Every serious jury trial it’s really the same approach, which is number one, you need massive time with the client and their family because the more time you spend with and their family the more avenues you learn to defend the client and bring out their excellent character.

Number two is we try to have a focus group, and informal focus group in almost every serious case here in the office and that is a bunch of people that we gather to hear arguments, to see exhibits, they ask questions, we sometimes even present the defendant to testify. And we hear from a group of people unassociated with the case what their opinions are and how to express things better and what arguments to make.

Number three, for jury selection we do internet jury selection during this jury selection process so that we can know who we’re selecting and who to eliminate better. Also we extensively investigate what sort of jurors do we want for a particular case because the type of juror is not the same for each case.

The next thing we do is we give a powerful opening statement. I think it’s very important to win your case in opening. Almost any very successful lawyer or famous lawyer has that philosophy, you have to just lay it all out in opening because the problem is the presumption of innocence although important and understood is just not properly applied. People assume from the very beginning that the person is standing there at the defense table because they’re probably guilty. So you need to open people’s mind in opening statement.

The next step is during the jury trial we try to have as many as we call shadow jurors as possible sitting behind us. Those are people that we either arrange to come voluntarily who are unassociated with the case or family and friends or just spectators or people from the firm that are sitting there watching every bit of the trial so at lunch breaks, at the end of the day, we can go and have a little debrief and say what should we do better, what did we do well, what is not clear, how do we do better tomorrow?

And lastly, just preparation for cross-examination of the state’s witnesses and an extensive, well-reasoned and well-presented closing argument with lots of graphics and lots of pictures, thinking of every single argument we possibly can to get an acquittal, including many different ways to explain beyond a reasonable doubt. Because that is sometimes the most confounding thing for jurors to understand and properly apply.

I think I tell jurors whenever I hear of a wrongful conviction and see a man walking out of jail into the arms of his family and lawyers 20 years later after a wrongful conviction I always think to myself, “What did that defense attorney not explain well with respect to beyond a reasonable doubt? I bet that defense attorney did not explain beyond a reasonable doubt well to that jury and that’s probably the major reason why that person was wrongly convicted by a jury.”

So we try to give many examples of beyond a reasonable doubt and just as passionate as we possibly can telling the jury how important it is to apply that standard properly and to acquit our client of all charges. So the process that I just laid out is basically what we do in all cases and we do it with maximum effort, maximum passion, and I’d like to think, maximum skill.