Methodology
Where the numbers come from, and what we did with them
Every input below is public and free. You could pull it yourself. What you are buying is that we already did, for all 159 counties, and checked it.
Sources
What we use
Named. We do not use Census QuickFacts, Wikipedia, or any secondary aggregator for a figure that goes into a county profile — every number traces to a primary release.
| Source | What it supplies |
|---|---|
| U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey | Population, race and ethnicity, age, educational attainment, household income, poverty, housing tenure, home value |
| Georgia Secretary of State, certified county returns | Statewide races: presidential, gubernatorial, U.S. Senate including both runoffs, and Attorney General |
| MIT Election Data and Science Lab | County-level presidential returns, used to cross-check the certified state figures |
| Georgia Department of Labor | Labor force, unemployment, industry composition, principal employers |
| Georgia appellate record | Dispositive-motion outcomes and appellate treatment, compiled from published opinions |
| Commercial settlement and verdict databases | Resolution amounts among cases that resolved with a payment |
The venue model
What the tier rating measures
Each county's tier comes from six components. We publish what each one measures, why it is in the model, and what it is worth.
Political context 38%
A weighted blend of statewide races rather than the most recent presidential result. A single cycle is noisy; a blend across twelve years shows a county's behavioral center and its direction of travel. This is the largest single factor in the model.
Economics 19%
Poverty rate, homeownership, unemployment, and household income. What a juror considers a large sum of money is not constant across a state where median household income ranges from roughly $30,000 to well over $90,000.
Dispositive-motion outcomes 15%
How often defense-filed dispositive motions actually succeed in the county. This measures whether a case survives to a jury at all.
Verdict and settlement history 12%
How generously cases resolve among those that resolved with a payment. It sees only the cases that lasted long enough to resolve, which is why it is one input among several rather than the whole picture.
Appellate predictability 8%
How often the county's trial rulings survive appellate review. A county whose judgments hold up is a different risk than one whose do not, independent of which side tends to win.
Industry composition 8%
The dominant employment sectors. A county whose jurors work in professional services brings different instincts about corporate conduct than one built on extraction or agriculture.
The panels
How twelve seats get filled
A panel is a construction, not a sample. No juror is drawn from a jury list, a voter file, or any record about an individual — every name and person in every packet is fictional.
What the twelve seats do is carry the county's measured distributions. Race, age band, educational attainment, housing tenure, sex, and political lean are each allocated across the panel to land as close to the county's real shares as twelve seats permit.
Occupations come from the county's confirmed employer base and dominant sectors. Geography is distributed across the county's actual sub-areas, which in a county like Fulton is the difference between a juror from Alpharetta and one from College Park — politically a wider gap than most state lines.
Every packet closes with a composition audit showing seat-by-seat what the panel achieved against that county's real figures. If a panel is off, you can see exactly where and by how much.
See it
A complete packet, free
Reading about a method is not the same as reading the output. One full county packet — twelve jurors and three alternates, court-sheet detail, the composition audit, the whole thing — is available at no cost and with no email required.
Download the sample packet