ENRON MULTIPLE CHOICE.(The Talk of the Town)

Do you watch "The Apprentice"? Have you recently renewed your subscription to Martha Stewart Living? Do you think Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski was misunderstood? If so--and if you live in the greater Houston area--then Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and their attorneys want you, or someone just like you, to serve on the jury for their upcoming legal proceeding, known by most people as the Enron trial, which begins this week at the Houston Federal Courthouse.

To get just the right jury, Lay has hired Robert B. Hirschhorn, a jury consultant whose C.V. includes the successful acquittals of Robert Durst and William Kennedy Smith. "Robert misses nothing," Mark Lanier, an attorney who worked with him last year on the Vioxx case, said. "I know people who hire him just to keep the other side from using him."

A jury consultant's key tool is the jury questionnaire. As Hirschhorn puts it, a questionnaire helps "get the poison to come out," eliminating people who might not reveal biases in the oral discussions that make up voir dire. But since attorneys can't ask questions like "Have you ever pumped up your stock price while you knew your business was going bust?" they have to devise subtler ploys.

The questions for Enron jurors were hammered out by the defense and the prosecution together. In November, the questionnaire was mailed to four hundred prospective jurors. The document, which contains thirteen pages of questions, begins with instructions that recall the S.A.T.: "Write or print clearly. You must not ask anyone for help. Do the best you can." The form asks for some standard information, but there are also questions designed to smoke out both aspiring C.E.O.s and armchair prosecutors. "We are looking for people who understand the business world," Hirschhorn said. "Who are the Donald Trumps? Who can relate to Bill Gates or Martha Stewart?" He wants people who understand the pressures of being in charge. One question goes, "What are your opinions about the compensation that executives of large corporations receive?"

The form ...