What a trial focus group costs, and what drives the number
A traditional focus group prices most cases out of testing. Here is where the money goes, which line items are the real ones, and how to test a case when the budget is a fraction of the usual quote.
Ask three jury consultants what a focus group costs and you will get three answers separated by an order of magnitude. The spread is real, and it comes from a single structural fact: the traditional model puts people in a room, and every line item follows from that.
Below is where the money actually goes, which line items are fixed and which scale, and what changes when the room is the thing you remove.
Five line items on a traditional quote.
Figures below are the ranges firms commonly see quoted. Yours will vary by market and by consultant.
The consultant
Usually the largest single item, billed as a day rate or a project fee, and it covers designing the exercise, moderating, and writing the report. Experienced trial consultants price like expert witnesses because that is effectively what they are.
Recruiting
A screening firm finds people who match your venire profile and confirms they show up. Priced per recruited participant, higher when the profile is narrow, and higher again when you need them on a specific date.
Participant stipends
People give up half a day, so they are paid for it. This is the line that makes panel size expensive: doubling the panel doubles the stipends, doubles the recruiting, and often requires a second session.
Facility
A room with an observation area and recording equipment, rented by the day, plus catering because you are keeping people there through lunch. In larger markets this alone can exceed what an entire online panel costs.
Video and transcription
Recording the session, then producing clips and a transcript you can actually use afterwards. Optional in theory. In practice nobody remembers what participant seven said by the following week.
The result is that a full mock trial with a professional consultant runs into five figures, and a scaled-down single-panel focus group still typically lands in the low thousands before anybody has looked at your case. For a catastrophic injury case that is straightforward arithmetic. For the mid-value case that makes up most of a personal injury docket, it means the case never gets tested, and the demand goes out on instinct.
What changes online
Same caseTake away the room and four line items disappear.
An online panel removes the facility, the catering, the travel, and the scheduled day everyone has to attend at once. What remains is recruiting, if you need recruited participants rather than your own contacts, and the analysis. CaseFuze puts the platform and the analysis in the same $49 plan as the rest of the software, so the marginal cost of testing one more case is close to nothing.
- Scale stops being a budget decision. Twelve participants or twelve hundred is a setting rather than a quote.
- The analysis is included. The AI reads the structured answers and the long ones and tells you where the panel split, instead of handing you a spreadsheet to interpret.
- Test the mid-value cases too. The ones that never justified a consultant are exactly the ones where a surprise at trial hurts most.
Test every case, not just the big one.
Stop deciding which cases can afford a focus group. Run a panel on the $180,000 case the same afternoon you thought of it, get the split and the damages range back, and send a demand built on what strangers actually said. The platform is included in the $49 plan with no per-panel software charge. Paying the panel is separate, whether you recruit your own participants or have CaseFuze supply them.
Common questions about focus group cost.
Is a focus group a recoverable case cost?
What is the cheapest useful version?
Do I still need a jury consultant?
How much does recruiting add?
The software that does this for you.
CaseFuze handles the ledger, the statement, and the checks. $49 per user per month.