What Is a Voir Dire?

Voir dire is an attorney’s first opportunity to develop rapport with your jury. A good practice is, towards the end of voir dire, selecting a juror who is already leaning the California accident attorney’s way and asking questions like: “If you disagree with other juror’s opinions in deliberation, what will you do?”

Where the juror says he would follow the judge’s instructions, the California accident lawyer follows up with others confirming that they too would follow the law, continuing to use open ended questions. For instance, in a wrongful death case the attorney might ask, “If in deliberations another juror says that money won’t bring back the dead, what do you think you would say?

Tell us how you would make your opinion known.” Then using the kind of language the attorney would use in normal conversation he asks similar open ended questions of other jurors.  This raises the important point that jurors don’t like attorneys to use lawyer vocabulary.  For instance, the California accident attorney should use “before” instead of “preceding”, “after” instead of “subsequent” and “is it true that” instead of “isn’t it a fact that.” An attorney should view himself as the coach and the jury as the team. He must prepare the jury to go into the jury room and win his case for him.