Partner Camille Vasquez Shares Jury Selection Strategy on NPR’s Flagship Show long arrow

Partner Camille Vasquez was a guest on NPR's "All Things Considered" to discuss how defense attorneys approach jury selection in a high-profile case, such as the hush money trial in New York against former President Donald Trump.

During the April 14 segment, Vasquez explained to host Scott Detrow how the Brown Rudnick team handled jury selection for the 2022 defamation case actor Johnny Depp brought against his ex-wife Amber Heard.

The first step they took was to hire a jury consultant, who was instrumental in helping them narrow what they were looking for and - more importantly - what they weren't looking for, she said. Vasquez compared it to building the perfect list of dinner party guests.

"You're going to have different people," she said. "Someone's going to be the leader, and you're going to have people that are followers. And you need to have the right balance of that. So the leaders that we were looking for were going to be open-minded. They weren't going to know much about the story between our client and Ms. Heard. They obviously would have known who Johnny Depp was, but we weren't necessarily looking for big fans of Johnny Depp."

Then, once the ideal member of the jury is identified, the selection is next. There's more than 100 people in the room and 16 people file into the box and the lawyers begin asking questions. Vasquez said this is the first impression those potential jurors will get of the legal team and their client, so it's important to establish rapport.

"It's about establishing rapport and getting them to open up because it's an uncomfortable process where you have everyone looking at you, and you have people taking notes," Vasquez added. "You want them to talk about things that will show you: do they know a lot about the case? Do they really want to be on this jury? Are they trying to hide that? Or do they want nothing to do with this, and they're just desperately trying to get out of jury duty? Those are all the things that we try to identify by building a rapport."

After the jury is selected, the trial lawyers are consistently paying attention to how they are reacting to information, she said. She said it's crucially important during all parts of the trial to try to understand what's affecting them and in what manner it's affecting them.

"There was a moment during my cross-examination of Ms. Heard where I had two jurors actually physically turn away from her and just lean their bodies towards me," Vasquez said. "And I thought to myself, I had them in that moment. And as a trial lawyer during cross-examination, you want that. You want the jury paying attention to your questions because you are telling the story through your questions during cross-examination."