After about an hour and a half of deliberations on Friday, my Greenbrier County jury came back against my client in a civil jury trial. I really thought we had a good chance of winning. But such is the character of civil juries. In civil cases, you never really know what the jury is going to do. They are unpredictable. They could go either way based on something that both sides never even thought was important. On the other hand, in criminal cases, the jury 90% of the time is going to convict. That is what you can expect. Your struggle is one of the underdog.

There was something unique about this jury though – it had a criminal defense attorney on it. Usually it is a bad idea to leave a lawyer on a jury, and it may have been this time. I made a gut decision to leave him on based on a subtle nuance of the law that I thought he would understand and explain to the other jurors. But I suppose that is a two-way street. And then again, it could have been some fatal flaw in my client’s factual case that swung the jury. The fact is, you never really know.

There is no second place, but it is always good to know that in this situation your client is satisfied that you did the best that possibly could have been done given the circumstances. Sometimes you are just backed into a corner, and in this case, there was no possibility of settlement, so it was just up to the jury. And good or bad, you usually just have to live with the jury’s decision.

– John H. Bryan, West Virginia Attorney.