Strategies in Jury Trials: Staving Off Potential Holdouts and Avoiding Mistrials

This CLE webinar will discuss the risk of mistrials caused when a jury cannot reach a unanimous decision and offer trial lawyers strategies for overcoming these challenges and even making allies of potential holdouts. The panel will review the history, development, and current best practices used by the courts to avoid deadlocked juries, and then offer guidance for creating trial strategies that leverage the influence of potential holdouts.

Mistrials due to a hung jury are more common than might be thought. When a unanimous verdict cannot be reached, it is usually one or two holdouts rather than a close split. Courts and most lawyers and litigants do not like mistrials and have sought ways to reduce the number of hung juries. 

For their part, judges have developed a number of supplemental instructions that are given if a jury reports back that it is deadlocked. The tone these types of instructions range for the traditional Allen charges—which have been criticized as sometimes too coercive—to modified charges with "balancing" language. 

An alternative to supplemental charges is for trial lawyers to lean into idea of a potential holdout, understand and evaluate the psychology behind holdouts, and let that knowledge inform trial strategies in highly contested cases. Potential holdouts can turn out to be an influential and powerful ally (or enemy) that means the difference between a disappointing and a catastrophic outcome. 

Listen as our illustrious panel discusses how courts handle deadlocked juries and how trial attorneys can create strategies that build solutions into the trial that may be able to solve the holdouts' concerns.