When Jurors are Wary of Lawyers, It’s Prudent to Throttle Down
Illustration by John Schmelzer
Barbara Swanson looked numb. “What’s the matter?” I said. “Bad verdict?” “That’s the understatement of the day,” she said. “Lost a case I should have won.”
“We’ve all done that,” said Angus.
“Oh, I know it,” said Barbara. “Those are the cases that are supposed to teach you something. But my problem is I don’t know what I’ve learned—if anything. I gave this case everything I had. But the jury wasn’t buying what I was selling.”
“Everything is turned upside down,” she said. “People are unhappy about lawyers, judges, the system, plaintiffs, defendants—everything. They’re hostile, suspicious, naive, trusting, hard-nosed and compassionate—all at the same time.”
“Jurors, you mean?” said Dick Mudger. “They’ve always been like that.”
“I agree with Barbara,” I said. “It’s worse than it’s been. Take the recent unpleasantness in Los Angeles.”
“You mean the O.J. case?” said Barbara.
“I don’t talk about it by name,” I said. “Not so much because of the result as because of the way it was tried. Lawyers, judges, juries and reasonable doubt have all taken a real beating because of that case.”
“It’s happening with civil cases, too,” said Flash Magruder, the plaintiffs lawyer. “The coffee-spill case, the woman who’s suing a kid because she got hit by a baseball at a Little League game, the compulsive gambler who is suing everybody in sight because they didn’t protect him from his compulsive gambling—they have all helped create the notion that lawyers and lawsuits can’t be trusted.
Continue reading “Lawyer Fatigue” in the November ABA Journal.
