Try to find out what a jury consultant costs. Search the term and you land on directory listings, salary aggregators, and a long row of firms whose pricing page is a contact form. The number exists. It is simply not published. A trial team asking a client or an insurer to approve a five- or six-figure line item has no public benchmark to point to, and neither does whoever has to sign off on it. That is a bad position to negotiate from, on either side of the request.
What the market actually charges. A handful of firms post estimated rate cards; most do not. Taken together, those published cards and industry reporting sketch a consistent picture. Preparatory work (reviewing case materials, drafting voir dire questions, building a juror questionnaire) generally runs $2,000 to $8,000 per component. A one-day mock trial or focus group is commonly quoted from $10,000 to $30,000 in fees, with two-day formats roughly double and expenses billed separately; multi-panel projects in expensive venues reach $60,000 and higher, driven by recruitment, facility type, and depth of analysis. In-court jury selection is billed by the day, roughly $5,000 to $25,000 plus expenses, scaled to the seniority of the consultant in the chair. Shadow juries run $7,000 to $10,000 a day. Hourly rates for experienced consultants generally fall between $250 and $650. A full engagement runs from about $10,000 to well into six figures, and for a joint-defense group facing nine-figure exposure and a multi-week trial, an all-in litigation consulting budget approaching $500,000 is not unusual.
None of that is overpriced. Recruiting a representative mock panel in the right venue, running deliberations, and analyzing the result is expensive work, and cutting corners produces research you cannot rely on. The issue is not the rate. The issue is what the invoice buys.
The line items that never reach the invoice
The published numbers are the visible cost. The larger number is usually the one nobody bills for.
Internal hours. Associates assemble materials, brief the consultant on a record they already know cold, and reconcile the recommendations against the trial team’s own read. None of that time appears on anyone’s invoice.
Re-education. The second matter starts at zero, and so does the third. A consultant who spent forty hours learning your witnesses and your venues carries none of it forward unless you hire the same person again, and even then it lives in their head, not your file.
Coverage gaps. Because the day rate is what it is, structured jury work gets reserved for the biggest matters on the docket, and the rest runs on instinct. That is not a strategy. It is a budget constraint deciding which cases get analyzed.
The audit: what remains when the engagement ends
This is the question to ask before signing anything, and a fair one to put to any provider, VoirPro included. Five tests:
1. The juror profiles. Do the behavioral profiles built for this panel exist in a form your team can query on the next matter, or only as narrative inside a PDF?
2. The scoring logic. Is the reasoning that ranked one juror above another written down as a method your team can apply, or a judgment call only the consultant can reproduce?
3. The venue read. Does what was learned about this jurisdiction accumulate anywhere, or reset when the file closes?
4. The voir dire record. Is there a contemporaneous record of how the panel was evaluated and why each strike was exercised, or notes reconstructed after the fact?
5. The capability. After this matter, can anyone on your team run part of this process without outside help? If the answer is still no after the tenth engagement, the model is working exactly as designed.
Most firms, run through that audit honestly, find that what remains is a report and a relationship. Both have value. Neither is an asset the firm owns.
The arithmetic the category avoids
Run it once on a representative matter: a two-day mock trial and two days of in-court support during selection. At published rates that is roughly $60,000 in research fees plus $10,000 to $50,000 for the courtroom days, before expenses. Now add what no one invoices. A partner and two associates will spend, conservatively, sixty to eighty hours across that engagement assembling materials, briefing the consultant, sitting in sessions, and reconciling recommendations against their own read of the case. At standard billing rates that is another five figures of firm time, and most of it is spent teaching an outsider a record the firm already owns. Measured honestly, the consultant’s fee is often the smaller half of the number.
Then ask the question the category never poses: what share of the docket gets analyzed at all? The same math scales past a single matter for anyone funding jury work across more than one, a firm’s own book, a corporate legal department’s docket, or an insurer’s panel of defense counsel. An insurer with ninety matters in active litigation that funds structured jury work on its four largest does not have a jury strategy. It has four percent coverage. The rate sets the coverage, and the coverage sets the exposure on the other ninety-six, which is the part of the docket no one has modeled. That number belongs on a risk committee’s desk, not just a firm’s.
This is not an argument against consultants
VoirPro runs full trial consulting engagements itself, and for a bet-the-company matter in an unfamiliar venue on a compressed schedule, experienced outside judgment is worth what it charges. The deeper structural question, whether the intelligence a firm generates about jurors should be rented one matter at a time or owned, is taken up in What Is Litigation Intelligence.
Ask for the number. Every provider should be willing to give one, and the ranges above are a fair place to start. But the figure on the quote is the smallest of the three that decide what jury research actually costs a firm. The second is the internal time it takes to support the engagement. The third is how many matters the first two leave uncovered. A firm that negotiates only on the first will keep paying all three.
The second and third numbers are the ones VoirPro was built to change. That approach is set out on the Voirtex Platform page, on the VoirPro FINDS™ framework page, and in the full FAQ.