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Tammy R. Metzger, J.D. , M.A.
Teacher, Researcher, Trial Consultant
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Tammy founded JuriSense over 10 years ago and is based in Orange County, California, offering litigation support and MCLE trial advocacy workshops nationwide.  She is currently a Trial Consultant Advisor to New York University School of Law's Civil Jury Project and serves on the Advisory Committee for the Mt. San Antonio College Paralegal Program, which is approved by the American Bar Association.  Tammy worked in-house at a plaintiff products liability firm for five years, with prosecutors at the local, state and federal levels and at UC Santa Barbara as a researcher and instructor.  She served as a judge for the 2016 American Collegiate Moot Court Association National Championship and the 2014-2015 ACMA Regional competition. Tammy was also the Advertising Editor at The Jury Expert, which is published bimonthly by the American Society of Trial Consultants (ASTC). 

David Ball contributed his insights to Tammy's article, How Rules and Reptile Approaches Work.  This paper explains how trial advocacy techniques elicit subtle emotions that drive juror decision-making, including how jurors perceive risk, causation, blame, and guilt.  (See The Jury Expert, May 2011.)

Attorneys often say the mock trial workshops are the best CLE courses they've experienced.  Not only are they informative, they are fun.  Tammy's enthusiasm for helping people reach their full potential guides the design, preparation and the realization of these highly educational, enjoyable events. 

Tammy has studied body language, microexpressions, handwriting analysis, emotions, personality types, group dynamics and deception.  Having a wide variety of experiences with differing types of people also helps Tammy quickly understand jurors' motivations, personalities and how they are likely to organize the facts of a case into a story, i.e., how they will decide. 

Currently, Tammy is the 1st Vice President of Advocacy and Membership for the McGaugh PTA, where she works closely with parents, students, teachers, Orange County PTA, Seal Beach Chamber of Commerce, Lions Club, Assemblymember Silva's office, Senator Harman's office and other leaders.  She is also a Girl Scout troop leader, serves on the Board of Directors of Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) and is a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) member. 

 Tammy's resume

Legal Experience

Having graduated from Lewis & Clark's Northwestern School of Law, Tammy understands legal issues and the end game, i.e., the verdict form.  Studies show that jury comprehension regarding legal terms and jury instructions is disturbingly low.  The most often overlooked and critical component of a trial are the jury instructions and the verdict form.   Tammy can help attorneys walk the jurors through it in closing and point out legal terms which jurors frequently misunderstand (e.g. substantial factor, preponderance of the evidence, knowingly, negligence, and malice.)  

She also completed a Certificate in Dispute Resolution from Pepperdine University's Straus Institute, which is consistently ranked as one of the top ADR programs in the country.

Tammy worked for a plaintiffs' toxic tort firm, writing and researching responses to motions, preparing subpoenas and assisting with trial.  She clerked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), devising a strategy to introduce exploratory scientific studies into evidence in an attempt to satisfy Daubert restrictions.  This legal justification strategy is explained in her paper: Principal Components Analysis in Demonstrating Causation.

She also interned at the Santa Barbara District Attorney's Office, where she was assigned misdemeanor cases and helped pick juries for felony cases. There, she also authored a section on negotiation strategy and edited a chapter of the Environmental Crimes Prosecution Manual for the California District Attorneys Association.  Tammy worked for the Oregon Department of Justice, Natural Resources Section, where she researched secured transactions, civil procedure, delegation of agency power, public officers' duties, construction liens for property on state land and other issues.

College Instructor

Tammy has taught Cultural, Physical and World Regional Geography at several colleges, including UC Santa Barbara and Irvine Valley College. Teachers develop a sense of their students, especially when they are confused. Tammy has learned to communicate via people's individual preferred learning styles and she can help attorneys with this, as well.

New teachers are often surprised by how little students retain. While a lecture may have been clear, it is quickly forgotten.  Tammy helps attorneys teach jurors so that they understand and remember the scientific evidence when they are deliberating with the group.  People learn by repetition, being engaged in the discussion (e.g. storytelling techniques) and they remember powerful visual aids.  

Research Scientist

Tammy has worked as a research scientist, using statistical techniques to analyze climate change. She also uses these data analysis skills to develop juror profiles for voir dire. She has given invited lectures at many research institutions and academic meetings, including the Statistics Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.

Having studied at the graduate level in a Geography Department, Tammy has experience critiquing academic publications covering a wide array of topics, from geographic information systems (GIS) to land use planning to atmospheric chemistry to environmental psychology.  She can understand your expert testimony and help condense it into a more digestible presentation that jurors will understand and retain.

Hazardous Materials and Environmental Science

Tammy completed a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science and a Certificate in Hazardous Materials Management from UC Riverside. She worked as an environmental scientist for Tetra Tech, investigating pollution on Air Force property and authoring environmental compliance documents.  She has conducted fieldwork, sometimes suited up with a respirator, collecting environmental samples and taking measurements of contamination at Superfund Sites.  

The National Science Foundation awarded Tammy a grant to investigate iron chemistry at the Leviathan acid mine drainage Superfund Site.  She also worked with the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD), assisting Board Member Steven Albright, Governor Wilson’s appointee.  

Now, Tammy serves on the Board of the Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), working with activists, scientists, business leaders, government officials and members of her community to clean up the water that flows into the ocean along Long Beach.  

She was also recently awarded an Environmental Steward award for Earth Day by the Long Beach City Council.  

Tammy and Maddy at the Clean-Up

Tammy and her daughter Madelyn at FoLAR’s 2008 River Clean-Up

Environmental Compliance Documents

Through her work as an environmental scientist, consultant and law intern, Tammy has authored sections of many environmental compliance documents, including:

Environmental Crimes Prosecution Manual, Published by the California District Attorneys Association (Tammy authored a section on negotiation strategy and edited the chapter entitled Settlement of Environmental Cases.)   

Remedial Investigation, Feasibility Study, Installation Restoration Program (RI/FS IRP) March Air Force Base, CA.  (Tammy wrote the chapters for Sites 37 and 38, PCB spill sites, summarizing the investigation efforts and results, including risk assessments and remediation strategies.)  

Toxic Hot Spots Emissions Plans and Reports, Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plans, Emergency Response Plans and Waste Reduction Plans (Tammy authored these regulatory reports for small to medium-sized California companies.)

As part of a course on Environmental Impact Reports (EIRs), Tammy collaborated with a team that wrote an EIR for a hypothetical development in Riverside, California.  

Industrial Processes, Manufacturing and Process Control Engineering

Tammy’s experience with industrial processes provides her with insight into the industrial workplace and toxic exposures, which enables her to visualize the injury and help attorneys present a compelling story to the jurors.  

As an intern engineer, Tammy worked on the manufacturing floor of a large electronics assembly building.  She wrote classified missile electronics manufacturing instructions for Loral Aerospace, trained inspectors and set up and programmed process control instruments, such as steam aging and solder pad inspection equipment.  Writing Toxic Hot Spots Emissions Plans and Reports, Tammy learned about numerous industrial processes, such as metal plating, painting and printing.  

Psychology

Tammy is fascinated with all types of people, understanding their motivations, how they make decisions and find meaning in life’s events.  This is one of the most important things to keep in mind when you are presenting your case to a jury, i.e., how various jurors will organize the facts into a story.

About 5% of the population is exceptionally gifted at understanding people.  These are people who prefer options over closure, enjoy spontaneity, are more easy-going and tend to see the big picture better than more structured, time-conscious personality types (ENFP, per the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator).  They are far better at understanding people and generating case themes than others.  

ENFPs have an “uncanny sense of the motivations of others,” are “keen and penetrating observers and are capable of intense concentration on another individual” and are “brilliantly perceptive.”  (Please Understand Me: Character & Temperament Types, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates)  

Furthermore, “ENFPs have remarkable latitude in career choices and succeed in many fields.”  Not surprisingly, Tammy has an ENFP personality type.  Like other ENFPs, she is “unusually skilled in handling people” and has “outstanding intuitive powers.”  For more information on how Tammy uses her intuition in research and trial, please see her article entitled What is Intuition?

People talk about “women’s intuition,” but anybody who has cared for an infant or young toddler develops their intuition out of necessity.  Since young children are unable to articulate their wants and needs, caregivers must intuit their thoughts and emotions before the crying begins.  Being a mother strengthens Tammy’s ability to connect with others and sense the flow of their emotions, which is useful in understanding how a jury is reacting to the attorneys and the trial testimony.   

Tammy also uses her data analysis skills to develop psychological juror profiles for voir dire.  She has studied personality, cognitive psychology, perception, group dynamics, social psychology, persuasion, the psychology of attitudes and how people learn science, which was part of her Graduate Student Instructor training at UC Santa Barbara.  

Tammy has spent a considerable amount of time getting to understand people with very different jobs, experiences, interests and personality types, i.e., the full spectrum as described by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. She quickly grasps jurors' preferred ways of learning, making decisions and relating with others in groups. She excelled in many diverse areas because she is passionate, analytical and intuitive. She has now immersed herself in jury dynamics, persuasion and courtroom psychology and offers these skills to trial attorneys.

 

JuriSense, LLC  Seal Beach, CA  (800) 891-6592  info@jurisense.com

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