Anne Reed is a trial lawyer and jury consultant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She will teach a course about jury selection at Solo Practice University®.
Anne has practiced for 27 years at Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren, SC, where she was a shareholder co-chairing the financial litigation group. Anne has consulted with lawyers from many different firms to assist in trial preparation both in Wisconsin (using Reinhart’s specialized courtroom, the Trial Science Institute) and elsewhere. Working closely with these lawyers, Anne designs and conducts mock trials to help lawyers and clients see their disputes through jurors’ eyes.
Anne has written about juries and jury trials at her blog, Deliberations – “a smart, captivating blog,” in the words of the ABA Journal.
Anne’s work has been published in TRIAL Magazine and the Wisconsin Law Journal, and she has been quoted on jury issues in, among others, the ABA Journal and the Los Angeles Times. She has spoken to legal groups in Wisconsin and nationally about various aspects of jury trials.
In her trial practice, Anne regularly lead trial counsel in disputes over business fraud and malpractice, mergers and acquisitions, intellectual property, corporate and shareholder disputes, ERISA rights and responsibilities, and other business and financial issues. Anne received her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and her law degree, cum laude, from Cornell University Law School in 1981. She served on the Communication Committee of the American Society of Trial Consultants and as a neutral on the commercial arbitration panel of the American Arbitration Association.
Syllabus – Jury Selection
- Relax: the myth of accuracy and other reasons why you don’t need to worry so much about voir dire
- Voir dire is everywhere: preparing for voir dire at the grocery store (and the airport, watching TV, etc)
- What are you looking for? Describing the jurors you hope to strike, and hope to keep
- Handy questions: a repertoire of simple questions that make it easy for jurors to tell you who they are
- Voir dire by remote: drafting questionnaires, and questions the judge will ask
- Don’t go there: what’s off limits in voir dire
- Dealing with surprises
- Race and other tough issues
- Voir dire for cause: finding and challenging biased jurors
- Logistics: the voir dire section of your trial notebook, and making sure you don’t strike the wrong juror
- Beyond the basics: a few advanced techniques
- Putting it all together