February 14, 2025

“Asking yourself, ‘What should I ask in voir dire?’ is not the question. The question you need to ask is, ‘Where am I going?’ Or, as Sari says, ‘What principle are you driving to?’ Before you even sit down and start writing your voir dire questions, I want you to think, ‘What do I want my jurors to give me? What am I sourcing from them?’ Have an endpoint. It’s kind of like going, ‘Where should I go? Should I turn right or should I turn left on a road trip?”

– Sari de la Motte

Podcast Transcript

Sari de la Motte:
Hey, everybody. I have good news and bad news. Which one do you want first? Well, if you’re like me, you’ll want the bad news first. So here’s the bad news: the podcast is going to be on reruns until April. That’s the bad news. We’ll upload favorite podcasts that you’ve said you loved or that our numbers have told me have been popular. And there’s good news at the end of this. The reason why the podcast is going on rerun until April is because we have a huge, big-ass surprise to share with you in April, and it’s taking all of my energy. So I will be back then with brand-new episodes. Until then, enjoy your favorites.

Hello, darlings. So glad to be with you today, even though it may be a short one—even though I always say that and then it’s not short—but we’re going to start out with a reader shout-out. I’m loving this one. This is a five-star Trial Guides review from Phil S., and he says:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Don’t miss out. I don’t know how I missed this book and other content for so long, but I’m so grateful Rick Friedman recommended From Hostage to Hero. Part personal development and part trial skills development, Sari quickly went straight to the top of my ‘what other Kool-Aid can I drink’ list. You’re the real hero, Sari, and we’re all indebted to you for opening up our skill sets.”

— Phil S., Trial Attorney

Aw, Phil, thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it. And if you haven’t reviewed the book yet, you can do so at trialguides.com, and please review the podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Okay, so here is the down and dirty.

The question you constantly are asking, even if you’re in the H2H group and you’ve been with me for a while, is, “What should I ask in voir dire?” That’s the question you’re asking, and I’m here to tell you today that that is the wrong question to ask.

We do not want to know what to ask in voir dire, and here’s what I mean: You will put in the Facebook group—either in our big From Hostage to Hero group or in our H2H group if you’re part of the Crew—“Here’s what my case is about,” and you give us a little synopsis, and then you’ll say, “What do I ask in voir dire?” That is the wrong question.

Here’s where I see y’all going wrong. We will be in a voir dire circle, for example, in the H2H Crew, where we all get together to practice voir dire, and I’m there to coach the person conducting voir dire who’s in the hot seat. Then we have seven attorneys play jurors, and it’s a really great time. But when the voir dire goes off the rails, I always know it’s due to one thing—almost always—and that one thing is that–

You have no idea where you’re going.

This is because you start the whole process with, “What do I want to ask?” So you come up with a bunch of questions, having no idea where it is you’re trying to land. These questions get asked, the jurors start answering them, the whole thing starts to spin off its rails, and you don’t know what to do with it. So you look at me and you’re like, “Well, what do I do with this?”

My question always is—and if you’re in the Crew, you know this—“Where are you trying to go?” That is the question. And that’s where I always take you back when you come into the group and say, “What should I ask?” I always say, “Where do you want to go? What are the principles that you’re driving to?” Because the minute that you get what principle you’re driving to, then you know what to ask. That question then becomes a secondary question. It’s now being driven by where we want to go.

Let me remind you that where we start in the H2H process is always with our fears list: What are the problems in our case? What are we afraid of? What is the defense going to make a big deal out of? Then we go to: What would my ideal juror believe about this? What would they have to say or believe or think for this to no longer be a problem for me? So I start writing out those things. Now, when I have that ideal juror profile—which is not a demographic profile, but rather a list of all the beliefs that jurors would have, that I would hope they have, and that most of them probably do have—I can go in there and see if there’s some themes. There almost always are, and from there I can find some principles.

Now remember, a principle is a fundamental truth. It’s something that nearly all humans agree on—that lying is wrong, that betrayal is bad, that you should take responsibility when you hurt someone, whatever it may be. These are things that are fundamentally true, not just for your case but for the world at large. So you pull those out, and then your job in voir dire is to get the jury to give those to you—not to give them to the jury and ask if they agree, but to get them “in the air,” so to speak, so that we can all rally around them and then move on.

That’s why the timing of your voir dire is very important. That’s why we do not have the money conversation—if you listened to last week’s podcast—at the beginning. Why? Because they haven’t heard about the principles in the case. They haven’t heard about what it is we’re talking about. They’re not ready for the money conversation. Now, as I said last week, if that’s all the time you have, then go for it. But even there, we start with responsibility. We don’t start with money; we start with responsibility. Money never comes first. Why? Because everything that’s happening is priming the pump for moving toward that damages conversation. All the principles, all the things that jurors care about, you’re bringing that all up into the air—or, more importantly, the jurors are bringing that all up in the air—so that you can have that conversation about money at the end. You’re priming the pump. That’s what you’re doing.

If you do not know where you’re going and what principles you’re after, then your voir dire is going to swirl. And this is what, again, happens when you immediately go to, “Here are all the problems in my case; what do I ask?”

Stop asking that question. Instead, go to, “Here are all the problems in my case; what do I want them to give me? What do I want them believing and rallying around?”

Again, we’re not getting anyone to believe anything. Hear me out, hear me clearly: We are not getting anyone to believe anything. There’s no gimmickry here. There’s no persuasion here. We’re not trying to make them believe these things. Most people believe these things—that’s why we call them principles. So we’re getting the right principles matched up with your case and getting jurors to give them to us by simply asking questions about them.

We just had a trial debrief last month with Tom Ryan, and he was talking about how—and so many of you do this—where, in previous H2H, you would go in there and you would ask about where people worked, where they lived, what bumper stickers they had on their cars, what things they were watching on TV, and then you would get their answers. You would try to make sense of it, as if you were trying to divine what it meant. It’s so much easier, my friends.

We just need to get jurors to own the principles on their own.

So if your case has a problem like there’s no visible damage on a car and therefore the person can’t really be injured, what would you want the jury to actually believe? Your belief in that case—your principle in that case—is that people can be injured and severely injured without a speck of damage on a car. Right? That’s true; we know that’s true, but the defense is going to play with that. So if I know that this is the principle I’m driving to, then I start knowing what to ask.

Now, as you’ve heard me talk about, we have the funnel method in H2H that we’ve been training everybody on. This is where you put your principle at the bottom, and at the top is your experiential question: “Who has experience with…?” Your next question to get down into the funnel is: “What is your expectation of…?” Then your third question is: “What could happen if…?” That may not apply in every situation, but it gives you an idea of what we’re trying to do.

So, in your mind, if your principle is that you can be injured if the car doesn’t have damage on it—which we know is true—you may start by using this funnel method. You may start with, “Who here has ever been in a car crash or knows someone who has?” That’s your experiential. Now, where most of you go wrong is you’ll then ask all the people about those experiences. That is not how the experiential question is designed. It’s just a jumping-off point. They raise their hands: “Great. Let me ask those of you who raised your hand: What now?” Instead of going to your expectations, you might say, “How many of you were injured or had family members who were injured?” We’re still kind of in the experiential because I’m still trying to narrow my funnel down. “All right, great. We have some hands coming up there.” Then you might narrow it down even more: “Of those of you who were injured, how much damage was there to the car?”

Now, this could be dangerous—we’d want to play with this in a focus group first—because if everybody is like, “There was tons of damage; I had to be taken out of the car with the jaws of life,” that could get us down the wrong path. But I have often seen, in many of my voir dires, that a juror might say, “There was none,” and you say, “But you were really injured?” “Yeah, I was really injured.” “Well, how can that be?” “Well, I don’t know how it can be, but it be.” Even if that juror doesn’t get on the jury, we’ve still done something amazing: we’ve been able to get into the air that it is possible and here is a real-life example.

Now, you may be able to get there in a different way—I didn’t prepare this funnel before podcasting on it today—and there might be a different approach. In fact, in our H2H Crew, we recently had someone come up with a great way to do that. It was basically the gist of: “How many of you have gone to the doctor after a crash, and they diagnosed you with an injury, but what if there wasn’t any property damage? Would the doctor need to consider property damage when diagnosing you?” No, the doctor doesn’t need to take that into account. They don’t say, “Well, I see that you have a broken knee here, but I read in the report that there was no visible damage. So I’m going to have to go back and rethink my diagnosis because, even though I see your knee is broken, the car wasn’t that damaged. So I’m probably wrong.” That was the basic gist of that funnel, and I thought it was brilliant.

There are many, many fun ways that you can do this. But here’s what I want you to get out of today’s podcast: Asking yourself, “What should I ask in voir dire?” is not the question. The question you need to ask is, “Where am I going?” Or, as Sari says, “What principle are you driving to?” Before you even sit down and start writing your voir dire questions, I want you to think, “What do I want my jurors to give me? What am I sourcing from them?” Have an endpoint. It’s kind of like going, “Where should I go? Should I turn right or should I turn left on a road trip?” and my first question to you is, “Where are we going?” Then I can tell you whether you need to turn left or right. You need to have this location—this destination—in your mind, too. “I’m driving toward this principle. I want them to tell me that money can help.” Then I go, “Okay, well, let’s try to put that in a funnel. How can we get them to tell us that money can help?”

This might be a fun exercise for you—totally not directly related to today’s podcast—think of anything you want someone to tell you: “Hamburgers are delicious.” Without saying, “Are hamburgers delicious?” see if you can get your spouse to say it in three questions. Start testing your mind. Again, this doesn’t apply if you already know your spouse hates hamburgers. If you know your spouse loves hamburgers, then how do you get them to say that to you without asking outright?

Now, this again is not mimicry or gimmickry. That’s not what we’re trying to do here. We’re not trying to get them to say things they don’t actually believe. What we’re trying to do is get in the air what they already believe without going to a yes-or-no question. So you can start testing this yourself. But the point of today, again, is: Where are you going vs. How do I get there? “How do I get there?” always comes after “Where am I going?”

Thank you for listening, my friends. Talk soon.