University of Denver law professor Bernard Chao has been living in a world of virtual juries. The former Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati litigator is taking advantage of Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk website for human intelligence tasks to convene hundreds of mock juries online. He and Denver colleague John Campbell, along with University of Arizona professors Christopher Robertson and David Yokum, recently used them to test conventional litigation wisdom of both plaintiffs and defense attorneys. Their paper on the subject, “Countering the Plaintiffs Anchor,” will be formally published this fall in the University of Iowa Law Review.

How does this process work? Amazon Mechanical Turk is a platform that recruits a lot of people to do what they call human intelligence tasks. They have apparently millions of people doing small tasks for fairly insubstantial amounts of money, and they make them anonymous as well. We connect it to a fairly well-known survey platform called Qualtrics. The survey has embedded links that play videos that represent our trial.

So this gives you the opportunity to convene mock juries at a fraction of the usual cost. That's right. Previously when I was in private practice we would do mock juries, and we would bring in maybe three mock juries and talk to them after we did the mini-trial and deliberation. And that would cost—this is maybe dating me, 15 years ago—tens if not $50,000 to a $100,000. That would get maybe 36 subjects, and of course you pay the jury consultant. It was a very expensive process.