Sarah Murray, MA

Principal

PhD, Anthropology, UC Berkeley (ABD)

BA, Anthropology, Bryn Mawr

Sarah’s anthropology training enables her to evaluate jurors in multi-national jury pools from a fresh and informed perspective — and to identify and solve cross-cultural communication challenges that foreign witnesses face.

Sarah has worked in almost every state in the union but has particularly deep experience in CA, WA, OR, AK, AZ, NV, TX, FL, IL, and OH.

Biography

Sarah Murray is an anthropologist, writer, teacher, and performance coach who has been working as a trial consultant since 1999.

She founded Trialcraft in 2012 to serve her clients in new ways, and oversees a team of 10 consultants and research assistants who provide litigation research. She assists clients in pre-trial, trial, and post-trial work; and coaches trial attorneys to reach the highest levels of trial performance.

Sarah now focuses primarily on high-stakes, complex cases often featuring emotionally charged situations or parties who face high levels of bias. These include criminal and civil antitrust; sex crimes and murder cases; patent and intellectual property; contract and complex commercial cases; insurance coverage disputes; employment defense; class actions; medical malpractice defense; and asbestos defense.

Sarah is known for her skill with both expert and fact witnesses; she regularly prepares witnesses for testimony in high-stakes cases for a major medical provider in the Pacific Northwest and for a large national title and title insurance company.

Sarah has also developed a specialty in title insurance bad faith, title and escrow fraud and negligence claims, and mechanics liens litigation.

Before turning to trial consulting, Sarah was a Fulbright Scholar and conducted field research in Indonesia for 2 years.

Skills Summary

  • Specializes in helping counsel resolve emotionally, intellectually, and legally complex cases, both civil and criminal
  • Coaches attorneys in jury selection and voir dire skills with a trial-tested method of developing cause challenges that allows counsel to gain tactical control of the selection process
  • Prepared many technical and economics experts for deposition and trial testimony in patent and antitrust cases
  • Taught financial professionals effective expert testimony at the National Association of Valuation Analyst’s (NACVA) expert witness “bootcamp”