Software Helps Attorneys Select Jurors

Voltaire, software designed to help attorneys select jurors, made its debut in 2015.
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The process of selecting juries for trials can be long and frustrating, for both attorneys and those called for jury duty. But one software company claims to have a solution that could not only shorten the process of selecting jurors but help lawyers select jurors based on insights about how they might vote.

Voltaire, a proprietary software and tech information company based in Colorado, searches through billions of data points, including public records and social media posts. It uses technology including IBM Watson to provide deep psycholinguistic and behavioral analysis to support better jury research and selection, according to the company’s website.

It then organizes the information into dossier-style reports that allow attorneys “to master the difficult process of voir dire” and move to trial quickly.

“We can determine personality factors by the way people write on Facebook and Twitter and analyze the,” Voltaire CEO Basit Mustafa told the ABA Journal.

Mustafa came up with the idea for Voltaire while working with his local American Civil Liberties Union. He saw that law firms weren’t doing very well at using technology to assist them in their cases. He even saw one jury consultant who said his client had probably lost the case because of not knowing much about one juror. When he heard that, Mustafa said, he thought, “I am a tech guy; I can solve that.”

Mustafa worked on a prototype of Voltaire in 2013 and 2014, started beta testing in December of 2014, and generated its first revenue in October of 2015. According to the ABA Journal, Voltaire’s services were first used in a Denver “slip and fall” case where it was serving a defendant, one of the nation’s largest retailers.

As the former CFO of IBM, Mustafa kept ties to his former employer, and the company has a partnership with IBM to tap its Watson service. “We have heavily leveraged a lot of IBM technology,” Mustafa said. “It is like going to the hardware store and getting the best hammer possible. IBM Watson is an alchemy library for a lot of what we have.”

Since its 2015 debut, Voltaire has provided information to attorneys in 105 trials. Its revenue has grown more than 200 percent in the last year.

Mustafa figures it’s only a matter of time before Voltaire is bought out by a bigger IT player like ThomsonReuters’ LexisNexis or Google.

“We are pushing the limits on products and technology. That is the best way for us to reach the most lawyers and help them make good decisions,” Mustafa said.

Do you use Voltaire in jury selection? How do you think it worked out for you? Did you even know the product existed? Please share your thoughts in the comments.