Risk Analyses

Mock trials and focus groups are powerful diagnostic tools, but the group verdicts they produce are only the beginning of the analysis.

Two or three deliberation panels can tell a trial team a great deal about how jurors understand the case, where they struggle, which themes gain traction, and how damages are discussed. But those group verdicts can also vary dramatically depending on which jurors happen to be assigned to which panel. A single high anchor juror, a persuasive holdout, or a small cluster of sympathetic jurors can move a group verdict by millions of dollars.

High Ground’s Risk Analyses are designed to go deeper.

Using the juror level data generated during mock trials and focus groups, High Ground develops quantitative models that simulate thousands of potential jury outcomes. Rather than reducing the case to a single mock trial number, the analysis produces a fuller distribution of likely verdicts, showing where outcomes cluster, how much variability exists, where the tail risk begins, and how jury composition can change the value of the case.

What the Analysis Measures

A High Ground Risk Analysis may incorporate juror level verdict preferences, low and high damages ranges, deliberation group outcomes, leadership behavior, persuasive influence, defense verdict rates, and case specific juror characteristics.

Those data can then be used to model different trial risk scenarios, including baseline jury composition, adverse panel composition, and more favorable defense panel composition. This allows the trial team to evaluate not only the expected value of the case, but how much exposure changes when the wrong jurors remain on the panel or the most dangerous jurors are successfully removed.

The analysis can answer questions such as: What is the likely verdict range? What is the probability of a verdict above a specific threshold? How much tail risk exists? How often does the defense win outright? How much does jury selection affect expected exposure? Which juror profiles appear to drive the most dangerous outcomes? What settlement range is supported by the data? At what point does trial become the better option?

Beyond the Average Verdict

Averages can be misleading. A single midpoint does not show the shape of the risk.

High Ground’s analyses are designed to show the full distribution of possible outcomes. That may include average and median verdicts, defense verdict rates, percentile outcomes, worst observed simulated outcomes, risk curves, threshold tables, and side by side comparisons of different jury composition scenarios.

This approach gives trial teams a more useful foundation for settlement, mediation, reserve discussions, voir dire strategy, and client communication. It helps distinguish between the likely outcome, the realistic downside, and the catastrophic but lower probability outcome.