Trial lawyers may work in civil or criminal litigation, representing their clients throughout the process. However, because over 90 percent of cases do not go to trial—usually because the accused takes a plea deal—such work can tend to focus on the pretrial stages. In these early stages, trial lawyers may contact witnesses, take dispositions, and, overwhelmingly, advise their clients. If the case does end up in court, the trial lawyer is responsible for convincing the jury to support their client. Such work includes actually arguing the case, as well as jury selection and meeting with judges.
Within the process of a trial, one of the first things that trial lawyers do is select jurors for the case. Courses in trial advocacy teach law students the fundamentals of courtroom psychology, which assists them in jury selection. Trial lawyers select up to twelve jurors from the jury pool (the “venire”), primarily based on their answers to questions about their potential biases. Trial lawyers for both the plaintiff and defendant can then excuse jurors based on these potential biases, but they are not officially allowed to discriminate against a particular group of people (e.g. based on race or gender). Trial lawyers may dismiss an unlimited number of jurors for the case if they detect a potential bias, though the decision to accept this request is determined by the judge. In addition, trial lawyers are guaranteed a certain number of peremptory challenges that allows them to dismiss a juror without stating a cause.
While the entertainment industry is generally not a reputable source for insight into the legal profession, law students would find that a career as a trial lawyer is roughly the closest they would get to—though, admittedly still very far from—living the courtroom scenes from shows and movies like Law & Order and Legally Blonde. However, the one to two hour length of these features does little to accurately depict the length, exhaustion, and expenses of taking a case to trial. As such, television shows and films should not be considered a benchmark for trial work, and law students interested in pursuing the life of a trial lawyer should gain experience by actually working within the system.