Dirk Derrick (00:00):
Welcome to The Legal Truth, the podcast created to provide you general legal information about South Carolina law lawyers and the legal process, and hopefully prevent you from being surprised by the unexpected. We will answer many of the questions I've been asked during the past 35 years about South Carolina personal injury claims and workers' compensation claims. We will also discuss existing laws and propose changes in the law and how they affect you. My name is Dirk Derek. I'm the founder of the Derek Law Firm and I'm your host.
Please see required ethics disclaimers in show notes.
Welcome to the Legal Truth Podcast. I'm here with Pearl Carey. It's been a while Pearl. Good to see you.
Good to see you too, Dirk. I'm very excited to be back here today.
We got kind of unusual podcast today on some laws that are in the Senate in South Carolina right now that's really a game changer for the people in South Carolina, Pearl of you research tort reform and know what we're talking about today.
I sure do. Very excited to talk about it.
Okay, we're going to take what I did and I did a presentation last night to a group of independent adjusters and I've taken this Senate Bill 2 44 and I've run it through Claude AI to get AI to tell us what these changes will do to the citizens of South Carolina, how they will harm the citizens and how they will help insurance companies. This bill, I've been practicing since I graduated from law school in 87, been practicing since 88 actually when I got out of law school. We were a contributory negligent state where the plaintiff was 1% at fault. They could recover nothing. That law got changed to a comparative, but in the 36 years I've been practicing law, these proposed changes to the law will damage, in my opinion, the public worse than anything we've ever seen proposed by the politicians. It's kind of disappointing. I'm going to go through and show you what AI says about these changes and then I'm going to give you my opinions on what it would look like in real life.
(02:28)
It's drawn a lot of attention. I know Donald Trump Jr. Commented on how bad the bill is. I'm disappointed in it because it's not for the working man and the working woman in the state of South Carolina. It's not for the small businesses, even though it alleges it's doing this for small business. This is a group of politicians who are protecting insurance companies and that's all it's, and as you see how it benefits insurance companies and hurt the public, you'll see what the intent of these laws are and we'll go through the bill. The bill is huge. We're going to have a QR code and the notes of this podcast so you can download the bill yourself and read it for yourself. Don't take my word if you think I'm biased because I'm an attorney and don't take anybody else's word. Read the bill, take the bill and run it through your own AI applications. You need to know what it's going to do and what it's all about on the front end. Otherwise, you'll be calling me next year or two years from now complaining about an insurance claim you have. So let's get started.
Thank you so much for that introduction, Dirk. And so first off, let's just take it section by section and discuss a little bit what AI has to say about the topic.
Okay. The first thing is changes to comparative fault. Section 15 38 15 AI said the harm to the citizens. It removes joint and several liability protections. It forces consideration of non-party fault reducing plaintiff's recovery, and it allows defendants to shift blame to empty chairs or point their finger at somebody who's not in the courtroom. AI says the benefits to the insurers are that it will reduce total payout. It is easier for them to avoid full liability by blaming non parties and it will lower settlement leverage for plaintiffs. We have a joint and several liability law in South Carolina when it comes to a very limited number of circumstances. The main circumstance that has brought this bill up is the DR Shop case. Right now, if someone goes to a bar in South Carolina and they start drinking, they're responsible for themselves up until they get drunk and if they drink, get drunk on their last drink, go out on the road, hit a family, kill a family, kill a husband, kill a daddy, it's on them, it's on the driver, but there's joint and several liability.
(05:20)
If someone comes into a bar gets drunk and they're continued to be served alcohol when the bar knows or should know, they are now serving a drunk person. So somebody gets drunk in the bar, they got the credit card, they keep bringing up the credit card and giving this person drinks. Now they are joint tort feeders with the driver. So now he goes out with a 2.5 alcohol level, kills a family, kills a husband. Both the bar and the driver are jointly responsible for all the damages. They want to change that. They want to be able to not be a joint tortfeasor with the at-fault, the driver. They want be able to point the finger at the driver, make him more responsible. They want be able to point the finger at people who are not in the courtroom to take blame off of them, and they've kind of been behind this whole tort reform movement on taking responsibilities off the bars.
(06:28)
These are now my opinions about the consequences of this law. If it passes, number one, people will be sued that plaintiff did not want to sue. If they have the right to put non parties on the verdict form to blame, the attorneys are going to have to sue those people to bring them in so that they can defend themselves. If they're just on the verdict form and they're not a party to the action, they cannot defend themselves. So the defendants would be pointing at somebody who's not in the courtroom unless we bring them in and let them defend themselves. There's going to be more people being sued. It's going to be more people who have no insurance being sued and it's going to be people incurring attorney fees and costs who otherwise would not be in the courtroom. These people and the businesses that the defendant says they won on the verdict form will then have to come defend themselves and if the jury puts any blame on 'em at all, they either have to pay for it with their insurance or if they have no insurance, they'll have judgments against them for 10 years in South Carolina.
(07:43)
I think sometimes people look at it and say, yeah, I'm for that law. If there's going to protect a small bar who serves alcohol and it's behind a small business and they don't understand that small businesses may be pulled in these lawsuits when they wouldn't otherwise be there, and if it passes, I think you'll have some people who are very disappointed.
Absolutely. So first off, just tell me a little bit more about what some of those Dr Shop liability changes might look like.
Yeah, the joint and several liability kind of bleeds in with the DR Shop liability. Again, it is some money behind bars trying to protect them from liability. The DR shop liability 15 3 7 10 AI says the harm to the citizens will be higher burden of proof for alcohol related injuries. You must prove that the server knowingly served an intoxicated person. It restricts recovery for passengers In A DUI case it limits liability for bars and restaurants. The benefits to the insurance companies is that there'll be fewer successful claims against establishments. It protects grossly negligent bars who put drunks on the road and it puts more money in the pocket of insurance companies. I'll tell you that one of the main changes in this section is right now the law is the only way that the bar or the restaurant who overs serves somebody is liable is if they knew or should have known that the person they're serving is intoxicated.
(09:26)
For instance, the biggest change in this is right now the law is that to recover against the bar, you must show that they knew or should have known that the person they were serving was intoxicated. Either by their presence, the number of drinks they served were served, and if you knew or should know, you're still serving a drunk person, you're responsible. The new law is that you must prove that they actually had actual knowledge of it. When I was talking last night to some adjusters, somebody said, how do you ever prove somebody's subjective knowledge between their ears? And I said, that's the purpose of this law. The purpose of the law is for then to be able to deny knowledge. The consequences are my opinions based upon this law is that bars are incentivized to be intentionally ignorant as to amount of alcohol someone is consuming.
(10:22)
We already see that in some cases and here goes how they do it. Cash Knight, they're not taking credit cards. If you're taking credit cards and you're charging people drinks, you're keeping up with it. If it's cash night, nobody's keeping up with it. Cameras, surveillance cameras turn 'em off. I don't have them. That can be proof to somebody stumbling around in the bar. So let's not have that. Let's not do that understaffed. We're understaffed. How can we have two bartenders and know what 200 people are drinking? So it incentivizes them being ignorant as to the amount of drinks being served so they can deny knowing that somebody's intoxicated and there's businesses right now and that's how they operate. And when you file suit against them, they don't have anything. They don't have credit cards, they don't have surveillance. Nobody knows anything and that's what this law will incentivize.
(11:21)
More people will be killed and injured by drunk drivers without recourse against the bars. The victims will either lose financially or require public benefits paid for by taxpayers to help provide them the benefits that their father or mother would have provided had they been alive or that the recovery would have provided. You have unhappy victims who can't get justice of this happening, had a case cash night, no credit card driver goes in and served 13 drinks. One right after the other gets out and runs into a car load of people. The bar denies knowing who was intoxicated. Luckily the guy's posting on social media with all his glasses in front of him at showing everybody how many drinks he's having, they deny everything, have no records of it, deny he looked intoxicated, but the condition he was in when he crawled out of his car and there was no doubt, but that's the kind of situation we'll have if you have to prove knowing that the server knew that this person was intoxicated.
So now tell me a little bit about insurance bad faith restrictions.
Yeah, that's another part of this. What AI has to say about it, the harm to citizens gives insurance companies the right to delay claims, draw 'em out. Negligence or unreasonable conduct is now insufficient to hold. Insurance companies responsible for bad faith insurance practices requires proof beyond getting more money than the policy limits at trial to prove bad faith and it forces citizens to pay out of pocket up to 10 months on any kind of insurance claim. The benefits to the insurers safe harbor from bad faith claims reduce exposure to punitive damages, more time to evaluate claims and new ways to reduce or avoid liability. This part of the bill I believe is the most dangerous part of the bill and will do the most harm in South Carolina. The entire time I've been practicing law, there's been an implied duty of good faith on behalf of insurance companies that law recognizes that when you pay premiums for your insurance, that they take your money, take your money, take your money, and then you have a claim.
(13:58)
And the insurance company, no matter which type of insurance you're talking about, they have leverage on ordinary people. They've always had leverage of time, money, uncertainty, stress. They hold the money to pay your claim and without a duty to act in good faith, they can hold onto the money as long as they want to. They could beat you down with time and with money. So as long as I practice law, the law recognizes there's an implied duty to act in good faith. When they deny, when they delay a claim, it needs to be on a reasonable basis. They can't just do it for the sake of doing it. This bill would change that this bill would change the law that has existed for as long as I've been practicing and before, you think now that you have trouble with insurance claims. If you have a claim on getting things done in a timely fashion, if the law removes the requirement that they must act on a reasonable basis or in a reasonable basis in a non-negligent manner towards you, or you can't do anything about it, they have all the leverage.
(15:12)
You'll have no leverage against them. They will deny, delay and defend you into the ground. The obligation they have to act in good faith and act in a reasonable manner is the leverage that consumers have on their side is really the only leverage the consumer has on their side and this bill would take that away. Imagine getting in a wreck and them denying you a rental car for three months and you can't go to work and you don't have the credit to get a car. It's not bad faith. And under this bill, imagine a tree falling through your roof and they get three months to decide if they're going to pay it and if they say, Hey, you don't have enough information, send me something else. They got another three months. If you file suit, they got eight more months before they have to respond to it.
(16:04)
You can go 10 months with a hole in your roof and they have protection against pseudo for bad faith and they could have no reason. It could be totally unreasonable why they're not fixing your roof. The same thing for a necessary surgery with health insurance, they can delay it and deny it. This is across the board on the insurance coverages and companies. The only insurance right now that I've dealt with where there's no bad faith is workers' compensation insurance in South Carolina. Find someone who's been jerking around by a workers' comp carrier. They can cut off their pay no consequences. They can deny surgery that their doctor that they picked says this person needs emergency spinal surgery. They can deny it and they have no legal liability. The only thing you can do is ask for a hearing and get a hearing in 3, 4, 5 months and the commission will order them to pay for that surgery.
(17:06)
It is a bad thing if they do not have an obligation to act in good faith. And if somebody says, well, they do have an obligation to act in good faith, but it's just not bad faith if they act unreasonable. Well, that's crazy talk. This will be a terrible attack on the public's ability not to be bullied by insurance companies with the leverage of time, money and uncertainty if this goes through my phone will not stop ringing in a year from now or two years from now. When a hurricane hits the beach, the island of Palm Sullivan's Island Garden City and homes are destroyed and people start getting jerked around for a year. Everybody will get upset when somebody needs a surgery. They get jerked around and now the state has passed a law that says it's not bad faith and the insurance companies can do it without any kind of consequence. It will light up the phones of the law firms and it will put people in some bad, bad situations. The worst part, I think this is the worst part about this bill, if you remove the leverage and it's not only removing the leverage for the individual, if they hire a lawyer to represent them, they've taken our leverage away too. So this is going to be a bad situation if this goes through.
Right. Absolutely. No, it sounds like this is going to have some very real life consequences. So how might uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage change in lieu of this new bill?
Yep. This is bad too. So what AI says, it eliminates punitive damages coverages and it reduces total available compensation for the citizens and the benefits to the insurers, which is a constant theme according to AI's lower exposure on UIM claims, more control over settlement processing at lower total payouts. Right now, South Carolina, you can drive around on the road with 25 50 in liability insurance. That's $25,000 worth of protection per person you hurt and a total of $50,000 per accident. So if you hit hurt 10 people, you got $50,000 to cover those 10 people. Those limits are so low that it doesn't cover a whole lot of stuff. I mean, you go to emergency room and have any kind of testing and those coverage is going to be gone. What people can do is they can buy underinsured motorist coverage UIM coverage. You automatically get uninsured motorist coverage to cover you when somebody hits you that does not have insurance and underinsured motorist coverages coverages that you can buy, and I recommend everybody get it to cover you when somebody's underinsured.
(19:53)
They don't have enough to cover your damages. So first example, if somebody who doesn't have insurance runs into you, you file it on your uninsured motorist coverage to pay the damages. If somebody hits you and they got 25,000, you got $500,000 worth of damages you would file under your underinsured motorist coverage to pay things that the liability didn't pay. What they're proposing here is to eliminate the insurance company's requirement that they've always had to provide coverage for both actual damages and punitive damages. That means a drunk driver hits you, he has no insurance. The case, your actual damages are worth $2,000. Your punitive damages are worth $200,000. You can collect your uninsured motorist coverage for the bodily injury but can't collect anything that the jury says you should get for punitive damages because they are eliminating the requirement that the insurance company provide coverage for punitive damages.
(21:00)
So there's damages that South Carolina law says we can get in court and now South Carolina law is telling insurance companies, you don't have to ensure those damages. My opinion as far as the consequences about allowing insurance companies not to ensure punitive damages in and UIM is that compensation for damages allowed and awarded by South Carolina law will be uncollectible from parties and even against your own insurance if you want to cover those losses. So the consequences of what they're doing to U Im and UIM if they can do it and get it passed is compensation for damages allowed and awarded by South Carolina law will be uncollectible even if someone wants to go out and buy coverage to protect themselves from those damages. And again, you'll have unhappy victims who can't get justice.
Now that we've discussed how this bill could potentially affect uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, let's talk a little bit about alcohol server training requirements.
Yeah, that sounds real good. Alcohol server training requirements, there's been a push for that in Columbia for the last couple of years where in an effort to reduce the amount of drunk driving deaths to get bars required to train their bartenders and their servers, how to recognize when someone's intoxicated. Some of the same bars and restaurants who are trying to are behind this bill to change laws have fought the law that would make it mandatory for their bartenders and their waitresses and waiters to go through mandatory training. Now they're adding in this year, but they're adding in to reduce their liability when they wouldn't allow it to be added to reduce deaths. AI said the harm to citizens, it creates an additional hurdle for liability. Compliance with training may create presumption against liability. It adds complexity to proven claims and it may increase costs past two consumers benefits to the insurance company.
(23:14)
It provides new defenses against liability, lower risk profiles for insured establishments and reduced claim frequency. Now I think that anyone should be in favor of required training for people who serve alcohol, but what they've done now is not only required to reduce their premiums, but now they want to say, Hey, if we have a sheet of paper saying we've had this training that prevents us from someone suing us if we still serve somebody 13 to 15 drinks or have done something unreasonable in serving an intoxicated person. So they're looking at it for a shield to liability instead of an assistance to keep drunks off the road.
Absolutely. And now that we've discussed some of those granular changes in dream shop liability, let's talk about how this bill could potentially create some general procedural changes.
Yeah, it's AI says that the general procedural changes the harm to citizens. It's new venue restrictions as far as where you bring cases, stricter evidence rules, higher burden of proof, more complex litigation requirements, the benefits to insurance companies, more control over litigation. That's not a good thing. Additional defenses, lower litigation costs and better settlement leverage. If you see a lot of things, these things are, what the AI is picking up is all these things are giving them the leverage over people and that's why people will be constantly harmed by these bills or this law if this bill passes.
Absolutely. So let's move on to some building code violations. How could this bill impact those?
Yeah, I'm not real familiar with this AI spit this out. We don't do a lot of this, but building code violations harm to citizens, it limits use of code violations as evidence of negligence requires actual damage for claims, higher burden to prove negligence, restricted recovery options, the benefits to the insurance companies, fewer successful claims, lower defense costs, reduce exposure for insured and better risk assessment, which I feel like I'm just repeating a record every time I say what the benefits are to the insurance company, but that's a consistent undertone,
Right? And so obviously the overarching tone is that there would be a plethora of harms to citizens that this bill would create and of course a plethora of benefits to insurance companies. So tell me a little bit about what AI said is the overall economic impact of this bill.
The overall economic impact, this makes it very clear harms to citizens. It reduces compensation for injuries, higher cost to pursue claims, not just injury claim but all insurance claims, more barriers to recovery, all kinds of claims, not just auto claims and longer resolution time so they don't pay you less. It's going to cost you more to pursue it. They don't throw more hurdles in front of you and it's going to take you longer to do it if that's what you want. When you have an insurance claim, you should contact your representative and tell 'em to vote for this, but that's what's going to happen. The benefits to the insurance companies are increased profitability, lower claim payouts, reduced litigation expenses and better loss ratios. That's it. That's in a nutshell. That's not my opinion. That's AI reading this bill and that's going to be the outcome.
(27:04)
The people who are pushing this can use any smokescreen they want to as far as saying it's for this group of people or this group of people. It is for insurance companies. The people who are looking at this presentation, this podcast, I encourage you, go do your own investigation. Don't listen to what I'm saying as a lawyer, don't listen to what other people are saying. Use the QR code, pull up the bill, run it through whatever you want to take the time to read the whole thing, run it through your AI application, but see what they're going to do to. What's disappointing about this is I've always been a person who didn't have a political party. I'm more about issues. I'm more about which party or what candidate protects working people and just ordinary people in the country and in the state. People who are just trying to provide for their family and we go through swings where one party's doing it more than other parties, in my opinion, whether you like Donald Trump or not, he has taken the Republican party from the insurance company's big pharma, big money Republicans to the middle of the road working class, taking care of just ordinary common people, small businesses, the majority of America.
(28:27)
This bill, which is written I think mainly by Republicans, is not the working class Republicans. This is the Mitch McConnell crowd. This is the MIT Romney crowd. This is the big business part of the Republican party, and those aren't the people who got Donald Trump elected. Donald Trump Jr. Has actually posted something on social media dogging this bill. He said it's one of the worst bills he's ever seen. What's going on in South Carolina? So this is not the working class Republicans or the working class Democrats. This is a bill that has been written for insurance companies by, I think the main person pushing it works as a defense lawyer representing an insurance company, and you need to know the truth. If you do not take the time to research this and know the truth, I promise you, a year, two years down the road, if this passes, you will start dealing with things that you do not anticipate frustrated.
If this podcast action,
They need to contact their representatives, whoever the representative is that represents 'em in Columbia, the senator that represents them in Columbia and tell 'em not to pass it. I'm going to tell you what I'd ask them to first do their first to investigate it themselves and not listen to people. I've seen people put stuff on social media. There's really two things I see the people behind this pushing back on. They push it on, Hey, you can't trust Dirk or any lawyer because they're lawyers. They make money off this stuff. We're also the only people to know the consequences of it. We're in the trenches and we know what's going to happen to people and their claims. If this goes through, if every bit of this passes I can provide for my family, I can make a living. It's not put me under, but it will absolutely harm every citizen in South Carolina who has a claim.
(30:34)
So they can talk about me if they want to. The truth is they attack me to shut me up or to get lawyers not to talk about it. But the lawyers are the only people who know the true consequences because we represent these people on a daily basis every day against insurance industry. The second thing they argue is there's some small businesses that can't pay their premiums because their premiums have gone up so high. Well, that's a premium rating problem. The fix to that is to create some kind of steps in premiums, not to punish people who are doing it right. If there's a bar that doesn't, people, and let me just say this. We handle these cases and it's the same bars over and over and over. We don't get claims from all these restaurants around who serves alcohol with dinner. We get claims arising out of bars where people go to get drunk and people allow them to get drunk.
(31:35)
So they keep making money and to tell me, well, our premiums are going up high and therefore the law needs to be changed so that the victims of a drunk driver is harmed does not make sense to me. They need to fix premiums so that bars and restaurants who do the right thing, who monitor what people are drinking, who train their waitresses, who train their bartenders not to overserve. People don't have to pay the premiums of people who just serves whatever people want. The second thing I would say about that statement is this, I'm a lawyer. I have a license. You can't just walk off the street and start practicing law. It's a privilege. You got to go through the education, you get a license and you have to do what the South Carolina Bar tells you. You have to do ethically and legally to keep that license.
(32:26)
If I show up to courthouse two or three times drunk, I'll lose my license. A goes through all the shows up and does surgery, his license. If there's bars who keep serving drunk people over and over and getting sued over and over and having to pay the full limits over and over and they can't afford premiums, why shouldn't they go under? Why should they keep their license to sell alcohol when they prove they can't do it in a reasonable way? Why should we be worried about whether they can pay their premiums when they're not worried about killing people on the road? It's just unbelievable to me that it was 7, 8, 9 years ago. Before that, they didn't even have to have insurance. So people would go to bars, get drunk, go kill people. If you go to the bars, they had no assets. They were renting a building.
(33:18)
If you sued them, they go under, they reopen in somebody else's name, couldn't collect anything from them. It was a problem. So a few years back, the state made it mandatory that they have a million dollars worth of insurance, liquor liability insurance. So when that happens, these same bars get sued over and over and over. Their premiums go up and instead of fixing the problem, they go to politicians and say, we can't afford the premiums. That's crazy. In my head, that's just crazy to say, Hey, we keep serving drunk people. They keep killing people. Insurance companies keep raising our premiums. So here goes the fix. Reduce when people can sue us, take away the consequences of our conduct. Don't make us responsible. Don't make us responsible financially to the consequences of our conduct that if we wanted to, we could change. I don't know why those people are in business.
(34:14)
It's not a right to sell alcohol in South Carolina, and what this bill is doing is protecting the wrong group of people. I'm telling you, it's a small percentage of everyone who serves alcohol in South Carolina. There's a lot of people, a lot of people who do it right. So I'm not in charge of rating insured for insurance purposes. I know nothing about that, but I know that people should have to pay premiums based upon how they act. I know I pay a whole lot of insurance premiums for having a bunch of lawyers that work for me. I know doctors pay high premiums to protect themselves, and I know that if you start messing up, your premiums go up. If you start driving bad, your premiums go up. Why should bar owners think if you keep serving drunk people and they kill people, their premiums aren't going to go up. So those are the two things. We don't attach 'em to the show notes of this podcast. That will let you know who represents you in South Carolina and it'll have your representative's name and the phone number so you can call them. That's the best thing you do. If the phones ring in these people's offices and they start hearing people say, don't pass that law, don't sell me out to the insurance industry. It'll make a difference. What else per you got anything else?
This is just a reminder that that link to read the full bill yourself is in our show notes and we also have included a map so you can take a look at who your South Carolina representatives are
And if anybody has any questions about the bill, there's some attorneys here. Like I said, I've always been kind of nonpolitical. We've got some attorneys at the law firm who's following this very closely because I think it's in a subcommittee right now. I think the more people will contact, there's a flow right now. I think Donald Trump Jr. Getting involved in saying how bad of a bill this would be and then some other national people getting involved saying, this is bad. Bill has really got some people looking at it and it's got some politicians looking at it because there's a lot of politicians know that if you go against that group of people that supported President Trump that you may be in trouble next time when you run, but look at it yourself. Investigate it yourself, form your own opinions. If you have any questions about it, want to contact our office, contact us. Either I or one of the attorneys who are really keeping a close eye on it, we'll call you back and talk to you about it.
Thank you everybody for watching and listening to this episode of The Legal Truth and we look forward to seeing you next time.
Thank you for joining us on The Legal Truth Podcast. If you have questions that you would like answered on a future episode, please send them to the legal [email protected]. If you would like to speak to us directly, call us at (843) 248-7486. If you find the podcast valuable, please leave us a five star review and share the legal truth with your neighbor, friend, or family member who is seeking reliable information about a South Carolina personal injury or workers' compensation claim. Dirk j Derek of the Derek Law firm Injury Lawyers is responsible for the production of this podcast located at 9 0 1 North Main Street, Conway, South Carolina. Derek Law Firm Injury Lawyers has included the information on this podcast as a service to the general public use of this podcast and any related materials does not in any manner constitute an attorney-client relationship between Derek Law firm, injury lawyers, and the user.
(37:42)
While the information on this podcast is about legal issues, it is not intended as legal advice and should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed professional attorney In your particular state, anyone seeking specific legal advice or assistance should retain an attorney any prior results mentioned, do not guarantee a similar outcome. The content reflects the personal views and opinions of the participants in the podcast and are not intended as endorsements of any views or products. This podcast could contain inaccuracies. The information contained in this podcast does not constitute legal advice and is not guaranteed to be correct, complete, or up to date. As laws continue to change. In this podcast, you'll hear information about focus groups. Please note that not all of the firm's cases are presented to a focus group. Additionally, when speaking about juries or jurors in relation to a focus group, we are speaking of focus group participants and not actual trial juries or jurors.
