It is a truism among trial lawyers that compelling stories win cases.

Jim Perdue, a trial lawyer in Texas, wrote a trial advocacy book literally titled Winning with Stories: Using the Narrative to Persuade in Trials, Speeches & Lectures. I’ve written several times before about studying the methods of the great storytellers of our times and of classical times and how juries respond to the emotions conveyed by counsel.  The cynics might say we are doing nothing more than scheming to manipulate the emotions of jurors — like when a judge wrongly let defense lawyers drive an inadequate security / wrongful death case completely off the rails by discussing the Reptile book — but trial advocacy isn’t about misrepresenting yourself to jurors. It’s about choosing the most persuasive form of advocacy among many honest options.

Cases don’t come to us with summaries attached telling us which points to emphasize and how to construct the presentation of evidence at trial.  Perhaps worse, the structure of trial, particularly the way in which each witness testifies fully before the next witness is called and the requirement that a foundation be laid for all testimony, is almost designed to prevent the jury from understanding what really happened.  I’m fond of telling young lawyers and clients to recall the last great book, play, or movie they read or saw — perhaps Inception or Hamlet or Harry Potter — and then imagine if they had to figure out what happened based on nothing more than long, convoluted question and answer sessions with each of the participants.  Would you have any chance of understanding what happened if you sat as a juror on the the posthumous trial of Hamlet?

We all know a trial lawyer needs to turn that jumble of evidence into a story, but what story should that be?

To that end, let’s turn to John Reed, a rather unusual writer who, for example, successfully constructed a “new” Shakespeare play by mashing up lines from Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo & Juliet and Henry V into a cohesive narrative. In the latest Rumpus he rails against the commercialization of fictional narrative, with a couple interesting observations for those of us outside of literature:

To this day, sin, suffering, redemption is the primary Western story. In movies, in television, in cross-cultural memoirs (which must accept the Western story to be culturally significant) and in fiction. Harvey Pekar, in his recent collection, Huntington, West Virginia on the Fly puts a percentage to equation: 99% of what we encounter is establishment narrative.

In West Virginia and the body of his work, Pekar understands that a story can be told of any of us, without forced structures or prerequisites—because every man, every woman’s life, is an allegory of our times, and in the broader sense, existence itself. …

The distinction—from life or from edict—happens to be the customary distinction of the literary v. the non-literary work. The logic:

—In literary works, the structure is derived from the content.

—In non-literary works, the content is derived from the structure.

Max Brand (Frederick Schiller Faust), a prolific pulp western writer of the 1920s and 30s, maintained that there were two types of stories: coming home, or leaving home. The assertion neatly correlates to the classical definition of comedy and tragedy, as well as a content-first v. structure-first division of the arts. The coming home story (usually comedic or “feel good”): the cowboy accepts and/or is accepted by society. The leaving home story (usually tragic or “dark”): the cowboy rejects and/or is rejected by society. Structure-first stories, i.e. coming home, tend to be about assimilation, while content-first stories, i.e. leaving home, tend toward dissent.

Deep stuff, perhaps a bit too deep for me — “Academia, outmoded and provincial, peddles geniuses and nihilists, ignores contemporary writers of far more immediacy, relevancy, talent and accomplishment” — considering that I cited Harry Potter earlier in this post, but there’s a lot we can learn from examining the way in which narratives are formed, particularly this distinction between whether structure drives content or vice versa, and the idea that all stories fall into a couple predictable forms.

One obvious analogy to draw is that the “evidence” is the “content” and so it should drive the “structure” of the presentation at trial — but the evidence is a jumbled mess of known facts, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The lawyer has to create some semblance of structure to even begin arranging the evidence for presentation at trial. The core narrative of sin, suffering, and redemption fits much of our work, with the negligence as the sin, the damages as the suffering, and the plaintiff’s lawyer asking the jury to redeem the tragic situation, but it doesn’t get you very far into developing a real narrative for your case.

And then there’s a potentially bigger problem.Continue Reading Trial Lawyers As Storytellers, The Narratives Versus The Numbers

As a lawyer, you’re either a conversationalist, a counselor, a writer, a storyteller, or some mixture of them all. I spend a fair amount of my time reading or writing pleadings and briefs, a fair amount of time either preparing a story (through discovery and depositions) or telling a story (at a court hearing or at trial), and the remainder of my time counseling clients.

Consequently, I’m a sucker for any advice from writers and storytellers, and have previously referenced the methods of writers like David Mitchell and Philip K. Dick, as well as storytellers like Jay-Z and David Mamet. (I’d be remiss in mentioning David Mamet in an article about writing and advocacy without also also referencing Christopher Hitchens’ animadversion against Mamet’s book.)

So naturally I was drawn to NPR’s new story on Poet Laureate Philip Levine:

Levine’s work is most famous for its urban perspective, and its depiction of blue-collar life in Detroit. But while he was working in the factories, he found nothing poetic about them.

“I found the places hateful.” His job at Chevrolet Gear and Axle was hard, he says, “and the work was exhausting.” …

Why was it so hard? Levine quotes another poet laureate, William Wordsworth: “‘Poetry is made up of emotion recollected in tranquility.’ I didn’t have any tranquility,” Levine says. “I was full of anger. I was very aware of the fact that I was being exploited and the people around me were being exploited. There was a mythology about us: We were stupid and lazy and we deserved what we were doing, our dumb work.”

The whole article is worth a read, in part for his stories about that blue collar work, which remind me of Studs Terkel.

Levine adds:
Continue Reading Poet Laureate Philip Levine On Writing “Where The Poem Leads”