Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, August 13, 1995                   TAG: 9508110090
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: D1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: F. J. GALLAGHER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

JURY RESEARCH: FROM ANTI-WAR TO ANTI-TRUST

More than 20 years ago, marketing professors sympathetic the anti-war movement began employing their research skills in trials of protesters charged with acts of civil disobedience, according to Stephen J. Adler's book "The Jury."

The academics introduced telephone polls, focus groups, interviews of potential jurors and post-trial interviews with sworn jurors to the litigation stew. Slowly, as the tactics proved effective over time, civil attorneys applied the methods and used them in cases seeking damage awards.

Many in the legal profession acknowledge that University of Southern California marketing Professor Donald Vinson created the first shadow jury in 1976. That's when two lawyers working for IBM, defending the business giant in an anti-trust suit, persuaded Vinson to assemble a group of people who had similar demographic characteristics to the actual jury that would hear the case. Vinson attended court each day with the shadow jurors, as he called them, and paid them to act as would a jury member.

Each night, the professor would call the shadow jurors at home and talk with them about the relatively esoteric points of anti-trust law that were presented that day. By the end of the evening, Vinson had a clear picture of which points needed more clarification. One last telephone call to the defense team had the lawyers scurrying to refine their arguments to correspond with Vinson's findings.

Although the jury never reached a verdict in the case - the judge awarded the trial to IBM on a technical point - Vinson was convinced that the shadow jury had proved its worth. He soon left his USC position and formed Litigation Sciences, a company which eventually was worth more than $25 million. In 1989, Vinson split from the company and founded another jury research enterprise, DecisionQuest Inc.

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office has retained DecisionQuest as a consultant in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

Ronald J. Matlon, the executive director of the American Society of Trial Consultants, said membership in his group has exploded in recent years. The society provides law firms with lists of consultants and publishes a quarterly newsletter called Court Call.

"We started in 1982 with about a dozen members," Matlon said. "Five years ago there were 200. Today we have more than 400." He estimated that more than 700 people around the country work as trial consultants, and he predicted the number would continue to increase as juries continued to award larger and larger awards.