The polarization that has reshaped American politics, media, and workplaces has reached the one institution designed to require strangers to agree: the jury.
Trial lawyers and jury consultants have been saying it for a few years now, and the data is starting to catch up. A 2025 survey by Orrick and Trial Partners found that 57% of jury-eligible adults report less confidence in the U.S. justice system, up from 33% in 2018. Sixty-five percent say they would follow their conscience or personal beliefs over a judge’s instructions, up from 43%. Nearly half, 47%, report negative views of large corporations, almost double the figure seven years ago.
These aren’t abstract shifts. They show up in the jury box.
The Florida Opioid Case
A recent article in the WSJ follows a Florida case in which more than two dozen hospitals sued three major pharmacy chains over the costs of treating opioid patients. The trial lasted nearly three months. Deliberations lasted fourteen days.
By the end, one juror had ripped up another’s poster, another juror accused someone of misconduct, and tensions rose so high that a bailiff walked into deliberations to observe that the jurors were going to “kill each other in here.” One juror submitted a “Confidential Formal Statement of Juror Misconduct” that the judge determined had been written using AI. Another was accused of bringing in an outside slideshow. The forewoman went home one night and watched 12 Angry Men. “By the end,” she told the Journal, “we had become that movie.”
After 14 days, the jurors were still unable to reach a unanimous verdict, resulting in a mistrial. The parties plan to retry the case.
What’s striking isn’t that deliberation broke down. It’s how recognizable the dynamics are. Jurors lined up less by what the evidence showed than by what they were predisposed to believe about the parties, the system, and each other. As one consultant interviewed by the Journal put it, “Whatever you see in society at large you see in the jury deliberation room.”
A Different Kind of Bias
The traditional model of voir dire assumes a binary. Jurors lean pro-prosecution or pro-defense, pro-plaintiff or pro-defendant, and each side tries to weed out the other. That model is breaking down.
A 2025 study by litigation consulting firm DOAR found that juror perspectives in white-collar cases increasingly track political affiliation in ways that cut against intuition. Trump voters, for instance, were more trusting of both the Justice Department and corporate executives than voters who supported Kamala Harris. The clean prosecution/defense divide gave way to something looser and harder to read: a general posture of trust or skepticism that colors how a juror receives almost everything in the courtroom.
That has real implications for trial strategy. If 65% of potential jurors are willing to substitute their own sense of fairness for the judge’s instructions, “feeling good about the facts,” as one Orrick lawyer told the Journal, “might not be enough.”
What Voir Dire Can’t See
A juror questionnaire and a few minutes of in-person questioning were never going to fully reveal a person’s worldview. In a less polarized environment, they didn’t have to. The assumption was that most jurors would set their priors aside and decide the case on the evidence in front of them.
That assumption is under pressure, and the gap between what voir dire surfaces and what a juror actually brings into the room is widening.
Publicly available online activity, what someone posts, shares, joins, follows, and engages with, has become one of the few practical ways to close that gap. It is not a substitute for voir dire or for the judgment of an experienced trial team. But it adds a layer of context that the courtroom alone cannot produce: how a juror talks when they don’t think anyone in authority is listening, which causes they identify with, which institutions they trust or distrust, and which narratives they are already primed to accept or reject.
For a defense team facing a corporate-bias backdrop, or a plaintiff’s team trying to read a jury pool’s appetite for damages, that context can be the difference between a viable strategy and a misread one.
Where SMI Aware Fits
SMI Aware helps legal teams surface the publicly available social media and online information that informs jury selection, trial strategy, and risk assessment. Our work is built around what is defensible, relevant, and useful to the people making real decisions in a courtroom. Not data for its own sake, but the specific signals that help trial teams understand who is actually sitting in the box.
As juries grow more polarized and less predictable, that understanding matters more, not less.
Learn more about SMI Aware’s Jury Selection services here.
