Jannah Nassar

IR 1/10 GT/PD 2

Nick Povalin
Jury Researcher
Litagations Insights
December 17th, 2019 at 4 pm EST

1. Please describe your profession and how you got to where you are today?
a. Nick Povalin is a Jury Researcher at the Litagations Insights, he has been working
there for 6 months and had a prior job dealing with jury research at another firm.
He currently works with my Advisor.
b. He attended undergrad school and studied pre-law and then later went on to
graduate school.
c. He wrote research papers and conducted lots of research when in grad school.
d. Currently does Jury research, does not specifically focus on implicit bias .

2. In your research, what has been the hardest thing to overcome?

a. The hardest thing is that bias is implicit so it's hard to research and confront others
about it.
b. Another thing is that once the trial starts you can’t stop it due to a bias judge,
therefore you must be perfect when choosing your jurors.

3. Would you be able to explain a common factor you have found in cases that deal with
implicit bias?
a. It really depends, each case is different.
b. Some cases may deal with common trends such as racial bias whereas others may
be dealing with another kind of bias.
c. Each case is different so there will never be a common factor, but you can find
connections. You will most likely not be able to find any trends as they all vary.
4. So, I am currently researching implicit racial and nationality bias. Although, I am
concerned of having redundant information. Do you have any suggestions to make my
research different?
a. Racial bias is definitely over done and many people already know about it.
b. Looking into nationality bias would be helpful as it is a new idea.
c. Try researching de-biasing solutions or ways to get rid of bias. Many people know
about bis but, if you wanna be special maybe doing debais would be a good idea.

5. I personally really enjoy researching de-bias methods, would you think that shifting my
research from nationality bias to de-bias by surrounding yourself with a diverse group of
friends can be a good topic?
a. Well, you can't tell a juror to surround themselves with a diverse group of friends
nor can you control whether or not they do that.
b. If you are interested in it and want to pursue it, then maybe you have to look at
bias outside the courtroom, like in society as a whole or maybe a specific aspect
from society that you want to de-bias.

6. I currently use databases and University articles along with the articles that Dr.
Marniankis sends me. Do you have any suggestions on new methods I can use to further
my research or places to go for research?
a. Really enjoys Google Scholar and thinks its great tool for gathering data.
b. Have to pay for the full article on Google Scholar, however they have so many
cool features that can help you find recent articles.
c. Google scholar is what he used in high school, college and still uses to this day.
d. Look up articles on google scholar and find them on school databases without
paying.

7. Are there any topics that I should research that you think would be very beneficial to take
my research into another direction?
a. Depends on what I am interested in. If I'm interested in implicit bias then possibly
looking at nationality bias as it is new and not as common.
 b. One can also look at implicit bias in other fields such as gender bias and what not.

8. And, finally, what are some challenges a research might face?

a. Researchers may struggle information that is not repetitive, often times articles
all say the same thing.
b. Also, researchers need to make very specific questions and have specific research
ideas to find what they are looking into and interested in.

Reflection

I think the biggest thing I can take away from my interview is that there are so many
ways to research my topic that I need to look into them all and see what I like the best. The
interview itself went really good, we had an issue with finding a time between the time zones
however we got it and had a great interview. For my next interview I will ask more content based
questions as all my questions ended up resulting in new ways to research which is fine, but I
wasn’t able to learn new content. I think this interview was easier to prepare for as it was my
second one and I had already done one prior, I still need to work on asking more questions
because I planned questions but there were also questions I could've asked that came to me from
information that he said during the interview.