Prospective jurors in Tuesday’s start of Michael Steinberg’s insider-trading trial should be ready for a three-to-four week stint, a lesson in arcane Wall Street terminology — and to have their backgrounds probed for any bias.
Yes, anything they’ve said or posted in regard to insider trading or dislike of Wall Street fat cats could be held against them.
“As long as it’s public information, it’s fair game,” Barry Berke, Steinberg’s lawyer, told The Post. “The world has changed. Today people have a social-media footprint that is 100 percent public, and lawyers should be looking at it.”
Steinberg’s defense team has hired DOAR Litigation Consulting, one of the top jury consultants in the country, and last week DOAR received permission to bring three laptops into the courtroom.
Berke told Judge Richard Sullivan in last week’s pretrial hearing that DOAR may be doing an extra level of due diligence on prospective jurors by Googling their names, checking out their social-media profiles and looking into public sites for asset searches.
Berke told The Post that the searches of prospective jurors won’t happen in the courtroom, suggesting that DOAR would set up a war room of sorts to vet the panel.
Jury selection in the highly anticipated trial could last two days.
Steinberg is the seventh money manager at Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors to face charges of insider trading — and the highest-ranking executive at the $14 billion hedge fund to do so.
Each of the previous six has been convicted — part of US Attorney Preet Bharara’s dragnet that has bagged 75 guilty verdicts since 2009.
The extra level of juror scrutiny speaks to Steinberg’s fear that pretrial publicity will make it hard for him to get a fair trial. Sullivan denied a request by Team Steinberg to either move or postpone the trial.
A more-detailed-than-usual juror questionnaire will be used in the case, however.
Prospective jurors will be asked extensively about their knowledge of hedge funds and SAC.
Those with any knowledge of SAC’s recent guilty plea on insider trading will be pulled into the judge’s chambers for more detailed, private questioning.
The juror questionnaire will identify Steinberg as “an employee of a fund called SAC Capital.” But “hedge fund” was considered a “loaded term,” the judge decided.
The additional research on prospective jurors to find more detail about their views can be problematic, experts said.
“You certainly don’t want to contact the juror in any way or leave a footprint with the juror,” said jury consultant Julie Howe, who is not involved with the Steinberg case. “You wouldn’t want to friend them on Facebook.”
She said Steinberg’s defense may also be looking to strike jurors who are “biased against wealthy people, people [who] themselves felt they’ve lost money or have been swindled.”