I recently read a post which was citing the word of a 40+ year veteran trial lawyer. What was most interesting was his general pointers about jury selection to other lawyers. Given his long and successful trail career here is what he had to say when it came to picking good jurors:

“Generally, avoid jurors with special expertise or influence, e.g., community leaders, lawyers, doctors and nurses in cases with medical issues, economists in cases of economic losses, anyone with expertise you can’t cross-examine”

Of course, to the experts this is counter-intuitive and bound to make no sense. Explaining his rationale, he went on to say, “I have nothing against people who think they are experts, but they tend to believe that just because they know a lot about ONE area, that means they should be able to tell everybody else what to think about everything. I much prefer common sense over expertise when it matters.”

Preach it brother! What he’s saying that when he’s involved in a case where the caca has hit the wall, and its life or death, or serious money issues for his clients, he puts his money on REGULAR FOLKS — not experts — to be on the jury. Even if those experts have expertise in whatever the case is about!

Now some of you might think, he’s knocking professionals, not so he simply feels that you can’t rely or depend on experts to use common sense, and other people, the majority (just think about the past 2 ½ years) defer TOO MUCH to experts, suspending their own judgement and critical thinking! They’re not the “be all and end all” of everything and we need to stop deferring to experts. Granted, they are valuable for giving us an informed opinion to consider with respect to a specific matter, that’s all. At the end of the day however, you should always question, and feel free to reject expert advice if it doesn’t make sense to you.

Kinda, sorta like over the past 2 ½ years