When designers serve on juries
The design and process of jury deliberations is ready for a fresh look
I recently served on a jury. My experience revealed a huge gap in one of the most important pieces of the process: the jury instructions.
The trial was a classic “slip and fall” case where an older woman fell off the deck of a house she rented. The fall led to two broken ankles, surgeries, and her quitting her job due to disability and pain.
The jury instructions are issued after closing arguments before the jury begins its deliberations. They’re crucial in helping a group of non-lawyers make sense of the testimony they’ve heard to render a just verdict. While in some cases, like violent crime, the questions might be straight-forward (“did he shoot the guy or not?”), my case involved complex determinations of responsibility.
While the court did a fine job in explaining the nuances of the law, the design obscured the questions we needed to answer.
The instructions
Despite the case being a small-ball civil trial, there were over 40 pages of instructions to get through. We each received a copy and listened as the judge read through every page. The instructions covered the basics (what standard to judge on? did we need to be unanimous?) and the specific determinations to weigh.
The document seemed optimized for the lawyers’ and court’s process — not the jury’s experience — and it’s this experience that good design considers. In my process I always approach the work from the perspective of the end user: what do they need to know? what do they need to do? how can design help them?
Good design considers all the available elements to answer these questions: from the order in which material appears, to the typography that distinguishes one type of information from another. Careful application of these and other elements: pacing, grouping, hierarchy, definitions, supporting images, graphics, etc. — can help readers understand complexities and the actions they need to take.
Jury instructions are a great example of how applying these ideas would help the court get the most out of a jury’s time — and promote the best application of justice. Unfortunately, this is where the instructions fell short.
The deliberations
We got into the jury room and immediately launched into cross-talk. Which witnesses did we trust? Why did it take so long for her to get to the hospital? What shoes was she wearing? How did she land? Which lawyers did people like more?
At first, I tried to interject and keep up. But an hour in, I realized this back-and-forth could go on forever.
I ate my free court-appointed turkey sandwich (not great, but way better than it needed to be) and surveyed the room. Unruly stakeholders? Check. Sharpies? Check. Post-It Notes? Check. Wait a second: this isn’t just a deliberation — it’s a workshop!
As the group continued, I went through the jury instructions and broke it down:
The plaintiff sued under two counts (essentially, two different charges) that together could add up to over a million dollars in damages. Each count had a number of conditions that had to be satisfied. For the first count, all elements had to be satisfied, whereas for the second count, only the first element had to be satisfied. Once we determined which counts we found in favor of the plaintiff (if any), those would unlock different categories and calculations for damage payouts.
I translated these questions to a giant piece of poster board they had left us.
I interrupted the discussion: “I have an idea.”
Using the graphic version
Over the next 90 minutes or so we talked through the boxes for each count. We started with the easy stuff and took a vote to get those out of the way.
We zeroed in on the one box that determined much of the outcome: was there a “breach of duty” that constituted negligence? After about 40 minutes of votes and discussing the component tests we came to a unanimous conclusion: this guy wasn’t going to win “Landlord of the Year.” But NO, it didn’t rise to negligence.
With that clear “no” we could look at the other questions we were haggling about: why did it take so long to get to the hospital? Why did her son go back to the house? Was she really unable to work after the fall? The graphic clearly showed: none of these other questions mattered.
We moved on to the next count with a similar approach. Here, we also came to a relatively quick conclusion: YES, there had been some kind of breach of the implied warranty (basically, the landlord’s duty to make repairs), but NO it was not directly connected to the plaintiff’s injuries.
In the end, we awarded a trivial amount to the plaintiff. Later that afternoon, we returned to the court to deliver the verdict. Even though I had a great deal of sympathy for the plaintiff, I felt strongly that we reached a fair decision. Not one based on our like or dislike of any of the players — but a reasoned and objective application of the law.
Improving every jury instruction
A graphic version of the instructions provided the guidance we needed to reach a just verdict. It helped to illuminate which questions the court needed us to determine for the case — and helped nine strangers stay on topic.
We reached our verdict in a few hours through clear consensus, instead of spending several days in frustration.
But not every jury has a design professional used to running workshops on it. The lack of design concern in the instructions and indeed every court document I encountered was striking.
By “design” I don’t mean fonts, colors and spacing. By “design” I mean the way the court visually presents information — and the impact that presentation has on a juror’s ability to receive, process, and act on that information. In this way, it’s a problem of organization and intention; all of which can be accomplished within the bounds of Times New Roman.
Like medicine, law is one of those giant industries that’s yet to embrace design. That’s changing. There are groups today thinking about technology, design and the law: The Legal Design Lab at Stanford Law, Northwestern’s Law Lab and Suffolk University’s Institute on Legal Innovation & Technology all have projects developing services, apps and tools that can help interface between the courts and the public. There’s even an agency, Theory and Principle, that develops apps and products in this realm.
I found that the jury instructions were incredibly informative in helping to make a just determination — but also incredibly opaque. While there’s some discussion about how to improve these, it’s focused on plain-language guidelines and not on the meta-picture: how can we help a layperson apply the law to the specific case they’ve been asked to decide?
A trial is a massive investment of time and resources from the parties, the court and the jury. Giving the best possible guidance to juries would ensure the time is well spent towards justice.
