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HOW IT WORKS Why It Makes Sense Before we talk about how it works, let’s briefly discuss -- Here are some reasons why using ZapJury helps your case: 1. Organization. This system isn’t just about events immediately before trial. It’s also about organizing your lawsuit. We all know that doing exactly the same things this system requires of you are things you should be doing anyway -- assembling the facts, knowing exactly what the law is relevant to those facts, and considering the arguments against you. If you're not doing that, using ZapJury gets you there. If you are doing it, using ZapJury is easy. 2. Strategy. You think you know how to shape your case so it’s a winner. Laymen -- jurors -- may look at your case entirely differently. Getting juror feedback early on can change your basic approach for the better. 3. Discovery.
Mock jurors often suggest lines of inquiry you never thought of. Example:
In a sexual harassment case involving a female working alone in a
warehouse, the mock jury asked, Did the company install a cheap video
camera after her first complaint? Few lawyers would have thought of
that specific thing because it was not specifically required by law.
4. Dealing with clients. Ever had difficulty getting a client to accept a settlement recommendation? Ever doubted your recommendation yourself? Having mock jury results helps get you on the same page with your client, with greater confidence that you’re going in the right direction. 5. Negotiating with adversaries. Just as you may be uncertain about what a real verdict will be, so may your adversary. Producing mock jury results can be useful persuasion. In the hands of a mediator, they can be a hammer. 6. Selecting a jury. Mock juries tell you how jurors with certain demographics are likely to vote. With ZapJury, it’s possible to access a jury pool large enough to validate the results in a way that is statistically valid. 7. Facing the jury. You’ve been around a while and you’ve been successful. But you know the feeling of looking that jury in the eye and not knowing for sure what in the world they are going to do, or what exactly they want to hear you discuss, what facts or points of law they are most interested in. This system helps you shape your argument to best effect. 8. Sanctions and malpractice. It sometimes happens that your opponent or your client decides you did something wrong. Having Zapped your case makes it less likely that they will prevail. This system differs from traditional mock jury services in several respects.
There are a few obvious limitations in using online mock juries, mainly that the jurors are not interacting with each other in person. Some think that is not as important as getting thorough comments from each juror. And deliberation will be available online for an additional cost. But it is not necessary to think of ZapJury as a total replacement for traditional mock jury services. It is at the very least a very cost-effective supplement. The ZapJury system is an interface between lawyers who want their cases evaluated and jurors who want to evaluate them. You post information about your cases, and the jurors submit evaluations, by answering the questions you put to them. The place where you prepare your information is your ZapJury office. You rent your office from us for $20 per month, or $200 a year. We believe that providing an ongoing exposure for your materials gives you a lot more flexibility than a one-time, limited duration exposure. You can manage your contacts with the jury pool better, in terms of how many versions of your case they see and how long they get to work with it. We think this method yields the most information for the least money, while providing a subscription base which helps us keeps your costs down. There is a $5 charge for publishing the case to the jury panel and displaying a summary of it to the world on the public area of our website in order to interest others to sign up as jurors. If your case does not attract enough jurors to suit you, you may republish it with a fee offer, set by you. Jurors may accept the offer or make a counteroffer. You select some or all of the number of jurors you planned on using, and may re-publish with an even higher fee offer, continuing in that manner until you get all the jurors you want, at the lowest possible market cost. We charge 15% of jury fees for handling this process. You can draft the facts, instructions, argument and questions for a case and save it in your file cabinet. You can prepare and save information for as many cases as you like. And you can save as many versions of any case as you like. In preparing your case information, you may elect to draft all or part of the information off-line and then simply paste it into the appropriate places when you are ready. You can publish a case from a single office for a while and then publish another case, which removes the first one. But the first case is saved and you can re-publish it later. You can elect to do that out of one office, or you can purchase additional office suites and publish several cases concurrently. You can rotate cases through each of those suites just as you can with only one office. So if you have an active caseload of, say, 50 cases, you might consider five suites, rotating ten cases through each of them over the duration of those cases and see whether that fits your style. The process begins when you subscribe. When you do, you immediately get a fully operational ZapJury Office. Every time you want to access your office, you log in, using the email address and password you used when you subscribed. You are taken to your Office upon logging in.
It looks like this.
There is some explanatory text which explains the operation of the navigation buttons:
The first thing you have to do, before you are allowed to enter any information, is press the New Case button so you can enter new case information. You are taken to this place:
When picking a case name, be creative, even whimsical, but pick a name that doesn't suggest that you are for one side or the other (e.g., "The Oppressive Landlord"). The less neutral you are in your presentation, the less meaningful your results will be. Under both the civil and criminal categories there are several subcategories. You will assign one of them to your case. Once you have done that, you will return to the Office and will be permitted to enter information into the various sections of the display. There are four boxes on the Office page where information is displayed: Synopsis, Facts, Instructions, and Argument. They look like this:
But the information to be displayed is entered by pressing the button at the upper left corner of the display box. That takes you to an entry page that looks like this:
This first section, Synopsis, is very important. This short statement about the case will be seen by anyone who visits the website, and will be the first thing about your case that the jurors will see. You should design it to be as interesting, even intriguing, as possible, so as to attract as many responses as possible. Again, be as neutral as you can. The process of entering information for the Facts, Instructions
and Argument boxes is the same. Usually you will draft your information
off-line and paste it in, but you can do it online if you wish.You
can begin a draft and save it, and it will stay there as long as you
want.
It will happen fairly often that you will want to publish a somewhat different version of the same case, such as when discovery changes your factual assumptions, or you have found new legal authority which changes the Instructions. Or you may have thought up some additional questions. But you don't want to lose the earlier draft entirely. ZapJury lets you draft and save as many versions as you like. Just press the New Verion button and follow the instructions.
You can present multiple cases to the jury panel at the same time if you purchase more than one Office suite. If you do that, you will be able to manage all the cases out of the File Cabinet area of your Office. If you want, you can use the multiple suites to present different versions of the same case. Case names are permanently unique, so you could use the same name and add a number, 2 or II, for example. When you have your case the way you want it, you may publish it. This will present the name and summary to the open part of our website where it can viewed by everyone who visits ZapJury, and will make the full details of your case available to the entire jury panel. In addition, a daily email is sent to the jurors containing the name and summary of each new case. To start the process of publishing press the Publish button.
When you do that, you will be taken to the Publish page. Before publishing, you are given options, the first one being whether to offer the jurors a fee:
If you do offer a fee, you must enter a date by which it must be accepted. This eliminates doubt as to what fee applies if you later amend the fee offer. Then, you are required to set a deadline for submissions of the jurors' evaluations. This establishes a definite date beyond which the fee cannot be claimed. If no fee is offered, it is an optional limitation.
The File Cabinet is where your cases are stored, along with important information relating to them. It is divided into two "drawers". The first is the Case Drafts Drawer:
This drawer lists all the cases you have worked on. You can continue to edit any case, and any version of a case, until you have published. At that point, the published case is locked, which is necessary to insure that responses to it apply only to that version. You may republish that version later if you wish. You can edit and save that version as another version. You just can't edit and then republish a version of a case which has been published. The second drawer in the File Cabinet is the Published Case Drawer:
This table lists all the suites you have rented, their status and expiration date, the number of the case currently published from it, how many jurors have accepted your fee offer to evaluate that case (if any) and are awaiting your decision, how many jurors you have accepted and are ready to be paid for, and how many submitted evaluations have been received for you to approve before the jurors can be paid. (You have three days to reject an evaluation as bogus, which triggers a review process.) The numbers in the table are "live" and link to pages where you can make the necessary decisions. You will probably find it useful to submit both kinds of questions to the jurors, multiple choice and those calling for an open-ended, unprompted, verbal response. The unprompted responses are not suitable for a data compilation and will be emailed to you as they come in. The multiple choice responses will be compiled in your Office, available for downloading at any time. Help is only an email away, at lawyermail@zapjury.com. |
