Jury consulting booms in the Carolinas

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Attorneys nationwide are seeing an increase in the use of trial consultants. Those who’ve worked with consultants see their services as valuable contributions to higher verdicts and as leverage for negotiating settlements.

In North Carolina and South Carolina, business for these consultants is booming, with some attorneys saying they wouldn’t go to trial without one given the results they’ve seen and the aid they provide with jury selection.

An analysis of 2025 trial services trends by U.S. Legal Support found that year over year, the demand for outside trial services vendors has increased significantly. Alongside this increase, fewer firms are handling jury consulting in-house, instead outsourcing the task to litigation consultants.

Seating the right people

Marta Kiss, a litigation support specialist with a litigation support company primarily based in North Carolina, said she has seen a significant increase in demand for consultants in the past year.

She said consultants are especially valuable for attorneys who are at a loss regarding jury selection either due to a lack of education on the topic or because fewer cases are proceeding to trial.

“In February, I spoke at UNC Law School in a trial advocacy class that one of my friends teaches, and these are 3L students (…) their goal is to be a trial attorney after they graduate. They could not even tell me how many people you sit on a jury in North Carolina,” Kiss said.

Many attorneys Kiss has spoken with in the course of her work have confirmed this, saying they don’t know how to pick a jury and have never learned, making them nervous about doing so and less confident when trying cases.

“My focus now is how can we educate these attorneys on how to pick juries in a better way, so that they can become more confident in doing it,” Kiss said.

Ian Richardson, a lawyer with Vann Attorneys in Raleigh, has tried approximately four cases before juries using Kiss’ services.

“It just completely changed the way that I picked a jury and think about picking a jury,” he said. “It was kind of revolutionary.”

Before using consultants, Richardson — who specializes in personal injury cases — struggled with jury selection. More than once, he has confidently kept a juror who became a foreperson skeptical of his position.

“So, I think knowing when to strike somebody that I otherwise feel like is a good juror, I think that’s the value that a jury consultant brings to me,” he said. “It’s that extra set of eyes that can just convince me that ‘Hey, you really got to get this person off.’”

Richardson said he was introduced to the work of trial consultants while working on a particularly large case, noting that it completely changed the way his firm approaches jury selection.

“It’s almost like they have some counterintuitive viewpoints, which are really helpful beyond just the sort of typical things that you learn in seminars on picking jury,” he said.

In his personal injury practice, Richardson would typically look for ideal jurors by examining their demographics and political affiliations. Consultants do a deeper dive, often digging up information about organizations the potential juror is involved with in real time as the attorney questions them.

Kristi Harrington left her South Carolina courtroom where she worked as an attorney and then a judge to become a senior trial consultant based in North Charleston. She focuses on how potential jurors take in information so that she can help attorneys tailor their arguments to reach each person.

“It’s not specific to one particular generation or demographic—we’re all different types of learners,” Harrington said. “I want to make sure that a juror is able, however they come to the courtroom, that they’re able to see the evidence, to hear the evidence and to digest it.”

Determining what a juror can relate to can look like a mock trial, or sometimes Harrington will present a mock jury with different graphics or styles of information to see which delivery and themes involved in the case most resonate with them.

Harrington can also offer a fresh set of eyes on case material and help attorneys adjust their arguments, presentation and language so that a case they’ve studied for years is understandable to everyone in the jury box.

The case for data

Dirk Derrick, founder of the Derrick Law Firm in Conway, has revolutionized trial consulting by opening mock courtrooms across the state that provide data to attorneys nationwide.

For the first 30 years of his practice, Derrick said his firm would use focus groups on larger cases. While these groups provided valuable feedback, he got tired of not knowing the jurors’ truth regarding what evidence they wanted, who they wanted to hear from and how they decided on issues of liability and damages.

So, in 2018, while building a new office, Derrick decided to put a courtroom inside it.

“We started focus-grouping cases to find out the truth about cases. First for our own cases and then after three or four years, some lawyers around the state heard about us and they started hiring us,” Derrick said. “This past year we started getting hired by lawyers nationwide.”

Now the firm has six courtrooms across the state and a policy that its attorneys can’t settle their case if it involves “permanency, punitive, or contested liability.”

“If they don’t pay us all the money, you got to focus the case,” Derrick added.

At this point, the firm has run approximately 11,000 clients through the service and compiled data from 26,000 mock jurors serving in its focus groups. Derrick said this style of consulting helps to show attorneys — including those on the other side — how a jury will react to a case.

The data collected from these mock trial sessions is extensive, with 107 data points being collected when a participant fills out the intake form alone, including information about their demographics, their life experiences and their beliefs about the civil justice system.

Derrick said the firm uses this data to seat a demographically accurate jury when it focuses its cases. In addition to the 12 live jurors, some cases will include 100 virtual jurors providing their opinions as the attorneys workshop their arguments.

The data isn’t only used for attorneys preparing for trial. Derrick said attorneys can use it as leverage to send back to the insurance company to obtain wins for their clients without the hassle of a trial.

The game changer for compiling this massive trove of data has been artificial intelligence, said Derrick, who uses AI to efficiently transcribe and break down information and generate a comprehensive case report providing valuable insight into a case from a juror’s perspective.

Speaking a juror’s language

As a young attorney, Harrington wanted to seat a jury as quickly as possible, thinking her case would be strong enough to win no matter who sat in the box. As a judge, she similarly wanted the selection process to move along expeditiously. As a consultant, she sees the value in ensuring the jurors can process the information they are given and are in the best position to understand and connect with attorneys on both sides.

One mistake Harrington commonly sees in her work is when an attorney assumes jurors have the same basis of common knowledge, leading him or her to make broad analogies or use terms that may be foreign to the average juror.

“Not every juror is a sports fan, so when attorneys use very broad terms or analogies and sports terms, jurors who don’t understand the sports terms feel like that attorney is not relating to them,” she said. “We’re seeing a lot of pushback from attorneys who feel that everybody understands, and it’s not even a generational thing anymore.”

Overall, Harrington believes a consultant’s job is to study human behavior and make sure there are no surprises when the jurors go into deliberations.

“We’re hoping that when the jury comes out that we understand — even if the outcome isn’t what the attorney wants or the client wants — that we have given the jury everything that they need in a way that they understand to come out with the best possible decision for our client,” Harrington said.

For Kiss, one of the biggest mistakes an attorney can make is undervaluing jury selection.

“It used to be opening statements are the most important, or closing statements are the most important,” Kiss said, “but now people are realizing jury selection is one of the most important parts of the case.”