Finding The Story - Part 3

At first, your sketches may read like a scene from the tv series, Dragnet, “Just the facts ma’am.” Having spent years with your case though and learned much about your cases cast of characters, if you haven’t already, you will begin to see these witnesses more as human beings, and see well their relationships to other witnesses in your case. Relationships that are not necessarily spelled out in your numerous deposition transcripts simply because you didn’t know then what you know now. Your witnesses will take on more life. Fleshing out your witnesses like this helps you develop powerful, descriptive images and insights. You will in turn use these powerful, descriptive images and insights to develop and enact powerful scenes for use at trial. As you flesh out your scenes you build your story. After all, your story is but 1 scene after another. Until the end.

As for telling your story, your scenes will drive your directs and crosses at trial. You’ll play out your scenes and retell portions of your story with every witness you call, and cross examine. You will begin to see too what’s at stake for each witness. As fiction writer Anne Lamott advises to uncover and articulate “what each character cares most about in the world because then you will have discovered what’s at stake” for that witness in your trial. The most important thing to know then about any witness—and oft times the hardest to learn—is what matters most to that witness. This discovery in turn lends clarity and structure to your case, and helps you find and tell the story.

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