Sarah Murray is an anthropologist, writer, teacher, and performance coach who has been working as a trial consultant since 1999.
Before joining TrialQuest, she founded Trialcraft in 2012 to serve her clients in new ways, and managed a team of 10 consultants and research assistants who provided litigation research. She assisted clients in pre-trial, trial, and post-trial work; and coached 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”
- 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.
Education
UC Berkley - Ph.D., Anthropology (ABD)
Bryn Mawr College – B.A. - Anthropology
