Finding The Story - Part 5

As a trial lawyer handling high-stakes cases, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the responsibility you feel to win, and change things for your client. Oft times for the rest of us too. At times you’ll lose sight of your story. It happens to all of us. It happens because you have another human being’s life in your hands and you quite rightly appreciate the enormity of what lies before you.

Finding the story is tough. Telling that story well and getting justice for your client is tougher still. It’s the life we’ve chosen though. So embrace thinking like a storyteller. Spend the time on your characters and plot. Find the story in your case. Then do it again and again. Honing your hard-won trial skills until finding the story is as natural to you as walking. Only easier. 

Not long from now you will again find yourself sitting at your desk with a mountain of discovery you fought hard to get. You will be preparing your case for trial. Likely the most important case in your client’s life. All of your work. The risk you took. The piece of your life that you left behind for your client and her case. It all comes down to this. What 12 people you’ve never met decide. When that time comes and you’re sitting at your desk on Saturday morning staring at that stack of depositions, breathing in the smell of that hot coffee, those same 2 questions still nagging, my fervent hope is that you’ll recall this article and you’ll decide then and there to take a risk, to turn it up a notch, to ask yourself again and again “what is really going on here,” and that you find the courage to focus on your characters and your plot and try your case as a human being. Your story is well told. That you win. And when you do, Things Change.  For all of us.

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