Shapiro - Lawyers, liars, and the art of storytelling: using stories to advocate, influence, and persuade

Using Stories to Advocate, Influence, and Persuade

Telling stories is as natural to human beings as breathing. Thousands of years ago, storytellers provided entertainment just as they do today, but they also passed on the cultural heritage of civilization. Recorded as epic poems or stylized ballads, stories told of heroes, villains and gods. Religions and national epics are limned by stories. The development of the printing press and movable type replaced the centrality of the storyteller as recorder of events, but it never removed her from the collective consciousness. Storytelling carries on in each newly developed form of media. Books, television, movies, and now the pervasive blasts of creativity on the Internet are all elaborations on the telling of a story. Even the rarefied atmosphere of academia is currently fixated on the use of the story as a conveyor of information. What is the difference, after all, between data and understanding? It is the ability to put the data into a comprehensible package, something about which a person can make sense. Political regimes understand this fact.

Many governments labor mightily to control stories, to control the narrative. Holding the power to tell the story, to indicate the forces of good and the forces of evil, to explain what really happened in Tiananmen Square, or in the Ukraine or in Viet Nam, is vital. Planning a trip to the Balkans, one discovers competing stories, historic accounts that tell stories relating totally opposite facts. The winners write the final version of the tale; it is when competing entities survive that the competing sagas remain.

Yet storytelling often is not taken seriously. Children do it. Charlatans live by it. Popular culture is littered with con men and sharp characters who manipulate and deceive. Lawyers who pride themselves on technical skill are especially suspicious of honoring the storyteller. Stories lack rigor, stories are malleable. The charm of the teller may empower a foolish story just as the lack of grace of a teller can undermine a truthful one. What else explains the American legal systems distrust of juries? Why else have the systems elaborate rules of evidence that narrow how the story can be told in court? Storytellers can transport us, make us laugh and cry, make us learn and understand. Perhaps the power of the storyteller is too much.

When I began the study of law as a first-year student, the edited judicial opinion in the casebook drove me to distraction. A fascinating story might be set up: a young man whose hand was transformed into a hideous hairy appendage sues his doctor who had guaranteed a fully functional hand. Here was drama, a compelling story, absurd but enthralling, it pulled me in. But the story veered off into abstraction in the opinion. The reader learned about the use of the expectation measure in contract damages, but what happened to the boy with the hairy hand? If pressed, a professor would deflect the question. The end of the story does not matter. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. long ago opined that while a woman might care who the plaintiff was or if she was wearing a hat, the law cared nothing for such human details. The law is cold and hard-edged. Focus on the question of contract damages. The first year of law school is designed to bleach away the stories.

Jonathan Shapiro gives us the stories back. He demonstrates the power of storytelling and its inevitable importance. More important, he offers advice on how to do it well. Running at the subject from a variety of directions, he moves storytelling to center stage. If Jonathan did not exist, one might have to invent him in order to have this book written correctly. He is buried in stories. A journalist before coming to law school, Jonathan never stopped telling stories. Nor did he renounce the power of telling a good story. Years as an Assistant United States Attorney, a lawyer in private practice, a journalist, and a screen writer have immersed him in the power of the narrative. This unique background produces a book that ranges from the three pillars of Aristotle to remembrances of Professor David Daube to the theories of Professor Erving Goffman to David E. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein, with many stops in between. The author shows the reader how to tell stories by telling stories. Fortunately, he has some great stories to tell.