Consulting & Investigations

Focus Groups

Hundreds of legal articles have been written extolling the benefits of focus groups. While originally developed in the marketing and advertising industries to gauge consumer response to products and services, it didn’t take long for the legal profession to realize their value to help develop a winning courtroom strategy.

Legal Services Limited has organized, coordinated, and led focus groups for more than 30 years; each and every group has consistently revealed useful and strategic information used to refine a case presentation.

We cast a representative population of diverse participants which is reflective of the demographics of your area’s jury pool; taken in consideration are sex, race, age, education, and residency status. After assembling a mock jury, we step aside allowing you to present your case, evidence, witnesses, etc., then dismiss the client (you) to an adjoining room where you may view the balance of the proceedings on video monitors. We discuss the case in minute detail, then issue a command to reach a verdict and award damages if any are warranted. There is no set pattern; every case is treated differently based upon the materials presented.

Our questions and requested observations are not only related to the case materials but also to your presentation skills and personalities. A Legal Services Limited Focus Group leader is trained to be completely neutral and to coax as much usable information as possible from the focus group members, we help you in refining your case until both it and you are prepared to win.

Jury Consultant

What does a jury consultant do? We research the jurors’ backgrounds, create juror profiles, and assist with juror selection / voir dire. Legal Services Limited strives to give our attorneys the criteria necessary for the ideal jury by discovering what biases they may have which are not conducive to a favorable verdict. We also help prepare witnesses for trial, assist writing persuasive opening and closing statements, suggest methods to present evidence in the most favorable manner, and help our attorneys develop ways to present complicated evidence that is easy to understand.

A good illustration of this principle is the trial of Daniel and Philip Berrigan in 1972, the first known use of jury consultants. The Berrigan brothers were accused of conspiring to plan violent demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The defense attorneys decided that in order to have the best jury possible they should poll those persons likely to qualify as jurors in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the site of the trial. The purpose of this polling was to determine which demographic groups would be most sympathetic to their clients. The results led the defense attorneys to conclude that Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and other Protestant denominations with a fundamentalist outlook would favor the prosecution, as would college graduates because of their support for the position of the U.S. Government on the Vietnam conflict. Accordingly, the defense was successful in having a jury selected that consisted of entirely blue-collar workers who would likely not have graduated from college and who were also of a different denomination from those listed above. This jury deadlocked at 10-2 in favor of acquittal. The government afterwards declined to retry the case.

Case Investigation

Legal Services Limited has a 35-year history of investigations, from simple domestic cases, corporate espionage, employee theft, overzealous competitors, and international business. From uncovering the simplest interpersonal indiscretions, fraud actions to multilevel corporate conspiracies. We have been successful at discovering valuable information for our clients. Legal Services Limited’s founder Michael Shortt has maintained a Georgia Private Investigators License since 1985, training under Pete Liakakis of United Detective Agency.

Witness Interviews

As the primary attorney in a case, you are positioned on a pedestal or you should be by your client. There are things they will not say to you, there are things their family members and friends will not convey to you, but they will say them to a Legal Services Limited investigator. Your clients do not want to disappoint you, nor have you view them in a diminished capacity because of previous actions or questionable behavior for fear that your efforts might not be as dedicated, “if you knew.” Yet such information could have a major negative impact on the case if left undiscovered, our goal is to mitigate surprises and keep you abreast of all vital facts.

We are also free to interview defense or prosecution witnesses who may be reluctant to speak with you directly, often having these witnesses tell a different story to us than the version told previously. We have also been asked to investigate these witnesses to discover their background or any other pertinent facts which might be motivation for them to be less than truthful or fabricate testimony harmful to your case.