Source of article The Jury Room - Keene Trial Consulting.
Here’s another post on a variety of things too good to bypass completely, that we didn’t want to use for entire posts. You will see, as before, these combination posts are educational and help you become a scintillating conversationalist. At least we think so.
We’ve worked at lot in East Texas
If you want to get away with financial misconduct on Wall Street—be a man
You may think this is a pretty obvious one since fewer than 10% of the CEOs and CFOs in the financial services industry are women—but here’s a hard fact from a new study on financial misconduct among more than 1.2M financial advisors between 2005 and 2015.
Compared to men, women disciplined for financial misconduct were 20% more likely to lose their jobs and 30% less likely to get a new job in the industry within a year.
Women were punished more despite the fact that male misconduct cost the companies more ($40K compared to $32K).
For men, only 28% of the financial misconduct charges came from within their firm. This compared to 44% of misconduct charges for women coming from within their own firm.
And among both men and women who were disciplined, females were punished more severely (despite the fact that men were three times more likely to have a prior record of misconduct and twice as likely to be repeat offenders).
Intriguingly, only in companies where women were in at least ⅓ of the management roles was misconduct dealt with the same way for male and female employees.
Dodgy politicians—is this déjà vu?
Way back in 2010, we wrote a blog post on an article referring to “artful dodgers” (who happened to also be politicians) who did not answer questions posed to them but answered other questions instead. So when we saw this article from BPS Research Digest, we were sure we’d seen it before! The authors think witnessing question dodging makes the observer think the dodger is less trustworthy. We thought that too and back in 2010, made the following recommendations in the event you are faced with a ‘not-so artful dodger’ opposing witness.
In this instance, you are drawing the witness’ (and ultimately the jury’s) attention to the fact a question was not answered. Pay attention in deposition when witnesses do not answer questions. Get it on tape: “I asked you this but you answered something else. Try again.” You do not have to be nasty. Simply patiently ask for the answer to your actual question. When jurors see taped deposition like this, it can be devastating to witness credibility.
Don’t allow opposing witnesses to be non-responsive. Ask them if they recall the question. Ask them to repeat the question (which makes it more difficult to ignore it). Politely correct their paraphrasing. Make it clear to the jury that they are dodging, and that is not okay. It may seem a simple thing but when we have data showing people forget the actual question posed—the witness’ style may be more important than the substance of a less ‘artful dodger’.
Do honest people get their dream jobs? Maybe…
Remember the job interview technique that has the applicant volunteer a critique of themselves as a worker and potential employee? The advice often dispensed some years ago was to say things like, “I’m a workaholic” or “I am often over-responsible” or something else akin to what is now called humble bragging. Here’s a fun piece over at the Daily Mail that tells you “honest people are up to three times more likely to land their dream role when up against other high-ranking candidates”. Commenters do not take the earnest tone of the article particularly seriously, you may want to make a point of reading the comments.
