Finding The Story - Part 1

It’s Saturday morning. Your trial starts in 6 weeks. You’ve been working on this case for over 2 years. You’ve taken 30 or 40 depositions. Gutted a half dozen of their experts. Your client turned down their ‘last and best’ offer. This is one of those cases you both know needs to be tried. So today, you’re preparing for trial. You sit at your desk, surrounded by stacks of depositions, piles of pleadings and medical records, an outline for an opening that came to you while standing in line at Whole Foods that you hastily typed into your iPhone, Paper-Mate flair pens in red and black, a blank white legal pad, a hot cup of coffee, your MacBook Air and 2 nagging questions. How do I find the story? How do I best tell the story at trial? An hour later you still have the same 2 questions. Another hour goes by. Still the same. Only now your coffee is cold. 

Days like this are inevitable for a trial lawyer. What do you do? Ask yourself this question. What’s really going on here? No. Really! Ask it again. However deep you’ve been digging for the past 2 years, dig deeper. You must find and you must embrace the story – your story – the one you can’t wait to tell those jurors. You have to move from your complaint and discovery and all those depositions to the story of humans being that is buried somewhere between your DropBox files and these stacks on your desk. Oh I assure you, it’s there. Now all you have to do is find it.  

Until next time,
James Hugh Potts II
We Win.  Things Change.