By Steven R. Young
Approaching forty-six years and almost 200 jury trials, I’ve watched a lot of lawyers treat voir dire as a formality — a box to check before the “real” trial starts. That’s backwards. Voir dire is the only part of the trial where the jury talks and you listen. Everything that happens afterward, you do the talking. Waste those forty-five minutes and you’ve wasted your best chance to find out who’s already decided your case before you’ve said a word.
Ask about the case, not about the juror’s resume. California law gives you more room here than most lawyers use. Code of Civil Procedure section 222.5 entitles counsel to “liberal and probing examination calculated to discover bias or prejudice with regard to the circumstances of the particular case” — and it bars trial judges from imposing arbitrary, one-size-fits-all time limits. Too many attorneys spend their allotted minutes on occupation and hobbies, then run out of time before asking the one question that matters: “How do you feel about a company that says one thing in its safety manual and does another on the floor?” Generic questions get generic answers. Case-specific questions get the truth.
Write down what they actually said. Since January 2026, California’s playing field changed in a way every trial lawyer needs to internalize. Code of Civil Procedure section 231.7 now requires you to state your reasons on the record if the other side objects to a peremptory challenge, and a long list of reasons, including vague impressions about “demeanor,” “attitude,” or juror inattention, are presumptively invalid unless you can tie them, with real specificity, to something that juror said and why it matters to this case. A hunch isn’t a record. A juror’s own words are. I keep a notebook, not a checklist, and I write down phrasing, not impressions, because six months from now an appellate court reviews your reasons de novo, and it only looks at what you actually said, not what you meant.
Don’t confuse rapport with information. Jurors who like you will nod, smile, and tell you what they think you want to hear. The best voir dire question I know is the open-ended follow-up nobody plans for: “Tell me more about that.” It’s not aggressive, it’s not leading, and it routinely surfaces the one juror who’s already made up their mind about insurance companies, corporations, or “frivolous lawsuits.” That is the kind of bias a closed-ended question would never catch.
Remember the goal is a favorable jury. Hand-picking your “ideal” juror is a fantasy. What you’re actually doing is forming a “tribe” while identifying the one or two people who do not belong in the tribe, and using your six peremptory challenges (eight per side if there are more than two parties, under CCP section 231) wisely enough that they’re gone before the panel is sworn. Jury selection is not the warm-up act. It’s the first decision point in the trial, and it deserves the same preparation as your opening statement.
