David Alles graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 2008 and subsequently passed the bar exam for New York and New Jersey. His early legal experience was in complex litigation. He thereafter entered a career in direct sales, enabling him to develop the persuasive demeanor befitting a prototypical trial lawyer.
David re-entered the legal profession by passing the North Carolina Bar in February 2024, determined to demonstrate that adding years of mastering the art of persuasion to a naturally analytical mind produces an increasingly rare class of attorney: a genuine advocate who doesn’t think it’s corny or out of reach to be like Atticus Finch.
Everybody Loves a Good Training Montage
A passable montage needs to accomplish two things:
It gets a character from A to B - from lacking an important skill or trait to acquiring it.
It condenses what would be a large amount of time in the context of the plot into a relatively short amount of screen time. No one wants to watch every second of the training for the days or months or years over which it is shown to have taken place, but the viewer needs to be shown that the time and effort were spent. It makes the change in the character’s ability or mentality or both more believable, and it creates a feeling in the viewer that the eventual triumph is earned.
A great montage usually includes an additional wrinkle:
The training is designed to have the character develop a highly specific trait or technique by doing something different than just rehearsing the eventual performance. The reason this is so powerful is it gives shape to something most people feel on an intuitive level - that mastery requires more than repetition; it requires being willing to do something uncomfortable because there’s no other path to victory. The missing piece is too vital. Rocky chops wood and scales a mountainside in Siberia because he knows he cannot beat Ivan Drago without cultivating inhuman toughness and determination. Daniel Larusso waxes antique cars and paints an old fence because Mr. Miyagi understands that the underlying motions have to be automatic to react to an opponent in time.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
It seems so obvious. Improve the tools you need to complete a task and you perform the task better. What’s interesting is that sharpening the axe bears little resemblance to chopping down the tree, very similar to how the activity in a training montage might not look like the eventual test.
So how can this lesson be applied to practicing law? First, we have to make three preliminary determinations: (1) what is the tree, (2) what is the axe, and (3) how do you sharpen it.
The Tree
What is a lawyer really doing? What is the courtroom equivalent to chopping down a tree? In most cases, the ultimate objective is persuading another person. The jury needs to return a not guilty verdict. The judge needs to agree that the objection is warranted. The prosecutor needs to be convinced that a lesser charge is warranted. The other spouse needs gentle encouragement to becoming willing to make concessions.
The Axe
The persuader’s most valuable tool is storytelling. I like to share quotes from credible and influential sources to show that I’m sharing reliable principles and concepts, not inventing them. It’s like supporting testimony. This is the sort of place I would normally include one to overcome any incredulity regarding the importance of storytelling. The problem is, there are so many it’s hard to pick. The sheer number of academics, intellectuals, influential authors, and powerful figures in business and politics who discuss the importance of storytelling is, in many ways, more impactful than any individual message. If you do a search for quotes about storytelling and start reading, there’s a point where you start thinking yeah, yeah, I get it - storytelling is important. But then you keep on reading and reading, and at some point it really hits you: oh this storytelling thing runs deep.
I did say it was hard to pick a quote, but it doesn’t feel right to say that there’s a whole lot of something and not show any of it. “Trust me bro” is not a very compelling case. Here are a few examples from particularly noteworthy figures:
“Stories create community, enable us to see through the eyes of other people, and open us to the claims of others.”
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”
“You can change the world just by sharing your story.”
“Lawyers are not trained as dramatists or storytellers, nor are they encouraged to become candid, caring and compassionate human beings. Most could not tell us the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears in any compelling way. We would be fast asleep by the time they got to the first bowl of porridge.”
The Sharpening
Logically, if a lawyer’s task is to persuade, and the best way to persuade is through storytelling, a lawyer should probably invest time into mastering the art of storytelling. At this point you might ask, “isn’t that something they teach you that in law school?” And, somewhat astonishingly, the answer is no.
Now imagine you are writing a script. The protagonist, like most lawyers, is not a trained storyteller. No one has ever encouraged him or her to be empathetic or compassionate. But somehow, this lawyer needs to do the courtroom version of felling a tree or overcoming an invincible opponent in a boxing match - they need to persuade a jury by telling a great story and telling it well. How can you possibly get from A to B in the span of 90-120 minutes?
You need a montage.
A sequence you could use to convincingly transform a gray-suit-wearing, task-driven, emotionally indifferent attorney into a candid, caring, and compassionate human being might look something like this:
Just as this aspiring lawyer is about to graduate from law school, the market crashes. The employer that had previously recruited him does not renew their offer. He passes the bar, but is now one of approximately 3000 unemployed attorneys in his local market. It levels his pride to work as something other than a lawyer, but, not knowing what else to do, that’s what he does. He takes a job selling windows. People look down on him: former classmates, the lawyers who survived the crash, those who didn’t but decided to wait it out - even his family, he suspects.
He’s embarrassed whenever people ask him about himself, so he learns to ask them about themselves first. He commits to learning to listen and instead finds himself listening to learn:
from his coworkers with more experience, which is all of them;
from the salespeople who are statistically better than him, which, to his surprise, is not many of them. They all say the same thing: “stories sell.”
from the customers themselves - sometimes by what they say, more often by what they communicate without words. After appointments, he’d reflect. What was their body language? Did they like me? Why did or didn’t they buy from me? What could I have done better?
He does this, without exaggeration, thousands and thousands of times. He does this for fifteen years. A few times, the product or the employer changes, but the process is always the same. He listens to his customers, identifies which stories will appeal to them, and tells them a little differently each time, making subtle adjustments to personalize the message. He gets results and earns a very good living. He has no reason to leave sales behind,
except,
once in a while, he thinks about an alternate version of things in which he spent all this time practicing law. The irony - that what he has spent that time doing by learning to connect with and persuade other people has made him a more capable trial lawyer than if he had spent those same years as a practicing attorney - stings. But what can I do about it now?
Then something life-changing happens. He has a daughter. He imagines her being old enough to understand that he went to law school and passed the bar, and she asks, “Daddy, how come after being a salesman you never tried to be a lawyer again?” Because there was no clear path. Because it seemed too difficult. It makes him swallow hard.
-end of montage-
Writing this was challenging. It’s a risky way for any attorney to introduce himself to the people he hopes will become clients. There are three important reasons I’ve chosen to do it anyway.
If I’m emphasizing the importance of storytelling, I ought to be willing to convey that in story form - both to prove that I believe in its importance and to demonstrate the ability to do it.
If someone can’t tell their own story in an interesting way, why should they be trusted to tell someone else’s?
It’s the truth.