Conducting jury selection is an essential part of conducting trials in America. The process can be surprisingly tricky, and that has given rise to firms that provide jury selection services. If you're preparing for the process, here are four basic things every jury selection services provider will tell you to pay attention to.

The Questionnaire

Coming up with the questionnaire that the prospective jurors will be asked to fill out represents the best chance to control the jury pool. Each answer will offer insights into who the juror is and how they'd likely respond to hearing a case.

You can't waste the court's time with endless pages of questions, though. For that reason, it's important to compress the concerns you have into tight questions. For example, a criminal defense attorney handling a search-and-seizure case might fashion a few questions about jurors' feelings regarding how the police obtain evidence and whether they have doubts about seizure tactics.

Social Media

The rise of social media and the internet over the last couple of decades has provided a new research tool for folks handling jury selection. A jury selection services team has the right to obtain the list of potential jurors and to use it to conduct research. This can be an excellent way to rule out certain jurors who've expressed negative attitudes toward particular parties in a case. For example, an attorney working on a product liability case might look hard for social media sentiments expressed by jurors against multinational corporations.

Preparing for Voir Dire

Conducting voir dire is the last good chance to get potentially damaging jurors out of the pool. This means fashioning questions that can shed light on particular attitudes. Working from initial responses to the questionnaire, an attorney might focus a line of questioning on something they hope the judge will notice. This approach is especially important because most courts limit the number of juror challenges each side is allowed. When at all possible, you'll want to get the judge to do the job for you.

Courtroom Strategy

Once a jury has been selected, the biggest concern becomes thinking about how those jurors will respond to lines of argumentation. It's not uncommon to conduct mock trials using fake juries to get a sense of what does and doesn't click. This can then be used in conjunction with the profile of the actual jury to present an argument that will resonate.