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WELCOME, JURORS!
Have some fun, give important advice -- make a little money
The concept
XXXThe ZapJury concept was designed to create a large pool of people who are willing to serve on "mock" juries on the Internet to give feedback on actual cases pending in the courts. Lawyers have used "mock juries" with individual cases for many years, to evaluate and settle, or prepare for trial. But they have been expensive, and so are used rarely. Doing it online greatly lowers the cost. Many more cases will be evaluated. The increased use of mock juries will improve the fairness of settlements, and will lead to better presentations of evidence in cases that aren’t settled. The justice system will be better for it.
XXXA lawyer for one side or the other, and sometimes lawyers for both sides, will post a case summary on a special web page created for that purpose, and ask for reactions to the case as it stands at that time. That's where you come in, as a juror on a practice jury. We send you a list of the new cases as they are posted, and there is a page that shows all the open ones. You pick one that interests you, and if none does, you wait till an interesting one comes along. (Sometimes the most interesting thing about a case is the fee for doing it.) You won’t be told which side is presenting the case, because that information might affect your feedback. After you read the summary, you answer questions posted by the lawyers and submit the answers and any comments you have. There is no obligation to evaluate any cases. How often you do is entirely up to you.
XXXEvaluation fees. The basic concept for compensating jurors is the free market. Lawyers post their cases with whatever offer of payment they want to make. They know that if they don’t offer enough, they may not get enough jurors to provide responses, so they may have to raise their offer. Every case description tells what the terms are. There are two basic arrangements:
- For fun. Many lawyers will post a case without an offer of compensation because they hope you will find it so interesting, you’ll provide responses just for the fun of it. If it’s an interesting case, you might agree. If not, pick a paying case instead. Or, you can counter-offer and propose a fee. If the lawyer accepts, you get the fee.
- For a certain fee. Some cases will offer jurors a specific amount for their responses. The ground rules for such cases may vary a little. For example, sometimes the lawyer will be looking for jurors with a certain demographic background. Or they may want you to deliberate with other jurors online for an extra fee. The details will be announced on the page where the case is posted. Again, if you are interested in the case but don't think the fee is high enough, you may counter-offer.
XXXReferral fees. Another way to get paid is through our multilevel compensation system. It works like AmWay and other multilevel marketing systems. In this case, we want to provide an incentive for you to recruit other jurors, who in turn recruit still other jurors, and so on. We keep track of your "downline" network of jurors recruited under you to the tenth level down.
XXXWe deduct 10% of all payments to jurors and put that money into the system. Each 10% deduction is itself divided into tenths and paid over the ten levels above the paid juror. Even though juror payments won't be large, those small deductions can add up over a large downline.
XXXNo one can predict how many people will be in your downline, though obviously the more you "go wide" -- the more people you personally recruit -- the larger your downline is likely to be. As an illustration, if you recruit ten people and each of those people recruits ten, and so on down ten levels, the total number of people in your downline would be 11,111,111,110. That's more than all the people in the world, so it won't happen. It also won't happen because many people through the downline won't bother to recruit anyone. That's why "going wide" and encouraging your recruited friends to do so is helpful.
XXXLet's
take another example. If you filled out a downline with three people at
each level, the total would be 177,147. If juror payments averaged only
$10 in a year, each of your downline jurors would have earned you ten
cents. That means you would make $17,714.70 that year. If your downline
was filled out to four new recruits at each level, the amount would $139,810.
If you filled out only two recruits at each level, the amount would be
$204.60. This is all hypothetical, of course, and the odds are that your
downline will only partially fill out. Seeing how this will work out is
part of the fun of participating. And you can always start new downlines.
XXXIt helps us to keep costs down by using an online bank, PayPal, which is the best one we could find. It will be necessary for you to open an account with them. You can do it now by clicking here, or you can wait until you receive your first payment notification. When you earn a fee for working a case, we will pay you though the PayPal website, which sends you an email. PayPal then lets you pay people with an email, spend the money elsewhere on the Internet, transfer it to another bank account of yours, or receive a check. You may have used it on eBay.
XXXEach case has three main parts: The summary of facts, the relevant law, and the questions you answer. You read the summary of facts, and sometimes look at short video segments or listen to short audio testimony. Then you read "jury instructions", which are statements of the law that apply to this particular case. Then you answer some questions about the case by applying the law to the facts as you see them, including what verdict you think is appropriate. It's done online, with room for you to give as much feedback as you want to give. The lawyers like lots of feedback. Ideally, you won't know which side the lawyer represents. S/he knows it's in his/her best interest to give as fair a presentation as possible to you, because in a trial the lawyer for the other party will make sure the jury sees the other side of the story anyway.
XXXLawyers use your feedback to do three things: evaluate new cases early to see if they are likely to be successful, develop their cases further for trial, and try to negotiate a settlement as trial approaches.
XXXRemember, these are real cases involving real people with very real problems who are headed towards trial -- where the outcome is never certain. You help them get a more realistic picture of their case, often leading to fairer settlements. And if they can't settle, you have helped them organize their case around what you, as jurors, see as the truth, and what people a lot like you who will be on the trial jury will see pretty much the same way. That means trial presentations that are more effective and fair. The justice system of the nation benefits.
One case history
XXXHere's a real-life example of how the process works: In a case involving sexual harassment in a warehouse, the mock jurors wanted to know if the company had installed an inexpensive video camera after the victim complained the first time. This was a question the lawyers hadn't thought of, because the law doesn't require that to be done. But it was a practical consideration that told something about the employer's sincerity in preventing harassment. The lawyers for the victim investigated that issue. It turned out no camera had been installed, and the trial jury gave a substantial award to the victim.
XXXWhen a case comes to us, we create a mini-website for it and post the case information there. We also post a brief description of the case and e-mail it to you, and post it on the Current Cases page. You can visit that page anytime you want and click on any of the descriptions that interest you. You’ll be taken to the website for the case. If the case interests you, just follow the instructions.
XXXWe will not sell your information to anyone. We will protect your privacy even from the lawyers. In return, we ask that you agree not to discuss the facts of the cases you review or your case evaluations of them with anyone, outside a jury deliberation. In a case where you are selected to be a juror because you live in the county where the case is pending, it might compromise the lawyer’s case if information about it reached his/her opponent. Your participation in a case evaluation signifies your agreement to this limitation.
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