When the Law School hosted the 10th Biennial Conference on Applied Legal Storytelling in July, it was a full-circle moment. While the first of these biennial conferences was held in London in 2007, Michigan Law hosted a symposium on the nascent field of legal storytelling far earlier—in 1989—and published an issue of the Michigan Law Review dedicated to the topic that same year.
“It was one of the very first times that the legal profession or the academic world focused on storytelling,” said Beth Wilensky, clinical professor in the Legal Practice Program at Michigan Law and a member of the biennial conference planning committee. “When I developed my class on storytelling and persuasion, I read a lot of material from that symposium.”
Fast forward to July, when approximately 140 attendees gathered to discuss storytelling in law practice and legal education. In short, they focused on the question first posed at Michigan Law 36 years ago about why narrative had become such an important and recurring theme.
This year’s conference planning committee also included Ted Becker, clinical professor of law and director of the Legal Practice Program, and Jessica Lefort, clinical assistant professor in the Legal Practice Program and director of the Immigrant Justice Lab.
They helped oversee a program that included more than 50 sessions from nearly 70 presenters—including Michigan Law clinical professor Howard Bromberg—who spoke on a wide range of topics, with titles like Applied Storytelling as a Weapon for Justice and The Immigration Lawyer as Storyteller and Historian.
“It’s such a vast and broad span of topics,” said Lefort. “It sparks the ideas for future scholarship and future practical work.”
Eliciting emotions
While the law obviously relies on facts and logic, storytelling can introduce an emotional component that brings life to an argument. Advocacy that relies too heavily on a mathematical-type argument that “A plus B equals C” ignores a vital human element.
“In reality, that’s not how judges work. That’s not how probation officers work. That’s not how anybody works,” said Lefort. “Because we’re human beings, we still turn everything into a story, even if we’re trying very hard not to.”
Lawyers therefore should not eliminate storytelling from their legal writing and practice of the law. Rather, they should pair storytelling with facts and logic.
“A lot of what criminal law is about is mercy at the end,” said Lefort, who has practiced criminal law in the past. “For example, there is a lot of discretion in sentencing decisions, even with the guidelines. And so being able to tell stories is really important.”
Wilensky added that many legal questions do not have simple answers that can be presented as immutable facts of right or wrong.
“There are a lot of legal questions that turn on the question of what is reasonable. Was it reasonable to do X? Was it reasonable to do Y?” she said. “Stories are often the most effective way to describe, for a decision maker, how to think about those legal questions.”
She added that storytelling also comes through as lawyers give voice to their client’s experience, a lesson she drives home in her upper-level writing class on legal storytelling and persuasion. Storytelling not only strengthens an argument but also helps clients feel seen.
“It helps them feel like ‘my lawyer understands me and is representing me as an actual person with lived experience,’” she said. “It is more than ‘well, this is what the law says.’ It’s part of client-centered lawyering.”
Even vocabulary has changed in recent years as lawyers reframe how they discuss certain topics, such as abortion. One of the conference presentations examined amicus briefs in abortion cases over the past several decades and how the arguments have changed over time.
“On the anti-abortion side, it started out with everybody using the term ‘fetus,’” said Lefort. “But now they use the terms ‘unborn child’ and ‘pre-born baby.’ They also don’t use ‘mother’ or ‘woman’ or ‘pregnant woman.’ They use ‘womb.’ So it’s all about the child that’s growing in this womb. It’s about what’s going to spark certain emotions.”
Uses of storytelling
The most obvious use of storytelling comes in litigation, where lawyers ask a court to decide how the law applies to a certain set of facts. But storytelling has broad applications, from drafting a contract between two parties to the way a legislature writes a statute and chooses the short title that will be used in public debate. (One example used during a conference presentation was the Patriot Act, formally known as the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001).
“There’s also an interesting line of scholarship that looks at the story of how the law develops,” said Wilensky. “Sometimes what you’re trying to do is get the law changed. So your story might be a little bit about your client, but it might be a lot more about how we have a decision from 30 years ago. And the story that you’re telling might be about how nothing about that decision has seemed to work well in practice. It’s a story of constant confusion and uncertainty and tension, and the judges don’t really know how to apply it, and so we need to change it.”
That line of scholarship along with other work in the area of applied legal storytelling are important topics for law students, said the professors.
“Storytelling is a tool in your advocacy toolbox, not the only tool, by any means, but a really important tool,” said Wilensky. “And I think we under teach that in law school and under emphasize it relative to how often students will need that skill and practice as lawyers. That’s why I think it’s really important.”
