One thing I've been quietly building at VENYX is a set of custom AI tools for litigation, specifically for the parts of trial that move too fast for a notepad to keep up with. This past month I got to put one of them to work in a real courtroom, sitting in as jury analyst for a colleague's trial in Adams County.
I'm a PI attorney, not a professional jury consultant. But jury selection has always been one of the parts of trial I find most interesting, and also one of the hardest to do well under pressure. The problem isn't instinct. Experienced trial lawyers are good at reading people. The problem is information management. Voir dire moves fast. You're tracking answers across a large panel, by juror number, in real time, while also listening and strategizing. By the time you need to make a decision on a strike, you're relying on whatever stuck in memory and whatever made it onto a notepad. That's the problem I've been building toward solving.
The verdict came back $122,720.53 for two plaintiffs. The stat offers had been $15,000 each. Here's a look at the case and what I did.
Two plaintiffs were stopped in traffic on September 12, 2023. A BMW stopped behind them. Then the defendant rear-ended the BMW, pushing it into the plaintiffs' Corolla. The damage to the Corolla was minor. Defense counsel in closing said you had to zoom in on the photos to see the fender damage. The Corolla was never repaired.
Both plaintiffs drove themselves home. They went to their primary care doctor the next day. One went to the ER the following day. Soft tissue neck and back injuries for both, plus right knee pain for one. A few weeks later they started treatment at Mountain View, working through chiropractic, PT, and acupuncture. About a year post-crash, one plaintiff had three rounds of trigger point injections and an MRI showing facet joint effusions. The other had a lumbar ESI and cervical and lumbar MRIs showing a 2mm protrusion. Her knee MRI was normal. Both were discharged after about 17 months, reporting no ongoing problems.
Medical bills: $22,807 for one plaintiff, $35,456 for the other.
Defense's theory was predictable: low impact, low damage, over-treatment. They hired a records review expert who charged over $36,000 for his opinion that each plaintiff should have recovered in 6 to 12 weeks. My colleague had a different view of the evidence. She went to trial.
The plaintiffs' story was well told. Co-counsel humanized the clients in opening. One plaintiff was born in California, moved to Colorado, then to Mexico for high school after his father was deported. He met his partner there, and they moved back to Colorado together in 2022. He works construction and has advanced steadily at his employer. She started as a temp custodian at a school and was brought on full-time. Real people with real lives, disrupted by someone else's carelessness.
The high point of trial was my colleague's cross of the defense's records review expert. Within three minutes, the energy in the courtroom shifted. Jurors sat up. Some smiled. She started by establishing areas of agreement, then methodically walked the expert through his own assumptions. She got him to agree that the plaintiffs were injured in the crash. That the MRIs were reasonable and related. That the types of injuries they had can cause pain well beyond 12 weeks. Then she pointed out that his own math, 24 to 36 conservative appointments over that 12-week window, was essentially what they had received, just spread over a longer period because of their work schedules. The frequency assumptions in his opinion were the opinion.
Then she mentioned his fee: $36,000 for that records review. One of the jurors audibly gasped.
In closing, she asked the jury to award each plaintiff their medical bills and framed non-economic damages this way: the defendant had spent $36,000 to minimize what these plaintiffs went through. Wasn't 17 months of pain and disruption worth at least that much? She asked for $18,000 in non-economics for each, and notably did not ask for impairment.
The jury got the case at 3:30 Wednesday afternoon. They had a verdict by 8:30 Thursday morning. On non-economic damages, they gave more than what was asked for, coming back with $30,208 for one plaintiff and $45,312 for the other against a request of $18,000 each. The jury had their own view of what 17 months was worth.
My role was jury analysis, not voir dire. I sat with trial counsel during jury selection and worked in the background while the lawyers did what lawyers do. My job was to make sure that when it came time to make decisions on strikes, we had something better than scrambled notes and gut instinct to work from.
I've been building a fully custom case management system with AI components to assist in all aspects of personal injury work. This was a fantastic opportunity to deploy one of those tools, my jury selection assistant. The system let me synthesize juror data into something organized and usable when it came to selection.
The goal wasn't to replace attorney instinct. It was to make sure that instinct was working from complete, organized information instead of whatever happened to stick in memory during a fast-moving courtroom process.
One of the hardest parts of jury selection, in my experience, is simply keeping everything straight. Jurors are identified by number. They give answers in voir dire that mean something in context but are easy to confuse or forget as the panel grows. When we were picking the jury knew who was worth fighting to keep, who we wanted off with a peremptory, and who presented a credible cause challenge.
The jury we picked gave us more than we asked for.
This is also a window into how VENYX operates generally. I build the firm's tech tools myself rather than paying for a stack of outside software subscriptions and passing that cost on to clients. No outside jury consulting fees, no monthly software bills baked into overhead, no markup hiding inside the fee. That's a meaningful part of how a 29% pre-litigation fee instead of the 33-35% industry standard is possible in the first place, and it's also why there's never a separate technology charge tacked onto a client's bill at VENYX. The tools get built in house, they get used in house, and the savings go to the client.
If you're a trial lawyer with a significant case coming up and want to talk about what this looks like in practice, feel free to reach out.
This case had a lot of the hallmarks defense likes to lean on: minor visible vehicle damage, soft tissue injuries, inconsistent treatment frequency. Farmers made a $15,000 stat offer for each plaintiff and apparently expected it to hold.
The jury gave one plaintiff $47,827 and the other $74,893. Nearly five times the offer for each of them.
Cases like this get settled for bad numbers every day because injured people don't want the risk of trial, and because their attorneys don't want it either. Sometimes the risk is real. But when you've done the work, when you have solid liability, credible plaintiffs, and a treatment narrative you can defend, walking away from a lowball offer is the right call.
My colleague didn't give in. Her clients are better off for it.
What does a jury consultant do?
A jury consultant helps trial counsel make better decisions during jury selection. That can include analyzing prospective jurors for bias, organizing information gathered during voir dire, advising on cause challenges, and prioritizing peremptory strikes. The role varies depending on the case and the consultant. Some jury consultants conduct mock trials or focus groups in advance. My work focuses on real-time analysis and information organization during the selection process itself.
Can a PI attorney serve as a jury consultant on someone else's case?
Yes. There's no rule preventing a licensed attorney from providing consulting services on another attorney's case, including jury analysis. The key is that the consulting attorney isn't appearing as counsel of record. I wasn't trial counsel on this case. I sat in a consulting capacity during jury selection only, working behind the scenes while lead counsel handled the courtroom.
How does AI help with jury analysis?
Jury selection generates a lot of information fast. Jurors answer questions, reveal attitudes, and give you signals, and all of that has to be tracked across a panel of potentially dozens of people, by number, in real time. AI tools can help aggregate, organize, and surface that information in a structured way, so that by the time a decision needs to be made, you're working from a complete picture rather than memory and margin notes.
What kind of technology does VENYX use in its cases?
This is something I've invested in heavily since founding the firm. VENYX runs a custom case management system with AI components built specifically for personal injury work, including tools for case organization, demand and documentation workflows, and trial preparation, all built in house. The goal is always the same: to move faster, stay more organized, and make better decisions with the information available. Because I build these tools myself instead of paying for a stack of outside software, there's no technology surcharge passed on to clients, something I've written about in more detail at Is Your Lawyer Charging You AI Fees? The tools keep evolving. That's intentional, and it's part of how a 29% fee instead of the industry standard 33-35% is possible in the first place.
Are low-speed, soft tissue cases actually hard to win at trial?
In some ways, they're harder than catastrophic injury cases. When someone has a spinal cord injury or a traumatic brain injury, the jury can see it. The damages speak for themselves. With soft tissue injuries and minor vehicle damage, you're asking the jury to believe in something they can't easily see, pain that persisted for 17 months from a crash where the fender damage was barely visible in photos. Defense leans into that heavily. They call it over-treatment. They hire experts to say six weeks of care was plenty. You have to build credibility from the ground up, with real people who came to court and told the truth about what they went through. That's why the jury matters so much in these cases. A panel that's skeptical of soft tissue injuries, or that automatically trusts low-damage arguments, will punish plaintiffs even when the facts support them. Getting the right people in the box is as important as anything that happens at the podium.
Here to provide you clear answers about your case.
