At first brush, there was nothing about the 74-year-old beauty contest supplier from the Bible Belt bastion of Texarkana that inspired trial consultant Robert B. Hirschhorn to want her on his high-tech client's jury.
The case involved patent rights, and it was Hirschhorn's job to identify jurors in the pool who might be receptive to the claim that a lucrative Internet dating service had copied his client's search engine accelerator without paying for it.
As he now does routinely, Hirschhorn went online to learn more about the prospective jurors. On the pageant supplier's business website, he found something he thought could bode well for his client. The septuagenarian, it turned out when he asked her about what he had learned online, had spent a lifetime marketing exclusive sequined gowns for beauty contestants only to have them copied without compensation.
"We loved her," said Hirschhorn, who has been profiling jurors for more than two decades. "She told this story about how she would show these dresses to someone who claimed not to be interested and the next thing you know the same design would show up on a contestant. . . . It's all about accusing people of using your property without permission."
In the age of MySpace, Facebook, cyberspace sales pitches and blogging, the Internet is proving a treasure trove of insight into the thinking and values of those called for jury duty. And it has transformed the way many jury consultants do their jobs.
Jeffrey T. Frederick, head of jury research for the National Legal Research Group in Virginia, has been in the business long enough to remember when consultants had to drive by homes or talk to neighbors to get an inkling of a potential juror's social status or political views.
Now with a wealth of information online -- newspaper letters to the editor, petition signatures, club memberships, campaign contributions -- retrievable with a couple of keystrokes, Internet surfing can produce a detailed picture of how an individual votes, spends money and sounds off on controversial issues.
"If a juror has an attitude about something, I want to know what that is," said Frederick, who has been researching jurors for more than 30 years. The percentage of people who have substantial online profiles is still small, maybe 10%, he said, but it is growing exponentially and opening new avenues of exploration for Web-savvy consultants.
