Newsweek reports on Laura Day, a $10,000-per-month psychic to the powerful, who’s gained a few clients in the legal profession:
A Manhattan attorney who serves as special counsel to several white-shoe law firms has used Day’s insights to help her select juries and anticipate the opposing team’s arguments. “Day saves me thousands of minutes on my cell phone” working a case, says the attorney, who also didn’t want to be publicly identified.
Day denies that she has psychic powers, per se; rather, she has “intuition,” a term more palatable to her clients, “red-meat-eating, Barneys-shopping, Type A personalities.” (The $10,000-a-Month Psychic, Newsweek, Jun 30.)
3 Comments
Actually, this is not really surprising and frankly makes for good trial tactics. “Psychics” and other con-artists are usually very good at reading people – especially those suggestible to manipulation and appeals to emotion, which is precisely the sort of person you’d want as plaintiff’s counsel.
Someone who’s made a living at confidence games and manipulation would almost certainly be better at choosing plaintiff friendly jurors than a degreed psychology professional – it simply comes down to real-world experience and motivation. When your livelihood depends on finding the most gullible sucker, in time it would become second nature to you.
Julian,
You post a very plausible theory.
It is well known that there is no evidence that people can read people. For example parole boards are no better than random number generators. I understand that effective jury consultants use demographic – in the extensive sense – data in their work. Do you know of any data that supports your theory?
It is well known that there is no evidence that people can read people.
I’ve played too much poker to agree with this sentence.