THE GOAL
Pure and simple: to teach lawyers how to tell a compelling narrative.
At Stanford Law School and Michigan Law School, at law firms from Los Angeles to New York, at non-profit legal organizations and at continuing legal education courses around the country, I have taught lawyers and law students how to put together an engaging story and then how to apply those insights to legal situations. A handful of other lecturers may teach “storytelling for lawyers,” but almost all of them are academicians or theorists – no one else teaching that material offers the perspective of a professional writer of 30+ years.
THE BENEFITS
Those who have taken my workshops:
- Get a huge leg up in negotiations and in dealings with clients. One student wrote that he was “in a negotiation, and the other side clearly had the stronger case, but I won because I had the stronger narrative.”
- Learn how to construct the most effective narrative possible in the courtroom. A partner at a large New York firm was stymied before his argument at a circuit court of appeal, but after my course he developed his argument with clarity and confidence, and won.
- Employ the lessons in a wide breadth of situations. Attorneys from bankruptcy lawyers to litigators to judges to negotiators have taken the course and sung its praises.
- Consult with me on case preparation, in everything from bankruptcies to business litigation.
THE WORKSHOPS
My workshops are in two parts.
- Using film clips and excerpts from well-known movies, books and plays, I take the students out of the legal context and show them how a professional writer puts together a story: identifying the audience; developing a story drive; laying out a beginning, middle, and end; coming up with an effective opening; working through the essentials of plot and character; making smooth transitions; and avoiding clunky exposition.
- Returning to the legal realm, we apply our storytelling insights to real legal situations. I deliberately choose cases where the sympathies seem to be entirely with the other side. Students see that by constructing a powerful narrative, they can still carry the day.
THE FORMAT
The workshops can be two hours, four hours, or a custom length, all with or without CLE credit. I have lectured over lunch on consecutive days, or for an entire morning or afternoon or evening. The basic structure of the workshops remains the same: one half on the principles of storytelling, one half on applying those principles to real-life cases.