Using Social Media in Voir Dire

Social media platforms and other online databases offer trial teams access to unprecedented amounts of detailed, publicly-available information about prospective jurors. How this information can be leveraged to assist counsel during the jury selection process, however, is a thorny issue that raises a host of questions. Chief among them is how jurors might react to learning that their backgrounds had been investigated using these tools and whether the risk of alerting jurors to this activity outweighs any potential benefits it can offer. To answer this question, Vinson & Company undertook a quantitative study designed to examine jurors’ awareness of, reactions to, and feelings about attorneys who use social media and other background research sources during voir dire. The results are presented in our paper which can be downloaded here:
Using Social Media & Other Background Research in Voir Dire