An impressive demonstration

As another note to my jury duty this week, there was a demonstration of something I had read about, but never seen before.

The Plaintiffs lawyer took 2 1/2 hours to voir dire the jury pool of 42 people. The hour was getting late and the Judge had promised to pick the jury that day. Plaintiff and defense lawers do not cooperate in something as important as picking a jury so I was wondering what was the deal with the defense? Particularly since the defense lawyer was not taking a single note (his assistant was).

I found out what he was doing when he started his part of the voir dire and started calling, without error, every juror by their name. It was impressive as hell. I wonder how many juries he can just blow over with that ability?

As our judge was talking with us about settling the case I asked him why he allowed lawyers to be wired in his courtroom and why didn't the other side object to it. He said that another local Judge, Dan Conklin, (an old friend incidentally), had mastered the same technique. I will have to ask Dan how many cases he thought he won just with that ability.