Legal Advocacy as Interactive Storytelling. An advocate employs similar techniques to those used to tell interactive stories in a totally different medium: video games

• Author: Mark Yohalem
• Pages: 5-8

Appellate Practice

American Bar Association Litigation Section

Winter 2022, Vol. 41No. 2

© 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof maynot be

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December 21, 2021

Legal Advocacy as Interactive Storytelling

An advocate employs similar techniques to those used to tell

interactive stories in a totally different medium: video

games.

By Mark Yohalem

It isby now a familiar adage that an effective litigator must be a skillful storyteller. Like all

storytellers, litigators must take the chaotic, tedious, confusing material of life and weave it

into a tale well told—thematic, exciting, and clear. The tale needs a compelling beginning, a

satisfying ending, and a logical through line running between them. It needs a moral. And it

needs a protagonist.

Butwhois the protagonist? For many years, the advice I received was that sometimes the

protagonist is one’s client (in a traditional heroic story) and sometimes the party on the

other side (in an antiheroic story). In this article, I propose that the best protagonist of a

legal story is the decision maker: the panel, judge, or jury. The decision makers’ act of

deciding takes them from outside the story to inside it. Because their decisions drive the

story’s course and resolve its conflict, the purpose of the story is to give those decisions a

context that leads inexorably to the resolution that the advocate wants.

To effectively tell this kind of interactive story, in which the audience is also the

protagonist, an advocate employs similar techniques to those used to tell interactive stories

in a totally different medium: video games. Examining the parallels can help us hone our

legal advocacy.

Law and Video Games: Interactive Narratives

Interactive stories are fluid precisely because the audience is active. The author of a book

or screenplay decides how the story proceeds; the audience’s only job is to read and watch.

But the audience in a legal dispute or a video game is not passive. The audience decides.

And each choice changes the trajectory of the story. Said another way, lawyers, or video

game writers, act as storytellers for a story that is still unfolding. To bring that story to a