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Continued... Page 2 > Mock Trials

We will be conducting a mock trial in ______, on _______ (date and time). The trial will be interesting and will last approximately four hours. Jurors will be paid $50 for their work and lunch will be provided. If you are interested, please call ________ (name of staff member) at ________ (office phone).

The ad is run in the part-time/temporary section of the classified employment ads in the local newspaper. If we are doing the mock trial in an area outside of Seattle , we try to borrow a conference room from a local lawyer. Lacking that, we look for a local community center or a hotel/motel conference room we can rent.

Typically, we get at least 100 responses or more to an ad in the Seattle newspapers. (When unemployment rates are high, this number has spiked up to over 400 calls.) All potential mock jurors are asked their age and regular occupation or trade during the course of the call. If retired, we ask them to identify what they formerly did. We then try to fill the jury initially by attempting a rough split between genders, age groups, white/blue collar occupations and area codes, if applicable. Once we have enough jurors, we keep taking down this information from all subsequent callers and keep a running list for potential use in other cases. The last time we ran an ad was about two years ago and names generated from this effort have been used for five or six additional mock trials.

QUESTIONNAIRE FORMS

We have a standard form of questionnaire that we end up adapting to the specific needs of each case. (See Exhibit 1 .) The first part of the form asks each juror for their responses on liability:

Who should win?

The three main reasons why

The key issue or major point deciding who should win

Do they believe everything the plaintiff is claming?

Do they believe everything the defense is claiming?

Would they like more information to decide the case? If so, what?

Assign a percentage of fault to each entity likely to be involved in the case.

The second portion of the form pertains to each juror's vote on money damages, asking to make an award in the event liability is found, stating the key issue or major point on how large the verdict should be.

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