By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: A good piece of advice for employers: If your habit is to sweep things under the rug, then don’t commission a study to look under the rug. Last Thursday, the ABA Journal released a fascinating report with important implications on the role of research, the risks of discrimination, and the occasional absence of […]
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm – Judges, arbitrators, mediators: legally trained and neutral minds, without the juror’s baggage of selective perception, predisposition, and bias, right? Not really. In the previous two posts on motivated thinking and instrumental argument, I wrote that an audience’s reasoning and advocacy is driven by emotions and not just by logic. While a jury’s decision making
By: Dr. Ken Broda Bahm – Last week, in part one of this post, I wrote about the increasing tendency for jurors to express irritation and insecurity at the prospect of serving out their jury duty, a greater proportion of hardship claims, and some recent research showing that the resulting changes in the jury pool could lead to
By: Dr. Ken Broda Bahm – The situation has been noted with a surprising frequency: Instead of filing in quietly to fulfill their civic duty, prospective jurors in voir dire have expressed a deep frustration over the litigation process and a deep concern over serving. Most recently, an article in the National Law Journal noted this
By: Dr. Ken Broda Bahm – When dealing with the number of plaintiffs in a class action, mass tort, or other large scale litigation, is “Super-Size Me” the plaintiff’s best choice? At a legal level, the U.S. Supreme Court will get a chance to weigh in, after the decision last week to determine whether as
By: Dr. Ken Broda Bahm – As closing arguments finished in a recent employment jury trial that I sat through, the defense team and I felt, predictably, that we had the overwhelming weight of evidence on our side of the case. But still, we worried as the jury filed in to deliberate. We had faced a Plaintiff’s case
Understand Juror Bias, But Bet On The Evidence Read More »
by: Dr. Ken Broda Bahm When you have the ability to ask your own questions in voir dire, make the most of them. Done well, attorney-conducted voir dire should create a balance between the goals of spotlighting high risk jurors and safely drawing themes from more favorable jurors. At the same time, the questioning process
In Voir Dire, Improvise with Structure Read More »
by: Dr. Ken Broda Bahm So the company finally terminates the troublesome employee. “Problem solved,” right? In a litigious climate, the answer could be, “Wrong, the problem’s been replaced by a different problem” because what follows could be months or years of discovery, deposition, and developing strategy before you find yourself explaining that decision to
In Employment Cases (and All Cases), Keeping it Simple is Smart Read More »