got to work with really great people from NYU, Arizona State, the University of Arizona, Stanford, Cornell, and got an education. But I always had a foot in practice. Alicia had a full-time practice. I still kept cases while I was a law professor. And so it wasn't long before I started thinking, these methods of studying hundreds of people and doing scientifically validated studies and statistical analysis, this has a lot of practical application to everyday cases. And so Alicia had a case where she had multiple defendants and there was a real question about whether you could settle some out or it would be an empty chair problem.

John at the same time had a case going to trial that had fantastic liability, but it was really hard to figure out what a fair ask was for the non-economic damages because the guy had largely recovered from opioid addiction and didn't have a lot of permanent injury. And so we studied both of those cases and we built out big studies online with real evidence, showed them to real people online, got hundreds of people, manipulated what different people saw so that we had variables. And in Alicia's case, we learned some really powerful stuff that ended up helping know who to settle out and also drove value of settlement because the mediator started to realize this made sense. And in John's case, he went and tried it. And in a case that I think he told me at the time, and I think he said this publicly, he probably thought it was a $5 million case.

He got a $17 million verdict and we were sort of off to the races. And I think got invited to talk to the inner circle shortly after that. People started calling and we sort of stumbled into studying cases as a practical solution to we were just trying to build a better mousetrap for our own cases.

And when was that, John, that you were professor at the University of Denver and then you started working with these scholars?

I started in 2012 at the University of Denver and I think I published the first article in 2014 and we studied the first cases in late 2015, kind of started doing a few more in very early 2016.

That is an amazing journey to look at when we're going to talk about where you are now, but I didn't know all that history. I really, really enjoy hearing it. Alicia, while he was fiddling with the law at the University of Denver, what were you up to in your career?

I was litigating mortgage fraud cases and doing consumer fraud and some class actions. So I started off at legal aid and did disability work that I did when I opened up my own firm. So I had a practice in downtown St. Louis and that's where I took Wyatt after he was born. So Wyatt actually came to work with me every day. But I helped homeless people on the disability end, which was really nice. And every two weeks I went to the homeless shelter and fixed tickets and did things like that for the homeless community. And that let me keep my lights on so that I could do mortgage fraud cases and just cases that I wanted to work on. So the case that we almost tried, we got to the courthouse steps before finally Bill Helmick decided it would be in his best interest to finally settle it.

But I had 16 defendants and a woman in North City who had lost her house based on a $35,000 loan. It was really terrible. She came home one day after work was locked out of her house. She and her children slept in the car for several days. So we litigated that, but we had 16 different defendants because how many people the loan servicer had sent into her house to collect her belongings or to come in and steal her air conditioning, you name it. So actually Dick Share is a very well known. He was a well-known mediator. I miss him often these days because we have so many people who call us and say, "How do you get a mediator to listen to the data?" Because when I called him and said, "Hey, Dick, I know you keep telling me my case is worth double her house." That's it.

Double her house, so $70,000.

Double her house. They're like, "This is $70,000 case." And Alicia, I don't know how to tell them. These cases aren't very prevalent. We don't have a lot of results or case law to look at to compare what value is. And I said, "Well, Dick, I ran it with 600 people and it's telling me it's worth about $12 million."

Are you kidding me? Yeah.

And he said, "So tell me a little bit about what you did." So I sat through a call with him and explained it to him and he said, "You know what? I'm not going to call you again until they come up in their numbers." And he spent the next two weeks before trial calling him going, "Guys, she told me about this data she's collected and y'all are in trouble. You're really misguided about what this case is going to turn out to be. " And so after everything had kind of settled out and all the defendants were gone and case was over and Danielle was happy.

And by the way, and they ended up paying a solid middle seven figures number on a case they thought was worth 70 grand because that was the first time I think we saw that we sort of said, "Well, then if you think our data's bullshit and we can't be right," is like Alicia was sort of like, "Well, then cool. I'm so excited to try the case." And the jury was in the hallway waiting to get picked

When ... That was kind of a funny side story, but we know all the judges in St. Louis and the judge who was going to handle the case said to Alicia, Judge Dowd across the hall said he would try to mediate this and Judge Dowd gets a gold star because he hammered everybody and got the case done. But it was kind of when we saw for the first time, I think like, oh, first of all, we believed in the data because we knew something about the background of how we got there and we didn't have any reason to believe that people looking at the case with real evidence were just making stuff up. But we also started to see that mediators and the defense, if you really put them to their proof, weren't that willing to bet against real people seeing the real case either, which has been a theme that's sort of developed over the last 10 years.

Well, I think I still have the highest settlement for a mortgage fraud case in Missouri because when it went around on the listservs, nobody had gotten anything remotely close to what we settled it for. And then true to form, Dick had me out to his office afterwards. And so he and I sat down with the report that we had generated. He was like, "You walk me through this. I want to know more about this. I think this is going to change the face of mediation and I'm really into this. I think this is terrific." And I went through all of it with him and told him the result that we got and he was like, "Holy crap." He was so good at being a mediator and both plaintiff and defendants liked him that he was always my go- to guy. But after that, when I walked in with a data report, he was like, "All right, let's go.

" It was really

Great. So is it fair to say that your client got a little bit more than $70,000? I bet she got a new house with a fancy air conditioning system. Yes.

Yeah. I can tell you this. One of the settlements is on the record because it had to be because the defendant got sanctioned for not disclosing proper things in the pretrial filings and one defendant paid 2.3 million. And so the case, the data mattered, and of course being a gutsy lease is a gutsy lawyer. So being able to say no over and over again and say, "I'm just going to try it. " Of course, always matters. Outside of that, Charlo, by the way, you probably don't know this either. You didn't know you were the fourth case ever. You're also, you're the first person to ever say, "I'm just going to take this to mediation like that, " because in that asphalt case, I remember that we were studying in a large part to share it with the defendant and say, "We're not guessing at value.

Who knows how to value a case like this? Why not real people? " So that used to be uncommon. We'll talk about that, I'm sure. But it is interesting that over the last 10 years, we used to almost never see anybody willing to do that to now it's common practice to take your study at least to the mediator and to use that to anchor and think about your real value internally and then how you talk about it externally.

Now that you've reminded me that was the first case, I remember like yesterday we went to the mediation. It was in Houston and it was our second mediation, I think it was right before trial and they had really wanted an additional mediation. And I went down there by myself, my clients were available by phone and they started offering money and the adjuster was there, some big shot from New York City and he goes, "I'm not paying you a dime more." I said, "That's fine." And he goes, "You tell me why." And I said, "Why don't you come over here and let me show you why?" And I showed him that study. I remember that now. And he's like, "Okay." And I mean, we settled the case for substantially more, quite honestly, than I would have because my client desperately needed medical care. And you're in that quandary of ethical quandary of I want to take care of him.

But it gave me the confidence to know that what I was thinking the case was worth, the data showed that it was. And that was a great, great outcome. Those are great memories. And you don't have to tell me, Alicia's fearless. I mean, you pick on an underdog and she doesn't like bullies. We kind of have that in common. That's

The truth. Charlo, I'm going to tell you this. We're talking about this. I had a flashback to maybe the funniest moment I've ever had in a courtroom. We're getting ready to try this case and they say, because we were going to try it together, we were pretty excited about it. And so Judge Dowd says, "Come on over and we're going to try to mediate this. " And Judge Dowd says for one of the remaining defendants, I think a fair number in this case is probably a million dollars. I want you guys to go out there and talk in the hall about this. And this is without other people settled out, but you owe a million, just you.

The judge said this?

He did. And he said, "He said, I'm just going to tell you in the city of St. Louis, in this courthouse, you're lucky if you're going to only pay a million like that. " And so we go out in the hallway and finally the defendant comes around and says, Alicia's leading all the negotiations and he says, "But I'm kind of watching." And he says to Alicia, "All right, I talked to my client. We'll pay the million." And Alicia said, "That's not enough." And so we went in, we went back into the court and he says to the judge, he says, "Judge, we're trying, but I offered the million you told me to pay and she won't take it. " And the judge said without missing a beat, I thought it was a little low when I said it. And yeah, Alicia just kept on and kept on.

That defendant settled out too.

Alicia can be like a woodpecker on your brain, man. She will not give up. I know that about her. I knew it from the first time I met her. That's why we're kindred spirits. Okay. Girls rule, you know that, John, right?

I know. I'm just happy to be

Here. Okay. Let me ask you this. Y'all are now with a law firm called Campbell Law. Tell us what Campbell Law is and what you guys do under Campbell Law. Campbell Law

Studies cases for other lawyers and also litigates primarily excessive force cases. That's really the two pieces of Campbell Law.

Yeah. So I mean, really Campbell Law's evolution is that same case that Alicia was settling was Campbell Law.

Campbell law, yeah.

When I went to the University of Denver, within about a year, I joined Alicia's firm and took some cases over there that I had that were class actions and we kept working on cases. And then as we started to study cases, over time it became clear to us, at first we thought of studying cases as something you do that's a service in the legal industry. And then it became pretty clear to us that it's a form of specialty lawyering, no different than bringing in appellate counsel because that's what they do or discovery, somebody who's an expert lawyer, but at scientific discovery or figuring out experts or getting through e-discovery. What we do is we infuse cases with big data empirical studies so that we have better information to make better decisions in cases. We also know a lot about cases both from being lawyers and then seeing thousands of them, but our specialty is getting really good information reliably from real people so that we're not guessing in the cases.

Now at Campbell Law, a lot of Campbell Law's work is partnering with lawyers to study their cases. Sometimes being paid by those lawyers, like you'd hire an appellate lawyer and say, "Here's your flat fee for the appeal." Sometimes working contingently on those cases and studying them repeatedly. Sometimes getting asked to get involved in those cases either to help pick the jury or last year, Alicia tried two cases where she was in the courtroom trying the case with other lawyers and helping with the trial of the case so that data's kind of getting infused throughout. And then we have a subset of sort of more traditional lawyering where we work on, and one of the cases Alicia tried was an excessive force police shooting case where a white cop killed a black kid. And that's kind of the two camps of Campbell Law now.

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Okay. Let's go to the hot topic, big data. And John, you have sat down with me many times to get me to understand it. And if I can understand it, I want to say I think anybody can understand it, but talk to our listeners who have never heard about big data studies. Can y'all just explain to us what it is?

Sure. In the simplest version, our studies are meant to solve a fundamental problem that you have if you try to understand your cases with small groups. I mean, I'd state from the start, I think focus groups and in- person work where you study your case with 10 or 12 people has value, lots of ways, but we were all sort of taught, "Hey, you can't think this tells you the perfect outcome. You can learn things from this and you certainly can't use this to determine value or how much fault you're going to get exactly, but you can learn from it. " Well, that was a limitation of having 10 or 12 people in a room and they could be idiosyncratic. I always say to people, think of it like this, if you heard that a medicine had been approved for use on the general public and they'd studied it on 10 people, you'd be deeply concerned.

You'd say, "Well, hold on. How do I know those 10 people are like other people and why wouldn't they study it on a thousand people and see if it's different by gender or age or race or whatever?" Why wouldn't they do those things? What we do is really just solve the small number problem by taking case presentations. So we take the plaintiff case and defense case that with the attorney we're working with, we learn the case, we work with them. We put together a presentation that is part text, part diagrams, exhibits. We work with the lawyers to put together a presentation. They put first drafts together and then we help and we turn it into something that we can show people online. And the minute you can show it to people online where they're kind of like on an interactive website, now you don't need to show it to 10 people.

You could show it to 200 or 300 or 500 or 1,000. And this was borrowed from the academic methods where you knew you needed big enough samples to have statistically significant findings to be able to say not just this works, but it works with certain people differently than other types of people. And so in a nutshell, if you say, "What are you doing?" We're taking a case presentation that is meant to be the real case distilled. The key evidence really included, key depo clips or key animation or the dash cam footage or the body cam footage or whatever included. We're showing it to hundreds every once in a while, thousands of real people online that we do lots of things to vet and make sure they're real and paying attention and understood what they saw and are taking the time they should. And then we can do a lot of really good analysis of what is most likely to occur in the case, what the outlying possibilities are, what the likely value and value range is, how false likely to turn out, what types of people are more likely to have biases that hurt the case, what types of people are more likely to understand it, and all sorts of other things.

And big data is meant to have the attorney whose case it is move through both sets, the plaintiff and the defense presentation and the verdict form and the jury instructions today, as part of the process, really learn and know their own file and know their case and can see the holes so that we can test those things and get them answers about how different variables are affecting outcome, damages, win rate, those type of things. Part of big data is also for the lawyer to get to know their case in a way that's not, "Oh crap, I need to do this two weeks before I have a trial." It's so that you can actually ... I get this question a lot. We don't have lawyers presenting online because we know from the academic literature, the number one indicator of a plaintiff win is the plaintiff's strength of evidence.

So all we're trying to do is put the way you're going to present your case with your key evidence, what the defense is going to say about your key evidence and what they're going to put forward, and in that kind of scenario, who wins and who loses.

That's a great point that part of the process is, and it's a headache sometimes,

Is somebody calls us and says, "I want you to study my case," and they tell us all about the plaintiff case and say, "All right, we tell us the defense position." And then what they say is, "The defendant thinks this, but they're wrong." And I say, "No, no, no. Tell it to me like you're them. I mean, really give me the defense position as best you can. " And sometimes that's very hard. So even just rupturing that kind of confirmation bias and bubble is important. And then if you have real people look at the case and you gave the defense their best day, if it comes back, the number of people supporting the plaintiff's case isn't as good as maybe that attorney had hoped, yeah, that's unpleasant, but better to find out then than at trial because we also know not only that 40% of all people aren't voting for the plaintiff, but we know why.

We know what types of people are having the hardest time with your case. We know in their own words what they say they'd need to be persuaded differently. And so then you can get to work in improving the case. And so yeah, I think of big data as a way to stop guessing because if somebody asks me, is it better if I have the defendant doctor in or if I just named the hospital, we don't assume we run a study with the hospital and the doctor in, and then we run another version of the study with just the hospital in, and then we look at which one produced a better rate. And then you should pick the one that turns out better.

Although I like to think of it too as like, we always talk about the results because everybody loves getting the ... Well, not everyone loves getting their report, but some people really like getting their reports. But really the other part is it's a way to get to know your case better. And I think it's another part of it that we don't probably sell enough in terms of what big data gets you. But for a lot of people, I have them write me afterwards and go, "I don't think I've ever sat through and hated a process so much as putting together-"

The defense case.

The defense case, but really it's something lawyers need to do much, much more often.

Two things about that. I've done the big data studies. We get so busy and we're pulled in 15,000 different directions, but when you're spending money to do this study, you want to do it right and it makes you dig deep. It really does. And it makes you think, how am I going to lose this case? We all get pumped up about our case. I can win. This case is great. I always try to think, okay, I've never had a case yet that I couldn't lose. John, even if you told me I was going to win 10 out of 10, I would still think there's at least a half a one I could lose.

It's a healthy way to think.

And I know it's probably my own paranoia, but how am I going to lose this case? And doing this big data study, it forces you to really look at what the defense is saying and it pokes holes. It lets you see where your weaknesses are. And one thing, Alicia, I loved it when John said, "We, we, we do this. " You said, "No, the attorneys do it. " Because when we hire you, we have to come up with the synopsis of the case and that's work and sometimes you don't want to do it, but it is work that is needed. So take us through how that goes. I call you and I say, "Okay, John and Alicia, I have this case. I want to do a big data study." You then tell me what? That you need

To put together the plaintiff's presentation and the defense presentation as close as to what you expect will happen at trial and that we don't want 25 pages on the plaintiff's side and a five-page defense. We want it robust as possible. What are all the things they've been saying to you that you were like ... I mean, if you're like me, the defense walks up and goes, "You know what's wrong with your case, Alicia?" I'm always like, "Shut up, shut up, shut up." And so what's really important is what have they been saying? What are the things they're filing? What are they arguing in court and distilling that into what is their likely thought process at trial? Because they're not going to come in and just roll over. And so once you have that done and it's robust, you send it to us because at that point is when we're going to start going through it and we're going to go through it phase number one with your verdict form.

With what you've presented, can jurors answer the verdict form questions? Because if they can't, they're going to write us and say, "You know what? I can't answer any of these questions about the verdict because there's not enough information." So we go through it the first pass that way. And then the second pass we go through is, is this really coming in? Will someone actually testify to this? Do you have proof of this policy you say they break? And we need to make this a robust evidence-based kind of presentation so that the jurors are getting the best replica of what you expect is going to happen at trial.

Yeah, I would add to that. So if you think of it as the job of the lawyer after we have a call with them, we learn about their case, we learn about their concerns. We often have instincts right away because that case, we may have studied a case like it 10 times by now.

So we might say, "Well, hold on, let me ask." Normally the defense is going to say in an MTBI case the following three things, "Do they have somebody for all that? Do you have a DTI?" Or, "Okay, this is a birth injury case. Is this a fetal heart rate kind of case? How bad is the strip? Do you have the strip? What is it? " So we're going to dig in enough that we understand what you're thinking and what you're worried about as a lawyer. And then we're going to say, we're going to send you models, guides and examples to draft your case presentation. So you're not on an island, and then you're going to send them to us. When we go through them, we're asking questions like, for example, "Hey, this is some really good dirt on this defendant doctor." What's your certainty it'll be admitted?

Because if somebody says to us, honestly, there's going to be a motion in limine and it's probably fifty fifty whether it comes in, that's okay. We can run a version with it in, we can run another version with it out and then we can quantify. Sometimes we find out, oh, it doesn't matter that the win rate didn't change, the value didn't change, quit worrying about that.

Or you may have a case where it's a motor vehicle accident and I write and say, "Was your person in a seatbelt?" And they write back, I always get this, "Oh, in my jurisdiction, that doesn't come in. " And I always write back and say, "Well, we're going to test it with an in and out anyway, because there's not going to be a juror sitting there who's thinking, I bet they had their seatbelt on from the car."

So then they're just going to be sitting there wondering, why doesn't the plaintiff want me to know that they don't have their seatbelt on? So you can be causing yourself some credibility issues even though the law allows you not to put it in. So we do all of that probably on that second pass that I was talking about. First, we make sure this is concrete enough for verdict decision making, but then we are going to go through and say, "Hey, if you have a fetal heart rate case, you need to teach the medicine first. We've learned this now from running what, 50 of those." Right.

We don't have to run another study to tell you-

We know what you need to do to set this one up that gets the best results for jurors to understand that medicine and make a determination. So we go back through and try to give you tips and ask pointed questions about what it is that you're presenting and why. And then a lot of times what I'm doing is, "Hey, if I'm a defendant in this case, what about this argument? Have you thought of that? " We'll go through the defense case as well and try to really push back to make sure that the defense case is as accurate as possible.

When that's done, the process from there for the lawyer gets easy because when the presentation is done and we know what the verdict form's going to look like, what we need to ask jurors to decide, we then set about building a study that is scientifically valid, that will be put online, that will recruit ordinary people that are not looking, where they're not captive jurors to come in and do this work of being a juror. We'll check that they're paying attention. We have obvious and non-obvious ways to make sure they're not leaving the screen, that they're understanding what they're seeing, that they're giving us honest information about themselves. And then when we have this pile of data, there's lots of tricks to making sure you're getting good data, analyzing and cleaning the data, and then you have to make sense of it. Alicia's got her sweatshirt on.

We just got as a gift yesterday. Neither one of us went to Cornell, but the two people who run our data team, us in Madrid and just left this morning, and they both in the last year were recruited as full professors at Cornell. And so we have people much smarter than us on the data side who all they've done is work on law and human behavior.

I went to Grayson County Junior College, John, so you can't top that one.

Well, I mean, I'm close. I went to, and so Alicia, we met at Concordia University.

Yeah. Okay, you got me pretty close.

Pretty close.

I know there's something, LawDragon or something. They showed me in it and they showed these other lawyers. There's Harvard, Yale. I'm like, well, we called Grayson County Junior College Harvard on the Hill. So does that count? Let me tell you one thing, John, that you always literally pushed into my brain is when I'm doing these, because like you said, Alicia, I didn't want to talk about the defense case. Oh, it's a bunch of bullshit. We're not going to talk about that. But John, you always told me, Charlotte, put the best defense case out there in the study. ... study. And it took a lot for you to pound that in my brain. But I have learned how important that is because when I get the study back, I know this is their best day. I'm not holding anything back. I have a tendency to hold back on my case more than I would the defense.

And number one, it gives me accurate data in the best case scenario. Number two, if you're going to use the study to share with the defense at mediation and they say, "Well, you probably didn't show this or you didn't show that. " Well, let me just show you what I did. And I did that in the asphalt case. It woke them up. It really, really did.

We always tell people, look, whether it happens or not, you ought to be able to take your defense case and hand it to the defendant and have them say, "This is as good or better than I would've done." And if that's true, if you want it for mediation, it'll be useful. If you want to be able to trust it deep in your core, because what's the good of getting data if somewhere inside you kind of know you put your thumb on the scale. But if you want to believe genuinely that you really do have an 80% win rate and it really is worth $10 million, you better know that you gave the defense their absolute best day. The other thing we're very proud of, I think two things we're really proud of over the last 10 years is one, we've now tracked over a hundred verdicts where we predicted what would happen and then the case got tried and there was a verdict and the average verdict is 22% higher than our prediction, which is how we'd like it to be.

I love

That. When

Somebody says, "Oh, you say the case is worth $10 million," the correct answer is, "Yeah, but it's probably 12.2 and we're okay with that because we're giving you ways to improve the case. We have data on what's working and what could be better. We have it, what jurors you should prefer and worry about. And our model's built to be conservative. We are not in the business of overvaluing cases. We're glad to be there." The other thing is, is we ask every juror who they think sponsored this study and they can pick plaintiff, defense, mediator, court, academic institution, both sides or I can't tell. And historically, over three quarters of all of our jurors say somebody besides the plaintiff, even though the plaintiff put it together, and even though a lot of times these are very strong plaintiff cases, we can trust that data because then we know our participants aren't trying to please us.

They don't know who us is. And those two data points for us have been something we've constantly watched because it doesn't make any sense at all. And I tell people this sometimes, and sometimes they look at me a little stunned, is they give me the plaintiff case, the plaintiff case, and they send me a two-page defense case and I say, "Hey, I can run this. You're going to have 100% win rate and your case is worth a billion dollars, but it's bullshit and I'm not going to do it. Keep your money because we're not in the business of producing fake data." That's not useful.

John and Alicia, a lot of people have asked me because I knew I was really a fan of your work early on. What does it do for you? And I can tell you from me personally, because we always say it's an important case. Well, you know what? For your client, usually it's their only case. We'll have another one as lawyers, but this is their life. And it's a big burden when a lot of money is offered on a case and you're like, oh my gosh, I always struggle with, is it my ego taking over? Is it me wanting to go get another record setting verdict? And I always hope and really analyze myself, why do I think the case is worth this? Is this best for the client? And what your studies have done have given me solace to know after 40 years, I usually have a pretty good idea what something's worth, but it gives me the scientific data, as you have always told me, statistical data.

John, isn't that your favorite? Statistically correct.

Statistically significant. That's

What I like. That's it. Statistically significant. I love that word. I always forget it, but it's statistically significant, Charla. And when I get the study from you guys, it lets me know I'm not being outlandish on our demand. It gives me the confidence to say, "I'm going to hold firm on this. " When you're talking about the accuracy of your studies, y'all will remember right before COVID, our small firm in 13 months tried four cases to avert it. One was against a high school football player who had drugged and raped a 14-year-old, and we knew that we weren't going to get any money in that case. So we didn't study that one because it was pretty much a pro bono. But the other three cases, and they were everything from a product defect to dram shop, to a wrongful death with a Greyhound bus. You remember that one?

I remember that. And you did studies on all of those and it was amazing the percentage that you came in on comparative fault, the verdict range, every one of them you were spot on. And at that time, we were trying so many cases. I was like, "Oh my God, have I misjudged this? " And I go back to the study. I'm like, "No, John and Alicia say, this is statistically significant right here. I can rely on it. "

You know what I remember that the case you had with the product case where the seatbelt in the middle back seat was defective, I remember that in that case, one of the interesting things too was is that you had an expert who had ordinary people try to put on the seatbelt and out of 15 or whatever there were, none of them could do it right, which was powerful evidence.

Out of 30 people, 28 of them put it on exactly as my client had.

And I remember we tested it with and without that because it was a little uncertain whether it would come in. And it was one of those expert things where your expert was so clever and that was so simple for people that it made a significant difference in the outcome of that case.

It did. And that actually came into evidence. You'll love this. The lawyer on the ... I've never tried a product case before. This is my first one. And the lawyer on the other side travels all over the country and tries products cases. He's a big shot. If you don't believe me, ask him and he'll tell you. We picked the first jury and we busted the panel because it was a horrible, horrible jury. So he coccily walks over to me, he said, "Okay, you ready for the next round next week?" And I'm like, "I think I'm ready. And by then, I think I'm going to understand what a defect is. " He just died. It made him so stinking mad. It was so much fun. We whipped his tail.

Was his first name Ken?

Kurt.

Okay. He's a different attorney that tries product cases that will tell you how good he is.

I'm going to understand what a defect is next time. And I may make the jury understand it too. How about that? Pen a red rose on that, Mr. Otto defect lawyer. Anyway, I've had so many great experiences with you guys. And I got to tell you, for those of you who are interested in doing these case studies, John and Alicia, tell us when you think a lawyer should hire you guys. When is the most cost efficient way to hire you in the process of a case?

Boy. It depends on the lawyer's goals a little. And here's what I mean by that. We have a lot of people who hire us to do one big study, kind of like what we've been talking about where you're putting the whole case on and you're trying a few different damage asks. So maybe some groups of jurors are seeing different damage asked. Maybe we're testing it within and without a questionable piece of evidence, good or bad. Maybe we're testing it with and without a punitive claim because who knows if the court will allow it. And then you're getting this study of four or 500 people with the different scenarios and value and what's happening, most likely outcomes, jury analysis. And they can go use that for mediation. And if it doesn't settle and anything changes, they can do a little follow on for trial or just use that study for trial and they're kind of one and done.

We have lots of people who do that. If you're going to do that process, you need the case to be mostly baked or at least know where it's going because if somebody says, "I don't know how they're going to defend this one. They got a couple different things they could do with their experts." A lot of times we'll say, "Look, unless you really need this right away, wait because don't spend all this money and time and get it all done and then find out they pivoted. And now we need to run a whole new study because we're not sure if this will hold true." And the reason I was kind of hesitated about timing is on the other hand, increasingly, both because Alicia came up with Focus with Fred, which is-

We're going to talk about Fred here in a minute.

Yeah, which is sort of Big Data's little brother. I know y'all have worked with it too, and you can get a cheaper, faster study done with 75 people. Now we have people that call to do that before they even take a case because they think if I'm going to spend $250,000 working up a case, I think I'll spend $7,500 first and find out what 75 people think of it. And if I'm so far underwater, either I'm going to reject it or at least I'm going to go in eyes wide open. We just had somebody write and say, "Hey, I've got a police-successed force case. I'm thinking I'm going to take it. It's all on video. Can I just show people the video and find out where I am if they see what I know will not change?" Well, that you could do as early as you want.

What we are doing more and more of, if you think about putting those two things together is we get called more and more now to come into cases early, make suggestions about studying them throughout, starting with these smaller studies that are exploratory to know what's working, what isn't, what do jurors want to know. If we ask them, "What else would you like to see? What do we need to go get? " If we say, "How would you vote for the defense? What are the weak spots that we need to deal with? " And then we might do that, run a study before mediation, run a follow-on study, study their opening statement before they give it, then get the CVN opening statement, study it in real time and get results in 24 hours. And we might have 1,200 people who've been through that case from beginning to end, including studying it during trial.

Yeah,

Like I did in

Saguaro

Study with the dailies so that you know.

You studied with the daily transcripts?

Yeah, I studied. Wow. So I helped Sean try Salgaro because it was Sean, me and Jordan Logan and Jim Murphy, but I presented all the Spanish speaking witnesses. And so once that was done, I got the dailies every day and basically spent time calling that down to create a presentation. And then Sean and I sat down and said, "Okay, what are our goals? What do we want to do? " And we knew there was evidence coming in the following Monday, but I needed to run it really quickly over the weekend. So we ran it with everything that had come in so that we could make the demand to the defense on Saturday. And then I ran it with a manipulation of what we believed was going to come in on Monday so that when Sean got his testimony on Monday that he wanted, he came and he sat down at the table and was like, "I get to pull this off for now.

Yeah? " Because we knew it was much better once the Monday testimony came in since we had run it both ways. So he sat down and I was like, "You pull it. " So we pulled the offer Monday after the testimony that we knew changed the value for us and then just waited on the verdict.

Oh my gosh. I would love to have been watching all of that. That's like a movie.

It was neat, Charla, because I was back in Madrid. Alicia's there. She was Sean, they're trying the case.

Was it in St. Louis? It was in Denver. Denver. Okay.

I remember you telling me Alicia's in trial. Yeah, we lived together in a house in Denver. I went from Sean and I writing a book together and I know Sean really well and to like, we all just moved in and had this house that we walked two blocks to court. And didn't y'all get a humdinger of a verdict? 145

Million. Yeah. That's a humdinger of a verdict. It's a humding. And it was

Right- Here's the fun point. The data was 138.

Yes. Oh my gosh. I just love that. I think that is so cool that I'm not even going to ask how much that costs. Let's have that for a different conversation. Have Alicia there within trial running the data. Makes me feel like that movie where they have those experts.

Well, since we're talking about this, I will just tell you, this is increasingly, and that's why we do it through our law firm is this was a case where we just jumped in and we were contingent in the case. Our specialty was, we infused data. Then of course, Alicia then also got involved in trying it. But the nice thing is, is we ran that case probably six times. It's incredibly difficult to get opening statements, cut them and run them and have results in 12 hours. We pushed our team, but we also knew that this was what's best for the client. And for us, we had exactly the same goal as every other lawyer in that case, which is to maximize its value. Nobody could wonder about that. Nobody wondered if we were selling them a study. We were working to get the best result we could, including for ourselves.

So that was an easy model.

The case came into me and then I said, "You should bring in Sean." And I remember running the first study and I was like, "Hey, we're going to do this together." And then I told him, I was like, "And I think what we need to do is run the openings and then I think we should run the daily and then we should write jury vault two." That's what I think we should do because I have all these ideas about where data ... I mean, we've kind of gotten data for mediation and trial where it needs to be, but I think it needs to be used. And we've been talking a lot about this in the House, not just the dailies to know and have a shadow jury, but also in appellate cases where we can demonstrate that maybe a judge and a motion to dismiss or a motion for summary judgment, taken facts, read them incorrectly and no juror would agree with how they're interpreting the facts to throw a case out.

So there's a lot of implications for data even in the appellate level, at least we think.

Even just for example, you can imagine that often in criminal cases, they allow evidence in or exclude evidence and there's a criminal conviction. And then when you go up on appeal, even though the court concludes that the evidence shouldn't have been included or should have, and it was error, they say it was harmless here and it didn't cause any prejudice. Imagine if you had a data study that showed that a hundred real people, when shown that evidence or not, it significantly changed the conviction rate. Well, then it'd be very hard to argue it was harmless.

Oh, I love

That. And so we have our eyes set kind of on that whole horizon. So I called Sean, I said, "Hey man, I think we can try this one together, which how cool." And then we can run dailies and expand data a little bit and see what happens. And the first time I ran it and I sent him the report, he called me and he was like, "Alicia Campbell, I mean, I don't take cases with 60% win rates. What the hell?" He was so like, "It's going to be all right. It's going to be all right."

And the case got better and better, but it got better and better in part by learning what wasn't working and dealing

With it. Having those dailies, that's like having a shadow jury on steroids. I mean, amazing.

And Charla, I will tell you, this is doable. People were starting to see ways to do it. So for example, your buddy Brian Panish had a case where we had studied it and it was testing as really hard. We had that presentation done. I'd had a call with Brian and we talked about the data and they went to trial, but after a week, the case got a lot better. And so I got an email from Brian saying, "Hey, if we alter that presentation, can you run it again?" So his team redlined the presentation to match the evidence, but they got to work off the existing ones so they didn't have to start from scratch. We took those red lines, sent them to our team and said, "Make exactly these changes. It's the same verdict form and same questions go. " And 24 hours later, we had a report and lo and behold, that case went from like 50% win rate to 80% win rate and that was doable in short period with a little bit of forethought.

And so-

Was that the Las Vegas case?

No, this was a California case that had to do with whether or not a worker was in the course and scope of employment when he hit somebody with his truck.

Well, let me tell you my quick turnaround story. I got called to ... You know what I'm going to say, I think, John. I got called to try a case in Orange County, California, and I got into it and we're kind of in the trial. I'm like, "Ugh, I'm not feeling real good about this. " So I called John, I said, "Do you love me? " He goes, "What do you want? " I said, "No, how much do you love me? " He goes, "What do you want? " And I said, "I need a case study." He goes, "How quickly?" I said, "Quickly." He said, "When's it set for trial?" I said, "I'm in the middle of it. " I remember. And he said, "Okay." Do you remember that, John?

I remember because my memory of this is y'all were in selection already and it was like, we think we can make it take a little longer.

We had to delay. We were talking real slow. I had that twang, slow Texas draw going to try to drag that out. Anyway, you called me, you gave me a heads up before you sent the report and you said, "You're not going to like it. " And then he said, "You're going to lose this case two out of three times." I said, "That's kind of what I thought." So we ended up trying that case with all the bravado in the world. I mean, we're kicking their butt, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But in my mind, I was like, "I'm settling this case." So we're on two tracks to settle it. We're on a track of settling it outright in a high low track and I'm negotiating, just lying my tail off about, "Oh, we're kicking your butt, blah, blah, blah, blah." Anyway, the jury was out and I was trying to figure out, okay, which one am I going to take because I'm going to take one or the other.

And the lawyer was way down the hall in the defense lawyer in his room and a question came out, which we knew they were still on liability and my client did not want to settle because God had told her not to. I said, "Okay. And that's kind of hard sometimes."

So

The bailiff came and knocked on the door and said, "We have a verdict." And I turned to my client, I said, "Jesus, just talk to me and I'll be right back." So I hauled butt down to the door where the defense lawyer was and knocked on the door and he opened the door and I said, "We'll take it. " He goes, "Which one?" I said, "I'm not sure yet, but we'll take one of them, either the high, low, or the outright settlement." And I went back and told the client, I said, "Jesus, talk to me and it's time to get this thing done." And we ended up settling that case. And I got to tell you, but for that study, that would not have happened because you know how you get in trial and you start believing you're on BS sometimes because you have to to try to mix the jury.

But that is a way that we ... I would not encourage anyone to wait till you're in jury selection to call John and Alicia and ask for a study, but it did pull my rear end out of the ditch in that time. Okay. We got to talk about Fred, Alicia.

Well, Fred is something that I came up with in 2016, but we didn't build him out until what? Two years ago maybe? 20 years

Ago.

And so Fred is meant for smaller cases, ones where people still want to know if they have what's the right value for a case. Because even if it's a million dollar policy, do you settle it for 250 or 750? So it's for people who want to know that kind of information, but really the case value or the policy doesn't really allow big data kind of bills for it. So Fred's good for that. And Fred's also good. The way that we use it and on our contingent model, the way we use it for lawyers, and it's really what we do on our own cases is we start early and often. And so Fred is really good at giving you feedback all the way up until discovery is closed because there's always things that jurors are seeing because I like information that comes out that I'm like, "Oh, this is so great.

Oh, they're going to hate this guy." And then I run it and it really tempers my enthusiasm and reminds me that I need to be writing discovery to get at the things that jurors want to know more about based on that testimony and not just relying on how I interpret something to be all the evidence that I have. So Fred is good for those two scenarios. It's 75 jurors. You can have 3,500 words total, meaning for the plaintiff and the defense case.

And that's strict. You make a stick with that.

Yes. It's not really negotiable. It's 3,500 words or bust. And then you can have up to 10 minutes of video, five minutes on each side. We don't let you do two and eight. We're trying to limit attorneys trying to skew things. So it's up to five minutes on each side of video that you can put in, Fred. And then 75 jurors across the country will look at it. We don't test down into venue. We don't do any of that. We give you a national sample of Americans. So it's like the same as census data. TBD that works on our big data is part of Fred. So they're still on the backend. We have all the checks, everything that we're doing on big data we're doing on Fred. It's just meant to get at cases that a lot of times people call and say, "I don't think I can justify this.

" Or you call us with a big data request and we say, "Well, actually this is way too early." So that's what really Fred's for because at about 75 people, you're getting a rid of the noise that exists in data. You're getting to a large enough sample of people that we can tell you what your win rate is, what your damages look like, injury severity. We can tell you you can do ratings of evidence that's presented in both the plaintiff, the defense case. You can have open-ended feedback from jurors as well. We can test ecos, non-ecos and punitive damages. We can also do fault allocation. So he's pretty robust. It's just a limited version of facts for you either because you're early in the case or you just can't write more even though you'd like to on your million dollar case, but it results in three to five days.

And the other way that we keep costs down is it's an interface. So basically you log on, you have an account with Fred, and once you get onto Fred, you upload the presentations that you have already written, and then it's about 15 minutes of a build where you just are inserting information that Fred's asking you about because we're double checking what's your plaintiff's name, what's your defense's name, how many defendants do you have? Because at this point we can test two plaintiffs and two defendants, but what are you asking for? Are you asking? So really what the interface when you build Fred is to double check that you know what's in your presentation if you want the nitty-gritty so that people go, "Oh wait, I don't know how many requests I put in or did I put in one request or did I even request damages?" The Fred interface kind of forces you to make sure you look back through your presentation and verify the information that's there.

Once the 15-minute builds over, you pay and three to five business days later you have a report in your inbox with all of that information win rate, everything I described earlier so that you can have a sense of what the case is worth according to Fred.

Maybe if you'd said Fred in 30 seconds, because I kind of on the outside looking in, what's cool about Fred is it's a do- it-yourself small data builder because we're not going to sit with you and help work on that presentation and ask questions, but that also means you're not going to be paying for the time of lawyers helping you with it. We know enough about from 10 years of building studies that you could sort of make a clickable interface that lets you build the boiled down simpler one. And so you can imagine for a lawyer, once they know how Fred works, they sit down and write a plaintiff presentation and defense presentation. They use the models. There's even templates on Fred to help them. And then they go to this do- it-yourself clickable thing and say, "Yeah, there's this many plaintiffs, this many defendants, there's ecos, there's non-ecos, there's fault divided by these parties.

I'd like to ask them how they view these 10 pieces of evidence. I'd like to ask these open-ended questions and click go and pay." Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, not much longer later, that next week, the report comes in. And so we're seeing a lot of people that once they get used to Fred, this is something they do on lots of cases or firms that have one big case, but 20 medium and smalls buying packets of Fred to do 10 or 20 of them because even except for the really elite lawyers like you, most people have one big data case. For every one big data, there's 10 Freds.

I love it. You know that Fred is Alicia's baby because every time she talks about him, I envision this person. She never says it. It's always Fred. And Fred will tell you, "I want to meet Fred sometime." I love it. Okay, let's talk about jury ball. Alicia, you said you and Sean Claggett. By the way, I finally got to meet him. He came and spoke to the Dallas trial lawyers and he was on our podcast.

It'd be great.

I loved it. He showed up in blue jeans, had his shirt tucked out and the baseball cap on. I'm like, "Okay, this is my kind of guy." But anyway, jury ball. I read jury ball number one y'all wrote with Sean Claggett. Tell us what jury ball is all about.

Jury ball, the book, jury ball, shameless plug, juryball.com, you can get it. We donate all the proceeds, so we don't keep any of the money. The proceeds go to Justice Watch and the Justice Through Empirical Data Institute. So they're to help the plaintiff's bar advance and to help make sure academic studies are informing court's decisions, not guesses about everything from jury instructions to rules of evidence to jury selection.

But jury ball was really born out of us studying cases crossing paths with Sean a number of times, both in his own cases and cases where he'd been called in to consult and kind of be the gadfly, do work days with people, ask them hard questions, make them think about what their direct and cross is going to look like, help them with their openings if maybe they needed that kind of thing. And then we kept getting these really good verdicts out of that. And so we all sat down in Madrid. Alicia and I wrote the sort of, what is it to study cases, the conversation we're having today? What is big data? What's empirical studies? Why do we believe you can study cases and predictably know what will happen? How do you turn questions into empirical questions with yes, no answers and right answers? And then Sean wrote the, and how do you take that and put it into practice in your case and actually use it so that it's not just a great fancy report, but it didn't change the way you tried the case.

We had some success with that. And then out of that was born the jury ball conferences, which we've now had Jury Ball Madrid, Jury Ball Vegas. We've had about 370 lawyers come to those. And Charla, I know you're coming to Jury Ball Madrid, which we're really excited about.

I am. I'm excited.

As we've continued to evolve and learn about data, that's gotten us to jury ball. The first book was called jury ball kind of revolution. The next one will be jury ball evolution, which will be the idea of sort of infusing data throughout cases beyond what is the basic idea of this and how do you use it to, what would it look like if you had this mindset in a case from start to finish, including in opening in the dailies, all the way through? What does that look like and how do you do it?

Or on appeal. It's just this whole model of using data throughout the case and ways that you can leverage it to either convince a judge maybe their decisions about voir dire and how they're going to handle it are wrong or in appellate court. We've just tried to expand how you can use it so that it's most helpful, especially as judges are appointed and things are occurring politically, that you're going to need a little bit more leverage than, "Hey, this is the way I think you should do it. "

And I had never thought about it on appeal, but that is absolutely brilliant. I love that idea. I just got to say this. Have you guys ever sat down and just let yourself absorb the fact of how many plaintiffs, injured people, people have been through hardships, your work is helping?

I mean, yeah. I mean, I think I would be lying to say that we haven't had moments where it has seemed surreal that something that we kind of started to do to answer a simple question for ourselves grew into something where we've had the privilege of working with ... I mean, there's kind of two privileges. The first one being there's lots of people that I think their cases have turned out better and hopefully that means they've gotten more medical care, more help, they've rested a little easier. It's also meant for us, we've gotten to work with wonderful lawyers all over the country that not only have we got to work on really cool cases and we're nerds that way. We love diving into these really interesting worked up, complex, different cases, but we've also gotten to see how those lawyers work those cases, which has made us better lawyers and people like you, we've made wonderful friends in the community all over the country doing this.

And so we feel really fortunate to be doing what we're doing. And not everybody has a job they wake up to and feels excited and happy about or proud of. I mean, I heard when I was a young consumer attorney, they used to say, "If you can do well while doing good, you're pretty lucky." And that's probably how we feel.

Oh man, that's good. And you get to do it from Madrid.

That too.

I told you, I woke up this morning, I was thinking about you guys and I thought, talk about two people who live life according to their own drumbeat. It's you guys taking your boys over to Madrid and showing them the world. It is absolutely amazing. Well, when I was thinking about the impact you had, I can just tell you from me personally, the clients that you have helped me help is so very meaningful. Your legacy is going to be amazing. Is there any pointers that you can give lawyers, advice, young trial lawyers specifically that you've learned from all of these studies on what they should or should not do, just absolutes in the courtroom?

I have a couple that come to mind. I bet you do too. Here's one in the courtroom and out, but in the courtroom in particular, I think lawyers, one of the things we're seeing is that all cases should be thought of as a product liability case. And this is what I mean. In product liability cases, you often have to prove a reasonable alternative design. And because you can't say it's defective, but then there's no real solution, right? There's no other real way. What we've seen across cases is that if you as a teacher, not as a persuader, lay out what should happen, lay out enough to understand the situation, lay out what a reasonable person or doctor or truck driver would do and how that would turn out and then lay that beside what actually happened. An amazing thing happens, which is the jurors start to figure out the negligence on their own before you tell them because they can already see, they can feel that ... So you can imagine, for example, you say, when somebody comes into an ER and they have symptoms like this, they could be signs of a stroke.

There are two types of stroke. One's a bleed and one's kind of a block. You have to run tests to look for it. And if you do, you'll either find it or if you don't. If you do, you'll do these things that administer these meds or take this course, and here's how the person will turn out. If you then start to say now, when they came in with these symptoms, the jurors are saying, "I bet they had a stroke." And then if you say, "They only ran this one test for the bleed stroke," they're thinking, "Why didn't they do the block stroke?" They've gotten to the negligence on their own because you gave them how it should have happened, the alternative design, and you haven't done any persuading yet. And so to me, one of the things we've seen is that pushing too early, too fast, overselling, believing that you can just show the defendants evil and therefore the jurors will jump over causation, all this stuff, I don't think is true.

I think what jurors like and what they seem to respond to and what any good case should be able to hold up to is to be able to very clearly and precisely explain what it is when done right so that then when you lay out the facts of what happened, the juror is already concluding that it was done wrong. And to me, that takes discipline, but we see that in cases worked up that way and then presented that way, the result is better and jurors have more ownership over their own decision that there was something wrong.

John, you just made me a better lawyer. And I'm not just saying that. I have never thought of it in that way about a product defect more reasonable alternative. That is absolutely brilliant.

Oh, thanks.

I love it. Brown knows, you know that. I'll say exactly what I think. That is amazing. Alicia.

Thank you.

It really is. I'm already thinking of cases the way I'll approach it because of that.

Well, I will just say we're really lucky that I wish I could take credit for it. But the neat thing about studying lots of cases is you see what works and what doesn't. And we've seen cases where the attorneys start by telling you everything bad the defendant's ever done, every cheat they've done to the government, every way they've lied, every way they hid their science, everything. And then they get to, and oh, they made this product and here's how it failed and the drug caused this thing. And what they're hoping is people will be so damn mad at the defendant that they won't ask, "Yeah, but was this defective and did it cause this problem?" And what we've seen is jurors are too sophisticated for that. They will say, "I agree, there are sons of bitches and they're an evil company, but I don't think this product caused that cancer," for example.

And you know what, John, that also helps you in doing something I've always said needs to be done is empowering the jury. You're giving them the leeway to make up their mind rather than shoving it down their throats, basically.

Well, and not to beat this point to death, but we've all been in the mall and had somebody come up to us and try to sell us something and say, "Do you want this lotion? We'll put this lotion on your hand." Almost everybody immediately walks to the other side or says, "No, thank you. I'm busy." They went to the mall to buy stuff. You go to the mall to buy stuff, and yet when someone offers to sell you something, you're repulsed. Why? They came on too strong, too fast. And so if I have one piece of advice for plaintiff's attorneys that are younger starting out, it would be a teacher first, lay out your case factually in a way that lets the jurors get there. You shouldn't get there before them, and you're not going to talk them into it with a motion and selling and saying the word clearly.

You're going to get them there by having the discipline to prove up your case in a way that shows them what should happen so they can feel that it didn't. And if you can't do that, your case probably isn't worked up enough, right?

Well, let me ask you this real quick. I know we're going over, but I'm finding this fascinating. I can't wait to come to Madrid. But when you hear sometimes in opening statements, people will say, "This case is about deceit, deception, blah, blah, blah, blah." So you wouldn't do that. You would start with a softer tone.

I want the jurors to start thinking of the words deceit and deception before I say them.

I love that. See, that's what I've always thought, John. Thank you, because I've always thought that. But then I've doubted myself because I see so many people doing it differently. And I know when they do it in the courtroom, I kind of cringe. I'm like, "Ah, we don't know that yet."

And maybe it works, right? If what you start with is that kind of language and at the end of the case, you've proven that that's true and they don't hold it against you. But we've certainly seen results from jurors being talked to after cases where people have started with that tone. And when the jurors don't come to that conclusion, they hammer you for it. It's much more likely because what I would tell young lawyers is what's most important to you and should be to you is your credibility. Your credibility is king. So just because you have the ability to not tell people whether or not the plaintiff's wearing a seatbelt, yeah, you're going to take a ding on that though. That's the thing is you have to think about your case as, what am I doing to prove my case in the most credible way possible?

Because we know anchoring's not what's happening when you ask for damages. Your damages are linked to your credibility. So if you've not been presenting a clean case or you're not answering questions that jurors want to know more about and they're sitting there wondering why you won't tell them about this particular medical ailment that your client has because you're scared of it and you think it's going to hurt you, the problem is it is going to hurt you because jurors are going to side-eye you.

I'll just throw out a couple of examples that came to mind as you were saying that. People lose credibility, for example, when they won't own their client's fault.

No.

And they argue their client has zero, but we know 80% of jurors say their client has some. You'd do better to say, "My client can and will accept any fault you think that he or she ought to receive." The problem is the defendant isn't taking any. And then all of a sudden you polarize the case. People lose it on out of control life care plans that the defendant picks apart. They lose it on modeling lost wages for 40 years for a 23-year-old who could clearly work a part-time job. All these things that then they diminish the credibility of the case. And the problem is credibility is a currency that runs throughout it. So you either accumulate it and by the end when you're talking about win rate and fault and damages, the jury's listening and believes you're there seriously and honestly to talk to them, or they're taking everything you say as they must negotiate it and assume it's exaggerated, which is a dangerous place to be in close cases.

Well, because the other thing, lawyers should just know, and we should say more often in front of judges, especially judges that are hostile to the jury processes, jurors aren't stupid, they're just not. And so they can see through bullshit and they can take really technical verdict forms and come down and get to the nugget of what your case is about. And that's why you can't cover it with, "Well, this company has this track record of being terrible." They're still going to get to cause. They may go, "Yep, I think this company is awful and I don't like them, but they did not cause this in this situation." And so to kind of think about jurors in a real way as being people who, one, want to do a really good job. I mean, for me, this job has really reinforced and it pushes me every day to think about what can we do to solidify this system because it is the best system out there.

And it is the antidote to all the political things that we have going on is members of the community will come in and say, "This is worth it. We got to tag them because this was terrible behavior or not. " And they'll do that and they'll work to do a good job. And you need to keep that in your head as you're working up your case is that I need to maintain credibility because I'm going to put this in front of people who are going to be staring at me and I'm not going to be able to do some kind of-

Song and dance.

Being

Funny is not going to save me.

And get around what they're looking at, which is your strength of evidence and whether or not you've been straight with them throughout about what that evidence is.

What I've always thought is if somebody were going to ask me what young lawyers need to remember, be authentic and be credible. Juries can smell a fraud a mile away. And if you lose credibility, you've lost everything. Well, one thing I can say without a shadow of a doubt is the two of you are authentic and you're credible and you're significantly statistically relevant. Is that the right ... Did I

Do it right, John? You nailed it.

But before we go, I got to ask this. Alicia, Fred Podcast, the Fred Files, tell us about it so our listeners will know how to listen.

Yes. So we are with TrialPods too. We're with LawPods. So we're on their website and then we're on any platform where you can get access to a podcast. So we go over all the intricacies of how to use Fred. So you can look up the episodes and they kind of start with going over what Fred does, how he does it best, how you can use it. And then he's the Fred Files because it's me and Nick Schweitzer who is one of-

It's not it's the Fred Files or it's this. It's he's. Fred is a person. Fred lives.

Fred lives. Fred, he lives in my brain. I'm glad. He's in mine too. So yeah, it's me and Nick Schweitzer who is part of Trial by Data. He's one of the professors at Cornell. So it's also Nick and I, besides talking about Fred, we're trying to cultivate a podcast that talks about all things data. So actually our next podcast will be with Sean. So we're going to talk about big data, small data, just data in general, so that people can listen to it and get more of a robust understanding of how data works and always besides with Fred. I

Would just say that the thing I think's cool about the Fred files, and I don't host it or participate really, that you also have academics on. We

Do.

And so one of our kind of mission statements has been, there's a lot of good academic research out there about jury behavior, how they think about damages. There's a lot of good information to cite for judges about why you need time for jury selection. There's lots of good evidence and information about how jury instructions influence jurors that trial lawyers should know, but there's always been a gap. And we tried to close it some because we're fortunate to know all those academics. And what the truth is, is they're really excited if real lawyers want to hear about what their findings are. Alicia had Valerie Hans on the Fred files, Jessica Salerno, and then you're going to see them, Charla, because in Madrid, we will have Valerie Hans, Jessica Salerno and Nick Schweitzer from Cornell and Sherry Diamond from Northwestern, which when you add those folks up, you have basically four of the most knowledgeable jury researchers in the world all in one place talking about what they're learning, which is really cool.

I can't wait. I got to tell y'all, I don't like conferences. I don't go to them. I mean, I have to hang around lawyers when I work. I don't want to always hang around them all the time. But I am looking forward to coming to Madrid, not just because it's Madrid, but I think I'm going to learn something. Guys, thank y'all so much for spending your time talking to us today. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And from now on, I will always approach every case if it were a product defect case. Thank you for those words of wisdom, John.

Thank you so much for having us.

All right. And tell Fred, I love him too. I will. I will. Thank you for allowing me. Okay. Yeah. All right. Thanks you guys. I think you can tell, and we at all this law here, we actually kind of like each other and we absolutely love, love what we do. And we work a lot of our cases up from the get- go, but we're brought in on cases a lot. We try cases all across the nation. If you have a case that you're interested in talking to us about, we'd love to hear from you. We've tried everything from trucking, workplace injuries, explosions and burn cases, dram shops, rideshare, sexual assaults, birth injury, your personal injury cases. If you need a partner to help you with your case, please call us. We can be contacted at aldouslaw.com. We'd love to hear from you.

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