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"You've had it before and you liked it."

Just last week I talked about how I get my son to eat things by "reframing" them: onions are "vidalias" and sauce is "gravy."

Getting my son to eat things is apparently a theme in my life.

Now that he's a teenager, that line has become a joke in my house. But when he was little, my son was more receptive to eating things that feel familiar to him.

When you think about trial work, familiarity is a tool that you can use to help jurors understand and engage with your client's story.

That's the great thing about story.

Even when the jurors aren't familiar with the facts, a story's narrative can feel familiar when it follows the patterns that they've come to know.

A study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience by researchers John Bransford and Marcia K. Johnson demonstrated that the comprehensibility of information improves significantly when it is presented in a well-structured narrative format. The brain’s tendency to recognize patterns in narratives aids in understanding and predicting outcomes.

When you tell a story in trial, it's important not only to ensure that it's creative and compelling enough to capture the attention and curiosity of the jurors, but also to use a narrative format that is going to envelope jurors in a blanket of familiarity.
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If you're working to create your own trial story and need some guidance in creating that familiar narrative structure, use my free resource, the Opening Statement Workbook, which you can download at the link below.

​LawStory Opening Statement Workbook.pdf​

Happy storytelling!

-Keeley

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