Lois Heaney President, Senior Litigation Consultant; President, NJP Litigation Consulting/West
For over 30 years Lois Heaney has been a consultant with NJP Litigation Consulting working with lawyers on a full range of cases and she still really likes her work. During this time she has worked on thousands of cases in federal and state venues across the country including some of the nation’s most highly publicized criminal and civil cases, such as the defenses of Robert Blake, Snoop Dogg, Stephen Bingham, Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, the Menendez Brothers, and hundreds of individuals facing capital charges as well as white collar crimes. She worked on behalf of the government in the successful federal prosecution of police officers charged in the Rodney King case. She has also worked on hundreds of civil cases on behalf of individuals made sick by asbestos, ground water contamination, toxic substances, or injured by defective products. She has frequently worked on libel cases on behalf of news organizations, and on a wide variety of complex commercial cases including billion dollar insurance coverage litigation, billion dollar trust disputes, contract disputes and intellectual property.
In addition to assisting lawyers with case strategy, jury selection, witness preparation and supervising mock trial research, Ms. Heaney has:
- Assisted counsel in settlement presentations
- Testified as an expert on venue and severance studies, including survey research and publicity analysis, jury composition challenges and voir dire procedures
- Written numerous articles on criminal and civil law topics, including some cited in US Supreme Court briefs
- Provided news commentary for local and national print and broadcast media
A frequent lecturer for many state and local bar associations, law schools and universities, she has also presented programs for:
- New York State Unified Court System Judicial Seminars
- Florida Conference of County Court Judges
- National Association of Women Judges
- U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division
- Association of Business Trial Lawyers
- National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
- California Attorneys for Criminal Justice
- California Continuing Education of the Bar
- California Inns of Court
- Consumer Attorneys of California
- And attorney organizations in Alaska, Florida, New Jersey, Oregon, Texas & Washington
Appointed by Chief Justice Malcolm Lucas, Ms. Heaney served as a consultant to the California Commission on the Future of the Courts. In conjunction with Honorable Helen Berrigan of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, she developed an interactive workshop for judges on uncovering bias in voir dire. She is co-author of Jurywork:® Systematic Techniques (West Group, 2nd Ed.), the first comprehensive manual on the uses of social science research in trial preparation.
Education:
- San Francisco State University, CA
- Hampshire College, Amherst, MA