Private Jury.com is operated by two main players, Mike Liffrig and Alison Wolf.
Mike Liffrig
Mike Liffrig (U.Michigan, J.D. 1985) organized this business back in 1989, after having worked in a trial law firm for three years.
Mike is a lawyer/mediator, a licensed member of the bar in North Dakota, and serves as the elected State’s Attorney in his home county. He has a large family of nine children, and enjoys horses, Presidential biographies and pheasant hunting.
As a mediator working in Houston, Texas during the 1990s, Mike found that experienced trial lawyers really weren't interested in his case evaluations. So he started conducting private jury trials, knowing that trial lawyers and their clients would be very interested in how "average citizens" responded to the facts and arguments and witnesses in a case.
Alison Wolf
Alison lives on 40 acres with her husband and one very exceptional son. She has been with Private Jury for five years, and serves as our primary jury recruiter. In the past Alison has worked for state agencies, an engineering firm, and a newspaper. She enjoys bowling, crossword puzzles, Nubian, Saanan and Toggenburg dairy goats, observing how badly people can butcher her first name, and foreign travel. She especially likes spending time in the Orient, which allows her to pursue her love of Chinese culture.
Because the opinions that ultimately count the most in our civil justice system belong to the jurors, Alison helps us to retain our focus on helping to evaluate lawsuits based on the reactions of disinterested lay people. Although we do work with experts in communication theory, the heart of our work has never been theory. Our settlement process centers on real lawyers, real witnesses and real jurors.
Private Jury.com is based on a ranch in western North Dakota. We use this Midwest location to conduct private jury trials throughout the United States. In the last seventeen years we have had the pleasure of organizing and conducting private jury trials on catastrophic injury cases in some of the most urban and some of the most rural venues in the country.