We've all been told that a trial lawyer should tell a story, but it took Ira Glass to tell me how.
Some cases naturally form a narrative. If you are plaintiff or prosecutor in a case based on a single event, you don't think about how to tell the story; you just tell it. Ms. Smith started an ordinary day with the ordinary details of an ordinary life, and then the car crash changed everything.
For defendants -- and sometimes for plaintiffs and prosecutors in complex trials -- the narrative thread can be more difficult to trace. A defense case often falls more naturally into topics, not story lines. You want to explain that the doctor wasn't negligent for this reason and this reason, for example, or that these are the three critical patent claims that don't appear in your client's product. For a criminal defense lawyer whose client won't be testifying, there's not only no easy story, but also no obvious storyteller. In these cases, trial lawyers know they want to tell a riveting story, but often don't know how to begin.
A storyteller on storytelling
It's not that the trial advocacy folks aren't teaching this. James McElhaney, for example, demonstrates in his seminars how to junk the tired "This is a case about [insert theme here]" beginning to your opening. He shows how to instead jump immediately to a critical moment in the tale, telling that mini-story detail by detail. It's a powerful way to begin, but how do you keep the story going over the whole trial?
Something clicked for me when Ira Glass explained it. If you listen to NPR, you know him as the host of This American Life, a radio show whose whole point is "to spin tales filled with irony, suspense, paradox, drama and humor out of the stuff of everyday life," as the New York Times says. Glass is starting a televison version of the program on Showtime (the premiere is tomorrow), and so he's talking in various places about the show and the transition from audio to video. One of those places is a video titled "Ira Glass on Storytelling", posted in three segments (1, 2, 3, and 4) on YouTube.
Two building blocks
Watch the video instead of just reading about it here. There's far more in it than I can summarize, and when Glass speaks, he uses the storytelling technique he's explaining. But in essence, he says there are two "building blocks" to telling a story: the anecdote and the moment of reflection. The anecdote is a series of actions, a story in its purest form, he says -- how one thing led to another, and how one event led to a thought which led to an event. He demonstrates with the dullest set of facts he can think of, and sure enough, you're hanging on what he says.
The moment of reflection is a pause to explain why we care about this series of events, what larger point it demonstrates. You "jump back and forth between the two," Glass explains, and you're telling a story.
This we can do. Stretching a single narrative over two or six weeks isn't necessary or even smart, it turns out. A good story, long or short, is composed of separate, related, manageable anecdotes, punctuated and connected by short explanations. In a trial, this means lay witnesses relate what happened to them, instead of what they think, where that's possible. The moments of reflection then come from experts, and from occasional simple questions like "Why was that important to you?"
Not just the words, but the picture
Glass is compelling too on the challenge of the transition from audio to video. (He touches on this in the YouTube segments, a Fresh Air interview, and the New York Times.) Segments that would have worked beautifully on the radio, he explains, are unusable on televison because the person telling the story has an incongruous look, or the background is distracting.
This lesson too is for trial lawyers as well as television producers. We prepare our opening on paper and we think it's finished, and forget that our presentation is visual, not just aural.
______________________________
Related notes:
1. For a current example of how Herb Stern told his client's story in the Qwest opening statement, look at Jeralyn Merritt's post at TalkLeft today, after she live blogged the openings yesterday.
2. For more James McElhaney (you can't have too much), Evan Schaeffer's Illinois Trial Practice Weblog points out here that you can join a mailing list for short essays from him, otherwise unavailable on the Internet, at an ABA sign-up page he links to. This week the Illinois Trial Practice Weblog also featured Matthew Hutson's "Unnatural Selection" article in Psychology Today article, reviewed here recently. Schaeffer's Legal Underground blog is better known, but his trial practice blog is a great resource for litigators in and out of Illinois.
3. The Ira Glass YouTube clips were pointed out in Presentation Zen, a blog devoted to "[b]eautiful design, philosophy, branding, business communications, marketing, great presentations (and doing my part to help rid the world of boring, ineffective, ridiculously bad, amateurish PowerPoint presentations)." Like many blogs and newsletters aimed at business managers, Presentation Zen's lessons almost always apply directly to trial lawyers too.
(Photo by Chez Curran at http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=411744335&size=s; license details there.)
