Picking up where we left off, recall that we were in Atlanta getting ready for a jury exercise to occur in New York.
So Friday night I fly back from Atlanta and Sunday morning bright and early I head up to NY. The exercise involved three days of case presentation to about 8 mock juries. We had lawyers from our team playing both the plaintiff and defense side, with a total of 90 minutes of go time for each. The event took place in a monstrous Times Square hotel -- we had the presentations going in a giant ballroom and the rest of us (about 50 lawyers including client, all told) were all assembled in the giant ballroom next door listening and watching on closed caption plasma monitors. Then the jurors would go into separate conference rooms spread out around the hotel and deliberate -- we would listen in from our ballroom with headphones you could tune to various channels depending on which jury you wanted to listen to.
This all sounds fine except that a) the jurors had no idea we were there, and b) the jurors thought the exercise was real, they didn't know it was fake. So we had to engage in clandestine tactics. None of us could talk to each other in public in the hotel, for fear a juror might see us and start wondering why plaintiff and defendant were so cozy. We had to do our ritual fire brigade trips to the nearest watering hole at distances far from the hotel. We ate our team dinners at non-descript Chinese restaurants far from Times Square so that no-one would see all 50 of us together whooping it up (or trying to anyway). We had to try to slip into our ballroom undetected and incognito -- would not do to have jurors see everyone going into the same room and wonder what was up. We could not take a hotel elevator with anyone else on our team. We could not get into the same taxis as one other, etc. Most of all, we had to be quiet as church mouse in the ballroom so they would not hear us through the fake wall. At one point, I was in the presentation room helping the fearsome blond bombshell put on her presentation against, of all people, my boss, and she said something rather humorous about my boss. Such as, "Mr. Brown may be a nice enough person when you get to know him, I don't know." Which was funny because of course she knows Mr. Brown extremely well and because Mr. Brown is, in fact, rather nice when you get to know him. This made all our colleagues in the next room hoot with laughter -- which we could hear quite clearly in the presentation room. Did the jurors figure out that the laughter was a response to what was going on in their room? Who knows.
The effect of three days of this was a feeling that we were living in a science fiction movie. Three days in a row with headphones on staring at plasma screen TVs watching jurors dissect your presentations (a very painful experience) was disorienting. Three days of trying to pretend you have never even met the people with whom you spend most of your waking hours is also strange.
And jurors complain about everything -- the clothes someone was wearing, whether someone's suit looked too expensive or threadbare, people's accents -- many of which have nothing to do with substance. Jurors make things up. People became completely convinced of some facts that were not in any presentation made by anyone and that are not, strictly speaking, true. Jurors ascribe all sorts of evil motives to the most benign situations. Jurors complain about being talked down to, as they gaily make a complete hash of the simplest, most basic facts. Jurors say terrible things about the lawyers, especially when they think the lawyers can't hear them. Spending three days watching one's case be dismantled and one's colleagues be ridiculed was extraordinarily depressing. By the end of day 3, we all sat in our ballroom slumped in our chairs, lukewarm hotel coffee and half nibbled Danishes strewn about, discarded jury notes made some lawyer fed up with the display (i.e., "Juror number 12 is an IDIOT!"). We had entered a collective twilight zone -- even though we were smack in the middle of Times Square, we might as well have been in a nuclear fallout shelter deep below the Rocky Mountains.
Eventually we could no longer speak to one another at all, we were too demoralized. After the end of Day 3 we all fled first the hotel and then the City. We needed to talk to normal people about normal things. We needed to be outside instead of stuck in a windowless ballroom. We needed to talk to people who liked us, at least a little bit. My closest friend on the team and I said "bye" in a rushed and desultory fashion in the middle of Times Square. He went to find his non-lawyer brother for dinner before going back to Baltimore. I gave up on humanity altogether, and got a train to come home and see my horse.
posted by Anonymous @ 11:53 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home