Chris Arledge, Founder of Narrative Edge Trial Academy and Partner at Ellis George LLP has published this informative article, “Storytelling on Direct Examination”. In most civil cases, the heart of your story comes through your own witness on direct examination. Your goal on direct cannot be to simply dump all of the useful facts into the record and clean them up later. Your goal is to tell a compelling story. It’s the story that makes the facts relevant, memorable, and compelling. And a good story will allow the trier-of-fact to fill in the gaps, and there will almost certainly be some gaps in your trial evidence. Effective storytelling on direct requires at least four things: (1) chapters (or scenes) to tell the story in bite-sized pieces; (2) signposts to guide the listener; (3) proper guidance from the questioner to elicit the critical facts without getting bogged down unnecessarily; and (4) the effective use of visual aids.
Read more here: Storytelling on Direct Examination
