The Way We Prepare For Trial

Successfully preparing for trial is essential to improving our chances of winning a case. Although most Florida personal injury cases settle before going to trial, the victim’s attorneys need to prepare the case for trial in order to get the best settlement possible, or reject an unfair settlement and be ready to go to court.

Here at the Law Offices of Cytryn & Velazquez, we do something that sets us apart from 90 percent of the law firms handling personal injury cases:

In any case that we file a lawsuit on, once we get near trial, we spend several thousand dollars to do what is called a jury simulation. We hire a company who then in turn hires a random group of 14 to 16 people to hear our case. This group is given both sides of the case and allowed to ask questions that they find significant or important in their deliberations.

This mock jury then breaks up into two groups and actually deliberates and decides the case in order to render a verdict. We videotape their questions, deliberations, and reasoning behind their ultimate verdict. Through this process, we are given an insight into exactly what a real jury might do with the case.

The videotaped session is recorded on CD to allow us to watch, as many times as necessary, the entire proceeding. We also type up the jurors’ questions, concerns, advice and suggestions that these mock jurors make, to better understand the case and to better understand the issues that a real jury might have. Ultimately, this process allows for great insight into what a prospective jury might do in any given case.

If the results between one jury panel and the other are inconsistent , then there's always the possibility that we may repeat the jury simulation. On some cases, we have actually done up to 3 separate jury simulations. If there's a wide spread in dollar verdicts between the panels’ results, we can certainly use that to measure the range that we think we'll get at trial.

These simulations help us plan strategy, help us understand our strengths and weaknesses in the case, and help us determine what avenues we have to use and what further discovery we need to do to better improve our chances of getting a large result at trial.