The Data Platform Every Plaintiff’s Attorney Needs Now

Voice Over (00:03):

Every trial lawyer knows that moment when you've built what feels like an airtight case, but you're still lying awake, wondering what will the jury actually think? Jury research was once a luxury reserved for cases that could support a big data study bill. Not anymore. Join trial lawyer and trial scientist Alicia Campbell, empirical legal scholar, Nick Schweitzer and data guru Kevin Doran as they break down the barriers between you and the minds of your jury. This is the Fred Files produced and powered by Law Pods.

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Alicia Campbell (00:39):

So hello, welcome to the Fred Files. This is episode one. We're thrilled to get started. We're going to be talking about Fred, why every plaintiff case deserves testing. So we want to introduce you to Big Data's little brother that we call Fred. I'm Alicia Campbell. I'm part of Campbell Law. I do big data studies and now small data studies, and I've got two wonderful people on the podcast with me and I'm going to let them introduce themselves.

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Nick Schweitzer (01:07):

Okay, everyone. My name is Nick Schweitzer. I am COO of Focus with Fred. I have been with Alicia and Kevin getting this together to be something that we're pretty excited about. I am on the side. I also work on big data cases. I have a company called Trial by Data and we do some data analysis and legal research type things. And on the side, I'm also a professor formerly at Arizona State University and now moving to Cornell University this summer. And that's me.

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Kevin Doran (01:39):

Hey everybody, I'm Kevin. I'm a software engineer. I'm the CTO of Focus with Fred. I met the Campbell's a couple of years ago and worked on one project with them and then was lucky enough to come into focus with Fred. I've always been kind of a founding engineer, so I write a lot of the initial code for various kind of software as a service startups and I mostly had been working kind of outside of the US in supply chain stuff. The camel's brought me into legal tech and everyone I talked to makes me more and more excited about the fact that I got to work on focus with Fred.

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Alicia Campbell (02:11):

Awesome, awesome. Well, today we're going to talk a little bit about who Fred is. We're going to do the next three podcasts together and then we'll have podcasts with different guests and either one or all of us will be on that, but we wanted to make sure that we could consistently provide podcasts that people can listen to while discussing Fred, while discussing data, those type of things. So this is kind of like a three-part episode of the where and why. What we're going to be going with is, so today is more like the who is Fred and why do you need him in your life? Because you do, Fred is someone you need in your life if you're a plaintiff's attorney because what he really does is democratize data so that regardless of your case size, you can get some input from 75 real life jurors about that case that maybe only has a million dollar policy coverage or doesn't really have all the injuries that would make it a large case, or it can be used for your large case as you're in discovery moving forward through the process to make sure you're filling in any gaps or holes and just providing all the information that you can to jurors when it comes time to do the big data study.

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(03:28):

So with that in mind, I wanted to talk a little bit about the plaintiff's attorney dilemma Limba.

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Nick Schweitzer (03:36):

Yeah, Alicia, I think people will want to know the number one question, which is who actually is Fred? Is Fred a person? We get that a lot. So if this is the WHO episode, we have to

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Alicia Campbell (03:47):

Give him a little bit of background, I guess like the origins of Fred. So Fred is not a person and he is not ai, he's not a robot. He's simply a platform. He's a platform where you can come online once you have your presentations done, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. You can build your own study with the help that we provide on the platform. We call him Fred because I don't know, we like to personalize data. So I gave him a name when I came up with him in 2016, I was very frustrated with mandatory federal mediation requirements that aren't very helpful. So since then we've just kind of kept him as a person because it's fun to talk about him in that kind of way and it makes it a little more personal. But yeah, that's a great question. We should probably explain who he is a little bit and not just jump into, but that's why we call it focus with Fred because you should definitely show Fred your case, right?

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Kevin Doran (04:46):

Yes.

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Alicia Campbell (04:47):

So yes.

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Kevin Doran (04:48):

Can I audit and say that when I first started hearing about Fred, it was in emails with you all and it was something like talking about one project and another, and I was still trying to figure out the Campbell cinematic universe where things were and what things were, and you guys were mentioning big data and then you said something about, well, that will come to play with Fred. And I had the same question. I was like, who's Fred? I started kind of looking at the emails and then seeing if anybody CC'd was named Fred, but yeah, now I know.

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Alicia Campbell (05:16):

Yeah,

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Kevin Doran (05:17):

Now,

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Alicia Campbell (05:17):

Yeah, I think it's kind of catchy. I don't know people will weigh in, but I like the idea that with tech comes a little bit more personalization, especially with focus groups being what they are, which is usually a lawyer bringing a bunch of people into their office or into a hotel conference space and getting 'em off Craigslist or using some kind of marketing on the ground service that can provide people for them. And then they spend the day providing Danish various food offerings and talking to jurors about their cases. So it's kind of nice to keep Fred still a part of that even though it's like an online platform, even though these are jurors you'll hear from in terms of having comments from them, things like that, their thoughts in their own words summarized by ai. But it is still kind of nice to think of it as a smaller kind of intimate way to get people to tell you either how good or better not great your case is. So

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Kevin Doran (06:16):

It's a great name and I'm sorry to keep sidetracking you from introing it, but in software engineering, one of the jokes is that one of the hardest things to do is just to name something because all day long you're kind of naming different parts of the code and a lot of it's abstract. And so with Fred, it's falls into this category of a perfect name because it's like when you say the full name focus with Fred, it implies the domain and what's going on. But then the Fred part is generic enough that the system itself doesn't have to be anything very specific. If you named it like the focus group coordinator and then Fred starts to do more and more, which I think it is, the name starts to not work anymore. So to give a different example at a different company I was at, we named a system Avocado to differentiate it from a different tool that we had named, I don't remember what it was, carrot or something like that. And so those were generic enough that it was like you knew that it was not Carrot, so that's why it was called that. But I think Fred focused with Fred is a great name.

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Alicia Campbell (07:14):

Well, that's good. I mean, originally this podcast was going to be called Fred Talks because I thought it rammed to TED Talks and it was very good, but then Law Pods was nice enough to tell me that there are many Fred Talks podcasts. So instead we went with the Fred files, which is kind of like the XFiles. At least that's what it channeled for me.

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(07:34):

So yeah, I think, I don't know, it's definitely fun playing with the name of Fred and having him have a face as the logo and a persona is kind of nice. So one of the things I wanted to talk about today was the plaintiff's attorney's dilemma about cases. And so I'm going to throw this out there and see what you guys think. I like to call it the confidence trap. This idea that you have a case that you've invested time and money on and your client, and for the most part, most lawyers like most of their clients, and so you have this idea of what your case is worth based on those factors. I've put money in it, I put time in it, I know my client and I pretty much like 'em. And so that always causes plaintiff attorneys to overestimate perhaps the value of those cases. And so can you guys give me an idea of how you think Fred helps with that problem as non-lawyers? What would you think would be the best parts about Fred for that idea that, hey, sometimes we may not be seeing things so clearly as the attorney on the file?

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Nick Schweitzer (08:45):

Kevin, you're the least lawyer person here. I'm not a lawyer also.

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Kevin Doran (08:51):

Yeah. I think about this often because you two have heard me talk about coming from venture capital backed startups. Everyone is so desperate for product market fit, and we hear about software startup ideas all the time. If you're a software engineer or you're someone financing these companies, you're just constantly hearing about ideas of how to take all the new tech and use it for something. And when I describe focus with Fred to people in that space who are like me, not attorneys don't know much about this world, they're always just like, oh, yeah, okay, that makes perfect sense. Which is not a reaction you get very often. A lot of times when you're working on these types of startups, the reactions you get are always follow up questions of this kind of, I'm picturing a vc, like a venture capitalist sort of probing your idea and sort of trying to poke holes in it.

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(09:40):

That never happens with focus for Fred. They're just like, well, yeah, if I was a plaintiff attorney, why wouldn't I want to do that? Why would I not want run data? On the same way that if you're running an AB test on a new type of product or you are getting data from customers or you're sort of scraping sales call videos for who's saying yes or no to different features, why would you not be running your case online with real data before it runs? Especially if you only have one shot? That's crazy in software, it's never one, you don't have a one shot thing in the future that you're preparing for. Usually even an investment call, you're like, if it doesn't work out, you just go to different investors. Or if the customer doesn't work out, you change your pitch. If you only have one chance, of course you would want to run many tests of it.

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Nick Schweitzer (10:30):

And Alicia, you mentioned this confidence trap. I think that's a good name because there's, I'm a psychologist, I have a PhD in psychology, which is how I came into this. I got interested in how kind of juries work and people make decisions about things. And so it is the case. I mean, there's a lot working against you when you're an attorney and you take on a case, especially if you've taken it on already. So okay, you already have made a commitment to it, maybe you started to put money in it so you have s some costs, and then all of the things that go on in your brain, you conspire to want to keep going and want to see it through. And one of the things that Fred is I think good for is being a little bit of a reality check and say, okay, we're sure that you think this case is worthwhile and maybe it is.

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(11:16):

Maybe it's exactly what you think it is and more, but maybe it's not. And so I think this is one of the big things that Fred can do and in all research obviously in general is it kind of gives you a more objective picture of what's happening. And so long as I think attorneys are receptive to the possibility that, oh, maybe this case wasn't what I thought, I think this is exactly the sort of thing that I think as Kevin said, it's like a worthwhile, why wouldn't you do this and get that information? You don't have to listen to it if you don't want to really, I mean, no one's forcing you to do anything with it, but it gives you a data point, gives you something to think about as you're moving forward with your decisions about the case.

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Alicia Campbell (12:01):

Well, it's interesting you brought up if you've put money in it because it also hints at something else that Fred is really good at, which is you can run Fred. Fred is economical enough that you can run Fred early to figure out if you should be investing in a particular case because lawyers know lots of wrinkles in the law. Lawyers know lots of issues that are going to come up based on specific facts, and those are all important, but a lot of them are also because we make a lot of determinations about experts, things like that for summary judgment purposes because lots of jurors we know from big data don't really think much of expert opinion. They think, okay, one guy's here from Yale saying A one guy's here from Harvard saying B, how am I supposed to pick between the two? They're both qualified, they're saying opposite things, what do I do?

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(12:49):

And so they often go looking for other evidence, other indicia what's actually going on in the case. And so it's kind of nice to be able to, before you even are thinking about filing a case, knowing all the wrinkles and what you're going to have to prove, what you're going to have to spend, know what you're going to have to present in order to pass summary judgment. Really the ultimate question is once you get past summary judgment, what do 12 people think? What do 12 average Americans think of your case and is it the same as what lawyers are fighting about in the courtroom? Because oftentimes it's not, and oftentimes it's the simpler version of the case that does, some of it gets complicated because of everything we have to file in court. So it is a helpful tool. You're right, Nick, early on maybe before you take that case, which is great because Fred is not just a trial study guy.

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(13:42):

I mean he'll run your whole trial study guy. I mean he'll do all of that, but he's also a video guy. So we've had several people come on and run videos just to get a sense, is this a case that I should take on based on the video? Because a lot of it's going to come down to the video. So that's a great way of thinking about it too because I kind of just framed it as, oh, hey, if you have a case with not big injury or not a lot of coverage or it is a big case and you're working it up, but really Fred can start before then

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Nick Schweitzer (14:10):

And even just to clarify, I'll kind of anonymize it, but we've run many of these video studies and it's interesting to just see what people say. So people, an attorney will come and say, well, I have this client, a potential client slipped and fell in a gas station somewhere and we have the video of it. And so we show the video to all these people and the jurors are like, no, I don't buy this. There was all these wet floor signs and just kind of standing around oddly and kind of bell in a orchestrated, choreographed way, it's not buying it. And you got to know that. And without putting it in front of a whole bunch of people, you necessarily know that.

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Alicia Campbell (14:52):

I think that's really true mean. Yeah. And frankly, in terms of cost, we say it's economical because when we think about the traditional small group focus group where you have, I've done those where you have 10 to 12 people who come in, you buy 'em Danish, you make sure they have lunch, you keep 'em, you pay 'em for all their time, they're usually there eight hours or more and you get a feel for what they're thinking. You get to watch them talk and debate your case. But the flip side is it's only 8, 10, 12 people, which Nick, what do you think about that in terms of a sample of information worth relying

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Nick Schweitzer (15:29):

On? So this is the interesting thing for people who do social and behavioral science research, there's always this question of how many people do you need when you're trying to test a research question? And what's funny is just in the past maybe five, 10 years, even the standards that we used to have, which were far more than eight to 12 people to get a reasonable estimate of what people will do in the future, it's gotten to be pretty big. And so the question of, well, all right, so if you really want to know what people, for example, going back to this gas station video, what will the average person think when they see this? The eight people, the 10 people, the 12 people? Let's say you do two focus groups. Let's say you do three focus groups and you have 36 people, that's fine ish, but that's going to be really expensive and it's not really worth it to get that information.

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(16:20):

But Fred, for video studies and getting these kind of quick impressions, we kind of figure out what's the right number of people that would make this prohibitively expensive for attorneys, but would also give the best, most accurate response. So we'll do 50 jurors for these video studies and for the trial studies, which we'll talk about a little bit more. And I think in our upcoming episodes, we'll do 75 people because that seems to be about where the accuracy gains start to get a little bit smaller as you keep adding people. But one focus group, it's great, and sometimes attorneys will be like, but you get hours of their time and it's like, well, you get hours of time of these eight people or these 10 people, but they could be and are likely going to be the wrong people. They're not going to be representative of everything. So you're getting in depth data, but how good is it? How applicable will it actually be when it comes time to, if you end up trying the case, is this focus group going to tell you something that will generalize to the eventual jury that you get

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Alicia Campbell (17:20):

And we take great pain. So you talked about are these going to be an accurate representation of people? Why don't you talk a little bit more about what we do to make sure that the 75 people that we get translate not specifically to a venue, but I mean I'll let you talk about that are a representative of Americans?

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Nick Schweitzer (17:37):

Yeah, so we kind of mentioned Alicia has been doing big data studies for a long time and myself and some others came into that orbit a couple of ago and have started helping with some of the data backend of that. And so we've kind of learned a lot from running hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and I don't know, Alicia, what, eight, nine, almost a thousand big data studies. I don't know how many you've done over the years.

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Alicia Campbell (18:03):

Yeah, we're 9 59.

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Nick Schweitzer (18:06):

Okay, so that's a lot. And these are big, there's a lot of people in each of these studies. And so you start to learn and then being involved with that, you start to get a sense of, all right, these are obviously a lot more elaborate, more complex sort of designs than what we'll do with Fred, but it gives you the sense of, all right, well, where now that we have this slightly more in depth or I guess a lot more in depth data from the big data studies, how can we distill that down, keep the accuracy high, but kind of make it a little bit better? And so one of the ways we do that is we've been sampling research participants, our jurors who do our study, but we've been doing that for a very long time and we've gotten very good at picking a sample of jurors who will be broadly representative kind of across venues in a way.

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(18:57):

So having done so many big data studies, we kind of get a sense of what sort of a sample do we need in order to make sure that it will be representative broadly? And so Fred being kind of on the more economical, the little brother of big data kind of route, we don't do lots of targeted or any real targeting to particular venues. And there's a reason for that. And we found that often it's not really necessary, especially for the types of judgments that you're getting from Fred, like an initial impression of your case, initial impression of a video. The opinions that you'll get from a nationally representative sample tend to be pretty highly related to what would happen if you start to narrow down to a particular venue and venue. Maybe it leans this way or that way, but that's going to be the little, that's the icing on it.

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(19:52):

But the core of the cake is really what the kind of baseline impressions are that all people will share. And that's a big chunk of what drives both people's decisions behaviorally, but also if they're going to be a juror, what their verdict and impression of the case would eventually be. So we can tap into that big kind of underlying thing that will drive most of people's decisions without necessarily having to go into a ton of detail like venue by venue. So we put a lot of effort into that, both in terms of the breadth of the participants, we get to be jurors and also kind of their quality, make sure that they are paying attention. And we have all sorts of tricks that we do to make sure that the data that we get and then pass on to the attorneys is reliable.

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Alicia Campbell (20:39):

I mean, I think that's all right. And I think people may have this misconception that really data is reserved for only really big cases of what we're talking about here. But really in some ways I was thinking about it, smaller cases, I mean, okay, they're smaller, so you can say the stakes aren't as high. I am not going to ask for half a billion dollars on this case. That's all true, but in some ways the smaller cases have less room for air. You can't be off in significant ways about mean, we can talk about the host of cases that people have overvalued and people have undervalued cases, but the problem is overvaluing cases. And so smaller cases aren't free from that, that you're holding out for the policy when your cases worth a quarter of that you're giving advice, you're telling your client to act in a certain way, or you are investing money that you may be putting yourself in a position where you can't really get that back without it being problematic because you just don't have a bunch of extra.

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(21:37):

And so I was thinking about that. That really Fred's really good at making sure that it comes in at an economic margin in terms of time and money. You don't have to spend as much time, you're not running your own focus group. You still have to write the presentations that you would for your traditional focus group anyway, but then it's like what a 10 minute build, a 15 minute build and then three to five business days later you have the opinions of 75 real people. But in that way, it is kind of a safety net for lawyers who they don't have a half a billion dollars to think about. But the flip side is they have limits on how much room they can actually budget to spend. Because some cases are like, well, heck, this case is so worth it that I'll just spend what I need to spend whatever that amount is.

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(22:24):

Smaller cases, you need to be a little bit more sure because the results may not work out very well if you've put as much into the case in terms of expenses that you can actually realistically get out of it. So I was thinking about that, how it's kind of funny because Fred is good with help, as John always says, the worst people to ask about their cases are plaintiff lawyers. We are the least capable of seeing our case. We either really, really love it, really, really hate it either way, we definitely need input. But the cost barriers really important because since Fred's economical in terms of time and money, it's very helpful for you to run it. And then just the small case idea where some people are like, well, who cares about the smaller cases? I thought about that for today. Will there be people who wonder, but my case is small, so who cares?

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(23:12):

And it's like, actually, maybe you really should because it would be better for you to know from the get go like, Hey, I should only budget to spend 20 grand on this case because based on the value I'm getting from these people, I can't justify spending more really. And so it's always better to know because otherwise what you're doing is putting yourself and your client in a position where if you've got $50,000 in expenses, but your case is only worth $150,000 after a fee and expenses and what your client gets, those can be harder sell, if you know what I mean for your clients. So I say all of this, just kind of say, so enter Fred, here comes Fred, the who of our episode. And so we've talked about a little bit, we have 75 real people, Kevin, we've written this, none of this. I need the data guru to verify that this is not AI people, but these are real people. Yes.

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Kevin Doran (24:11):

I just had somebody message me on LinkedIn over the memorial weekend about focus with Fred, and they've worded it so it's like AI gives you feedback on your case. I was like, no, that is not it. I think it's easy to make that assumption because almost everybody starting a software company right now wants to take advantage of AI and do something with it, which makes sense. But that's kind of the most valuable thing with Fred is that it's not AI people telling you what's happening in the case. It's real people. And as we say, we use a little bit of AI to help with a couple parts of the platform and the most useful being summarizing lots and lots of texts because AI is really good at that. But AI making a judgment call and kind of representing the general kind of us resident population like that.

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(24:59):

Nick can speak more to that, but that doesn't make sense right now, and that's not something I would want to spend money on if I had a case that I wanted real feedback on. You can always, I'm sure many people do throw a case into Claude or chat GT and ask questions about it, give me some feedback on this, but in no way is that your check. But when you were talking earlier about a small value case, I thought of flipping houses and I thought of people who would waive a inspection on a small value house flip. I don't flip houses. I don't know very much about this. I'm just assuming that if you were to put 50 grand as a down payment on a small house and you were going to try and flip it later and make 10 or 20 grand on it, you would definitely want an inspection and you would be willing to pay for it and have that be part of the thing.

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(25:44):

So anyways, I sidetracked a little bit from the AI thing, but imagine ai, actually, this is a great analogy. Imagine having AI run the inspection for you. That's when people talk about where to put ai and you hear about startup ideas, there's places where AI makes a lot of sense. And then there's places where it's like, in no world would I want AI to run an inspection on a house and in no world would I want AI to tell me what real jurors are going to think, given what I know about AI right now, maybe in the future, but at least for now, it's like we do a little bit, as Nick knows, we do a little bit more than 75 real people because we need to be able to make sure we're getting the right number every time and we're actually getting you 75. But none of those are AI people and we have a lot of checks in place to make sure that nothing like that happens.

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Alicia Campbell (26:30):

Because really even in Fred, right, Nick, we're still monitoring, cleaning the data, making sure that everybody who comes through is passing the checks and those type of things.

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Nick Schweitzer (26:40):

We have so far, every time a is run, somebody usually me looks at the data and just kind of gives it a ones over, just make sure everything looks good. We have automated checks of course that we've built into it, but it certainly helps to have somebody look at it as well, which we've been doing.

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Alicia Campbell (26:58):

So there's a lot of humans,

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Nick Schweitzer (27:00):

A lot of for

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Alicia Campbell (27:00):

Tech company, it's a lot of humans. Yes.

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Nick Schweitzer (27:03):

Yes. Which is good. I mean, that's the thing is I think, Kevin, you're exactly right. This is the value here is that we use ai and when you run a Fred report, we use AI to summarize some thoughts because AI is great at summarizing. Here's some information, make it shorter, pull out some quotes, things like that. That's great. But in terms of looking at your case and really understanding it and seeing the photos that you add or the text or the transcripts or the videos that you add and seeing it or feeling it, how a juror might, you need people for that and maybe someday AI will continue to get better at this, but then it will still have the perspective of one person and it's like, okay, well now what about the other 74 people? Well, they have different opinions, different perspectives, different. So remember that even when you have AI doing things, you have one AI agent doing it, it's not 75.

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Alicia Campbell (28:00):

And I like that because we're still keeping the community idea because that's the whole point of juries is 12, 10, 9, whatever, you got six people coming into a box to determine what they think of behavior. It's a community decision, which is still what you're getting in Fred. You're getting everybody who could show up potentially their view on your case, their perspective on your case, whether or not they think of it as morally outrageous or more morally outrageous that you filed the lawsuit, right? I mean, you're going to get all of those kind of perspectives so that you can figure out what to do with it. So it's great. I guess that leads into the next thing is we have real people cleaning and doing the studies, but Fred's super easy. Fred's super easy to use, don't you think so? And we just did a rebuild, so now he's easier to use. So for any listeners who've been using Fred before, what Monday would that be right, Kev?

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Nick Schweitzer (29:02):

Yeah, may end of May 25

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Alicia Campbell (29:04):

When you log on, Fred's going to look, I mean, Fred's going to look the same, but the platform's going to look a little different. Let's talk a little bit about that. We, we've tried very hard to make him even simpler than what we thought he was to begin with. Yeah. Yeah.

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Kevin Doran (29:18):

I'll add a little bit about how when you work on a form that asks a lot of questions, and you do that with a group of people, there is like, there has to be some sort of name for this, but the number of questions on the form goes up. You can't sit in a room full of people and say, what are we going to ask someone and not have the number just go up and up and up? And the more time you spend on it, often this number of questions just keeps going up. And the trick with software is kind of like art or writing. You want the number to go down. The more you work on a piece of writing, your hope is that maybe it goes up, it plateaus, and then you start to make it shorter. So with Fred, we've done three released versions of the builder that users have seen and interacted with.

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(30:06):

All of them have little tweaks to them, which is the most fun part of working on software as a service is that you just get to keep making it better. This isn't like code for the Mars rover that you write and send up and hope it works. You get to keep improving it. So when we first did focus with Fred, it was this kind of committee approach of six or seven people coming up with, what are we going to ask? And you guys had a decade and nearly a thousand studies of background that went into that. So it was impressive that we were able to get V one out. When I first was in one of those meetings, I thought, oh man, this could be bad. This could be a tool nobody ever wants to use. Just so hard to use. And I think what's really cool is that just like with writing, each version of the builder has actually gotten a little smaller.

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(30:51):

We've made the number of questions, we now know what's really important, what do we really need to know for a good Fred study? Because we've run several Fred studies, not several, quite a lot. And each week we see more Fred studies and we get to know more and more about what is really important to make a Fred study happen. So the builder is not only kind of just user experience, ux, UI design wise, a little bit easier, but it's more just like on structurally the information architecture is a lot easier to use now that we know more about it.

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Alicia Campbell (31:24):

Yeah, that's definitely true. And it's funny because it kind of hit us because everybody asked, what do I need to get started with Fred? What do I need to get started? And the answer is you have to have a plan of presentation and defense presentation like you would for a focus group, you would write up for a mediator. This time you have to do the defense portion. But that type of item is what we need to get started because the bill flows from that presentation. And then we realized that in Fred, the presentation was the last thing that you uploaded so that when you logged on into Fred, Fred asked a bunch of questions because our belief was that you would have the presentation done and that you would put the presentation in as the last step. Well, we have flipped it on its head.

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(32:05):

So when people ask us what is the first thing that I need to do to start a Fred study, well, now you're not going to get past page one unless you have a presentation for the plaintiff and the defense. And you can also use videos now as well. But we wanted to start with the actual first thing that you need so that anybody who logs onto Fred and doesn't have a presentation isn't going to go very far. Or maybe you're just going to go over to a little box on the side of the page that says, Hey, we have some templates if you would like to go ahead and put it together now. So I'm hoping that that fits with everything that we say when we describe Fred, what do you need first? Well, now it's the first page rather than the last page. So yeah, don't you think So Nick, what do you think of the new builder?

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Nick Schweitzer (32:49):

Oh, I love it. So I mean, Alicia mentioned those of you who are listening who have done a Fred study before now, and first of all, thank you for doing a Fred study and especially just because just seeing how these initial attorneys have made their way through it and what the pain points have been. I guess it just gave a ton of insight into like, oh, and again, just to draw an analogy to the focus groups and the representative thing. So there was just a handful of us putting together this first version we're like, yeah, this is how we saw it. We're like, yeah, this is going to be super easy. This is exactly how we think it's going to work and how people are going to interact with it. And then we get a bunch of people using it and oh, it turns out, no, they're all confused about this or that.

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(33:35):

And it's like, oh, turns out this small group of people didn't have a clear, broad picture of how this would actually be used. So all the feedback we've gotten has just gone into trying to make it easier and easier and easier because it doesn't for this to be something that is truly, truly really useful, we want it to be super, super easy to use and it can be. And it's getting, I mean, it was easy I thought before, and now it's just easier and we're not going to stop making it easier. We're going to keep kind of watching how people are using it and adjusting accordingly. So yeah, we're on version three as Kevin said, and I'm sure there'll be 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and onward as we figure this all out.

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Alicia Campbell (34:19):

Yeah, for sure. I think we talked a little bit about speed, but anybody want to talk about how quickly you get reports back? Fred is fast. Yes.

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Nick Schweitzer (34:29):

Fred is very fast. So it's realistically we do this, we have an ability to get jurors pretty much anytime. We try to run at certain times of day and all of this just for data quality purposes, but we have kind of a standing source of jurors that we've been using for big data studies we've been using for Fred. It's the same kind of source that we've vetted and we kind of cross vet. So if we're like, oh, this person isn't giving us good data, we'll make sure that they're not going to be doing any more cases with us. So because we have this standing pool of jurors, once somebody submits a case still right now, again, one of us looks at it and just makes sure everything looks good. They've been getting pretty good. I think we've been having, as Alicia hinted at these templates or other things that can help make sure that the stuff you're putting into Fred is actually of good quality.

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(35:26):

And so if it is really the steps are just giving it this once over getting jurors to look at it, seeing what the data looked like, making sure it's all high quality, and then kind of glancing at the report, making sure it all looks and makes sense and sending it back. We can do that pretty quickly. We can do that in just a couple days and we say three to five days because that kind of gives us the space to have, oh, maybe there aren't some high quality responses. Maybe we want to get a couple more people in to look at this. So it gives us that padding. But this is something that we're talking about a matter of just a couple days and even we have the capability of doing it. We realistically, I think we might say business days, but we do have the capability if need be to run over the weekend and holidays. Things might get a little weird if you try to collect when a lot of not a representative sample is around, but we try to adjust for that as best we can. But yeah, so we can pretty much at any point in time do these studies and get them back to you very quickly kind of almost no matter what.

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Alicia Campbell (36:30):

And the code that Kevin's put together allows us to do that too, because it's streamlined a lot more processes than what we have in the big data. Of course, some of it is because it's limited. So Fred is smaller, he's big data's little brother because the report is smaller, what you can input into Fred is smaller. It's not like going to the candy store. Big data is where you can have multiple videos and lots of words. Fred is more of a tight kind of presentation and a tight kind of report really. But it still gives you a lot of data even then because, and we'll talk more about that in episode two of the types of data that you're going to get from Fred. But yeah, I do love how quickly we can do it for people because the time crunch isn't the same just because of the parameters that we're putting on it.

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(37:21):

But it does make it helpful. And now even the builder, we've constricted the builder to where it's a shorter build time for you. So there's just a lot less room for error, which also makes the ability to turn the report around a lot better. So I guess we've talked a little bit about how it's useful for smaller cases, and in fact it might be even more necessary in smaller cases. We've talked about how it's real people, real people, we're not because gotten that question a lot too, that it's just an AI agent, I guess I'll use that word, an AI agent telling us about your case. But I think overall from this first podcast as a lawyer, I would think of Fred as something that can save me money, save me time, and really give me a sense of where I am in a case that I'm either working up for trial and I'm going to do big data on it.

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(38:13):

You guys know I do excessive force cases, so I run my cases through Fred because dude, they're polarized. I mean, there are issues that change fundamentally the way an excessive force case can be done. So it helps me on the bigger cases, but even on smaller cases, I look at it and think when I was starting out and all I had were smaller cases, Fred sure would've been nice to have had because I probably wouldn't have spent so much on this case or that case, or there would've been this case, I should have spent more money on that. I didn't. And there's always a couple cases in the back of my head that I'm like, did I settle that one too cheap? I might have. And so now to be able to know, I think is a really, I guess to put it in business language return on investment.

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(38:58):

So the idea is 7,500 bucks, can you have some peace of mind? Can you have an idea of whether you're winning or losing? You get an idea of what it's worth and you'll get ideas and thoughts from jurors to help make it better. Or thoughts from jurors that say, yeah, there's no way you're making this case better. I have one in mind that we ran. We actually ran it as a big data study. They had opened the policy, they had worked on it for five years. They'd spent $350,000 on this case, and when we ran it, they had a 35% win rate in the big data study, which is not a good phone call to have. So I took the presentation and broke it down and took tons of detail out of it and put it more at a bare bones kind of presentation. And it had no video.

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(39:46):

The big data presentation had video, and I ran it through Fred, and Fred gave it a 25 to 35% win rate. And in both studies, the big data study and the small data study, the problem was the same and it was obvious, and it was the plaintiff. No one, whether they are in the Fred Study or the big data study, trusted, liked or believed the plaintiff, you can't sub, usually you can't sub somebody in. So when you've got a bad plaintiff, you've got big problems. And so it was one of those examples that I liked to use that if they'd started earlier and run it from the get go, it could have saved them time and it definitely would've saved them money. But that's one of the beautiful things about being able to use Fred. So on the tech side,

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Kevin Doran (40:35):

I was going to give two examples that I was thinking of just conversations I had with attorneys at two different conferences of them using Fred to do exactly that. I won't give any details about the cases, but it was just that they had told us about how both of them reached settlements because they had run Fred and they found out that there was a way to do this where they could get a settlement and it'd be great, and they didn't have to go to trial. And they had, I mean, they sort of did what that particular case did not have a chance to do, where they found out early, if we go to trial, maybe we're not going to win, so let's settle earlier. And everybody kind of walked away with a much better situation than had they gone further or not used Fred or not known in the first place. Yeah,

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Alicia Campbell (41:17):

But what you did say brought me to mind is I got an email from someone who ran a Fred study and then did do enough focus groups in over several different dates, but ended up getting up to 70 people and found that the Fred matched what they were getting in their live focus groups. And it's interesting because Fred was much easier. Fred was much easier than seven 10 person days because it takes a lot to organize and to pay for and to present. And

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Kevin Doran (41:53):

That also that does remind me of something I wanted to say in this kind of welcome to Fred conversation related to what we hear at conferences like Nick, the booth at TLU where people would come up several times we heard people talk about real focus groups and they would say, so if I run Fred, then I'm not going to do a regular focus group and then I'm not going to get the experience of practicing my stuff. And our response at the time was, it was me and Nick there. Neither of us are attorneys. And we were just like, well, I mean you can do both. You're in charge of this. You don't have to. And it made me realize, yeah, there's always this thing with products and features where you mistakenly think something's replacing something else because it does replace something, but it's not the same thing. So if what you're looking for is very quick, cheaper version of getting a lot of feedback on whether or not case is going to win or evidence is there, then Fred makes perfect sense. If what you're looking for is to workshop a bunch of ideas with a bunch of people in a room like no, that's not Fred, then you can just go ahead and do a regular focus group as you would before.

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Nick Schweitzer (42:58):

Yeah, there's no back. I mean, now that to suggest this sounds a little self, I don't know, but you can run multiple Fred studies so you can't get a back and forth kind of thing. You can just in a room where you can stop and say, oh, how was that? How did you buy that? Should I say it? What if I say it this way? That kind of stuff. But you can run a Fred study multiple times probably for still cheaper than the cost of doing one focus group. So there is the ability to kind of refine your message and kind of see, well, how is this playing out? Is this helping me? Is this hurting me? Is it not doing anything? That kind of stuff.

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Alicia Campbell (43:35):

Yeah, because that type of focus group where you call in 10 people and you do your opening, it's real time feedback, and I get that people want that on the fly flip side, when you have that opening where you think you like it and you've done it with 10 people and you've gotten their feedback, I don't know why you wouldn't run it with Fred, because yes, I mean you can tape your opening 50 people are going to respond to a ton of questions and give you a ton of feedback. In fact, that's probably our least quantitative report that we send out overall is what people say about your opening.

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Kevin Doran (44:08):

Yeah, the opener is 100% qualitative questions, none are quantitative. It's all just getting you feedback on an

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Alicia Campbell (44:14):

Opening. And it's what John and I mean, we used to do those as favors for lawyers, and so we've developed these 13 questions that we ask that typically get people exactly what they need. And it is, again, we're summarizing with ai, but you get quotes and direct feedback. You're going to have a sense after you read all those comments, what's landing, what's not landing. So if you want to do it that way, you'll get a ton of feedback. If what you really want is the interaction with the person stopping you or telling your ties ugly or saying Don't do that with your hands, then yeah, that's probably not Fred necessarily. Although if you do that on your video, I mean jurors don't, they don't there, they're down to tell you exactly what they think, and in some ways you might get more honest feedback because you're not staring at the person you're talking to. It is something that Fred can do. You're opening or you're close. If it's 30 minutes or less, you can have a PowerPoint behind you click, as long as it's on video, man, they'll tell you exactly what they're thinking.

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Kevin Doran (45:15):

That also reminds me of how much we're hearing about that. The messaging is what's important, not kind of the rapport or the person there, the charisma or the way they're interacting with a room like it's a standup mic night or something. The messaging is a lot of what's important, and that does make me think that if you had the choice between putting money down on getting 50 people to tell you about your opener versus a room full of 12 people kind of back and forth with you, then it does make sense for me to get the variety of feedback and understand what in the messaging needs work as opposed to your interpersonal conversation.

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Alicia Campbell (45:57):

Well, because the academics have already studied this, so the number one indicator of a plaintiff win in a case is the strength of the plaintiff's evidence,

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Nick Schweitzer (46:08):

Which of course makes sense. That's what you would hope in a way, but

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Alicia Campbell (46:13):

It gets lost some people in that way. We talked about at the beginning, it democratizes data, but it does. It means that, because that's the part I love about data is it means that you don't have to be, and there's lots, there's an art to being a trial lawyer. Please don't misunderstand me, but if you're afraid you're not very good at that art yet, the beautiful thing is having the right information, knowing the strength of your evidence, knowing what evidence is best for you, is the best way to get on that path, that you can have success while you're honing in on your craft. It doesn't have to be, you can only win cases when you've gotten the art of lawyering down. Alright, so that kind of wraps up today for us in talking about Fred, hopefully a little bit more about who he is, and the next episode we're going to talk about more like the what of Fred, what does he do? So we'll go inside Fred's virtual jury room to see exactly how 75 strangers across America evaluate your case presentations and what their feedback really means for your litigation strategy. That's what we're going to be talking about on episode two, but we finally got episode one out of the way. So yay guys. Thank you.

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Kevin Doran (47:22):

Nice.

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Voice Over (47:23):

Alright, thank

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Alicia Campbell (47:24):

You. Lo pods.

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Voice Over (47:27):

Thank you for listening to the Fred Files. If you found value in today's discussion, please subscribe and share this episode with your colleagues. To explore how Fred can transform your case preparation, visit us@focuswithfred.com. Produced and powered by Law Pods.