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There was a great comment on the Verge (lol it's true) the other day about just this by someone who had been in a similar jury:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/23/3260463/apple-samsung-jury...

I actually have some experience with this. I recently “second chaired” a very complex civil trial involving significant accounting issues. The presentation of evidence alone took 5 weeks. The verdict form was almost as complex as the one described here. We all expected the verdict form to come back a self-contradictory mess, but in fact the jury had no problem sorting through it all. The verdicts were perfectly consistent and logical, as were the damage awards. And unlike the Apple/Samsung jury, our jury mostly consisted of homemakers and people from working class backgrounds, so we couldn’t expect them to have comfort with the subject matter. My take on this was that the jurors understood they were deciding a dispute worth tens of millions of dollars and really wanted to reach the right result. So we might see the same thing in this case. On the other hand, my trial involved “real people” with names and faces, not faceless corporations like Apple and Samsung. It is possible that the jurors had a higher level of engagement under the circumstances.




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