In the book “Beyond Right and Wrong”, David Donoghue, and intellectual property attorney and partner at Holland & Knight in Chicago, reflects on attorneys’difficulties in predicting case outcomes and opines that law school education itself may contribute to the gap between attorneys’ predictions and jurors; verdicts:
As a child, my dad (a criminal defense attorney) routinely ask my family and me to predict the outcomes of his trials. We were usually correct. My dad was not. At some point during law school, I stopped being able to predict his case outcomes. The law changes how you think. Perhaps lawyers become too clouded with burdens of proof and rules of evidence to appreciate how a jury sees a trial. As a federal district court law clerk, I had a similar experience. I saw a number of trials and as we waited for the jury, we would often try to predict the results in chambers. The only people who reliably predicted the results were those without law degrees.
