EP 711: The Improv Advantage: What Trial Lawyers Can Learn from the Stage Part 1

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to The Jury Is Out, a podcast for trial attorneys who want to sharpen their skills and better serve their clients. Your co-hosts are John Simon, founder of the Simon Law Firm, Tim Cronin, personal injury trial attorney at the Simon Law Firm, and St. Louis attorney Erich Vieth.

Erich Vieth:

Welcome to another episode of The Jury Is Out. I’m Erich Vieth.

Tim Cronin:

I’m Tim Cronin.

Erich Vieth:

We’re here with Ashley Rube and Ryan Myers from The Improv Shop in St. Louis. Welcome to the podcast.

Ashley Rube:

Thank you so much.

Erich Vieth:

Thanks for having us. We’re going to talk about improv and lawyers. It’s a little different as far as the topics that we traditionally offer here. But Ashley, could you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Ashley Rube:

Sure. First of all, I’m not a lawyer. I do improv. So I am a member of the faculty and I’m the director of operations and business services at the Improv Shop in St. Louis, Missouri. I’ve been a part of this improv community going on eight or nine years now. I started teaching about four or five years ago. I teach all levels of long form improvisation to our adult students.

Erich Vieth:

Including?

Ashley Rube:

Including you.

Erich Vieth:

Yeah. Including Erich. I just finished your class.

Ashley Rube:

You finished my level one class, which is how I found myself in a law firm this morning. And in that process, Ryan and I also developed a curriculum about applied improvisation where we take the tenets of improv and we work with companies, educational institutions, nonprofits about how they can leverage some of the skills that we teach our performers in their own context. So that’s a little bit about me. And in terms of my background, I have a master’s degree in theological studies. I got an English degree back at Clemson University when I was in my undergraduate years. I worked on a dairy farm for a moment. I now work in an improv theater. So my whole life has been a bit improvisational coming up to this point and I’m thrilled to be here.

Ryan Myers:

Yeah. My name’s Ryan Myers. I also work at the improv shop, so I teach there, I perform there. I also run our marketing related tasks, so making sure that folks can find out about shows, classes, things like that. And then I guess in my past life, I was in B2B marketing and sales. So I joined a startup very, very early and helped scale a team to about 200 people. Ended up running my own team and then consulting our Fortune 1000 clients on how to better position their products and services. I did that for almost 10 years, something like that, all while I was taking improv classes. Another thing I guess about Ashley and I is we are on a two-person improv team called Touch Baseball. And we actually travel the country doing festivals and also teaching workshops and I guess classes, things like that for folks learning long form improvisation specifically for the stage.

So that’s, I guess, another little Easter egg about us.

Erich Vieth:

We’ll be talking a lot about many things, but long form improv, my few experiences of it include watching you a couple days ago. You were on a show at the improv shop. And for those who’ve never seen this, the performer comes out on a stage or the stage, whoever’s introducing you and says to the audience, “Give me a word.” And then somebody shouts out a word. In this case, they shouted out three words and I think it was circuit under spider.

Ashley Rube:

Yeah, we got two nouns and a preposition.

Ryan Myers:

So for the title of a play that had never been performed before.

Erich Vieth:

And so the job of the two performers, and these are the two performers that are sitting here, Ashley and Ryan, their job is to make a play out of that, which went for probably 45 minutes or so. And it was a vast stage full of apparatuses, items and things that you would use that are all invisible to us, but they’re made real by the performers. So you are with your imagination creating a story. So is that typical? Long form would be about an hour or thereabouts?

Ashley Rube:

It really depends on your format. So Ryan and I have recently embarked on an even longer version of what we’ve typically done, which is usually an 18 to 20, maybe a 25-minute single scene. But long form basically is distinguished from short form, which is to say in long form you get a single suggestion, you use that suggestion and the creativity of your team to create scenes or it’ll look more like a sketch or a play or something like that. Short form is going to look more like games. So you might get a bunch of suggestions throughout the course of the show and play a number of games that you use in these little fun containers. The best example we have probably that most folks would recognize is whose lines it anyway.

Ryan Myers:

That’s short form improv. Short

Ashley Rube:

Form improv. And what we teach is how do you ideate off of maybe a single word or a handful of words? And that could look like one single scene. It could look like a series of scenes, but all the same skills are used despite whatever format you might use it in.

Tim Cronin:

So Erich, for our listeners, we are lawyers. This is a lawyer podcast. Why are we talking to people about improv?

Ryan Myers:

Great

Erich Vieth:

Question. Yeah. I was grappling with that. I think there’s

Tim Cronin:

Very good reasons, but just-

Erich Vieth:

Let’s see if I can improv those reasons for that, Tim. So to start with what we’re not trying to do, we’re not trying to turn lawyers into entertainers or comedians. Maybe I can segue back. Improv can be serious or funny. So it can be a lot of things. It’s not just going up and trying to be funny necessarily. And

Ryan Myers:

We’re going

Erich Vieth:

To talk more about what it is, but we’re not trying to turn lawyers into entertainers or comedians.

Ryan Myers:

And I will say too to that point, that’s something that when we work with a lot of these corporate groups or companies, we’ve worked with some amazing organizations. And when we go into an Anheuser-Busch or a Washington University, that’s one of the things we say at the top, we’re not here to turn you into an entertainer unless you want to come take improv classes with us, which by all means, but getting into how we apply improv in a context like this, we don’t have anything to practice. We don’t have any scripts. So people often ask us, they say, “Well, what do you practice? You say you’re going to practice with your improv team.” And basically what we practice is being a really great team. And so taking that lens, taking those skills into something that applies in a professional context is how we approach so many of these engagements with these organizations.

We’re not going to their businesses and telling jokes. We’re doing a lot of introspection and self-reflection and interrogation of our habits, how we’re showing up to be more present, open, responsive in again, that professional context.

Tim Cronin:

Well, I imagine what you have to practice and excel at is listening and then processing, thinking on your feet and pivoting. And to Erich’s point, you’re not trying to, and we’re not suggesting turning lawyers into entertainers or comedians, but for those of us who try cases, I mean, we are performing. It is a show for a jury. I don’t mean that to be lighthearted

And it’s not a substitute for knowledge or legal rules. It doesn’t improve your research skills. I give talks or seminars sometimes about deposition tactics or cross-examination and trial. And the biggest mistake I see young lawyers make, and Erich, we’ve talked about this on other podcasts, is I have an outline questions that I am going to ask and I am going to rigidly follow it and I’m going to say these words and they forget to listen. And the more advanced attorneys who get more comfortable get better at better at listening to what the witness says and then responding to that and being willing to pivot and redirect.

Erich Vieth:

In fact, one of my, I don’t know where I picked this up many years ago, I make an outline for every deposition or- Mine’s

Tim Cronin:

Crazy. And then halfway through it’s-

Erich Vieth:

And I put it off to the side and I use it as a checklist after I’ve done it because it makes me want to, if it’s there, I’m looking at it and I don’t want to look at it. I want to look at the witness and hear it better, hear what they’re saying. Maybe another way to look at this is I teach law school at St. Louis University, it’s called pretrial practice. The students are taught, you can see how it’s drilled into them that they are supposed to be adhering to the rules. There’s so much to know in law school and remember about what you can do, what you can’t do, when you can do it. And they come in and they’re kind of frozen except for I got to do A, B, C. That’s how our jury instructions are rigged that the jury has to find A, B, C, like the person that’s negligent, the negligence caused an injury.

And so we like to plug evidence into these buckets. That’s how we’re rigged. So it’s really anal retentive. It’s hard and it’s hard to break out of that. And when something happens in the class, you can see, and I know you teach too.

Tim Cronin:

I teach trial advocacy and it is the number one thing I have to break in the students.

Erich Vieth:

And if something goes wrong, they’re like deer in the headlights.

Tim Cronin:

Yeah, they stop.

Ashley Rube:

Well, and you have the extra layer within the classroom. Here’s the thing with a legal case, there are material consequences if we mess something up. So the stakes are quite high. So it makes sense to be nervous to find yourself in that paralysis. In the classroom, the same thing, whether or not you’re learning law or whether or not you’re in high school learning geometry, there is a right answer and a wrong answer and you’re going to get graded for it. So from a really young age, we get really stuck in this binary of correct and incorrect

And fearfulness of not doing what I’m being asked to do because there are consequences to that. And I work with high schoolers at St. Louis University High School doing improv and speech classes and there’s a level that I work with them about starting to trust their intuition and having discretion because they go up on stage in the classroom and they’re doing improv in front of me and they’re like, “Well, what should I do? Am I doing it wrong?” And I go, “This is improv. You have to decide for yourself. You have to have a little bit of discretion.” And that’s really scary for these kids that are like, “I want to know what the right answer is.

Tim Cronin:

” I mean, I frequently in class, I mean, we go through the various stages of trial. You should have four classes for jury selection, four semester long classes. But we do jury selection a litle bit, opening, closing, and then most of the time is on direct and cross and on cross they’ll come in with their rigid outlines and like, okay, this case problem has this number of witnesses and they’ve said this thing and there’s these exhibits and these facts and this is what I need to get out of this witness and the points I need to make. And they’ll be rigidly going through it and I’ll go, “Stop. Did you hear the answer that that person just gave?” Take your thing and throw it. Well, that’s not in the case problem. That doesn’t matter if you’re in a real trial and somebody gives an answer that gives you a win.

If you follow it down the right path, you follow that path.

Ryan Myers:

Real quick, I just wanted to say from my professional background working in particularly sales consulting for a while, this was something that was drilled into me being on discovery calls with clients or even in person when I’m quote unquote selling is if you have a salesperson that’s on a call and they have a script and they’re not showing up receptive and open and curious, you may not realize you just uncovered a pain point from this person that you’re trying to sell. And it’s like if you would just get the script out of your nose and follow, like you said, that trail of logic, it’s going to lead to you closing this deal. But if you’re so rigid and you can’t get away from your script- These are the things I’m

Tim Cronin:

Supposed to say.

Ryan Myers:

Yeah, these are the things I’m supposed to say.

Tim Cronin:

And not based on what he just said.

Ryan Myers:

Right, exactly. It changes everything, right?

Ashley Rube:

Speaking of being anal attentive, it’s like I want to check all the boxes on my sheet. So what is improv? It’s a theatrical art form in which the art is created spontaneously and collaboratively. That’s the most basic definition. So this can look like a lot of different things. It can be short form games, it can be an hour long play, but at the very basic core, it’s often comedic, I would argue that’s often because that sells more tickets, the dramatic stuff, but it is the artistic process put on stage. So basically we tell our students, we tell our clients, I don’t practice a given show. I practice being a fantastic collaborator and the kind of person that’s willing to go into a high risk environment and think creatively with someone else and trust that we have worked so hard on the front end to be great at what we do, to be great listeners, to take good care of each other, that anything we do I think will be worth the price of admission because I couldn’t possibly know before the show happens.

I am discovering the show in real time along with the audience.

Erich Vieth:

I’m thinking about that high stakes, yes, the lawyers are in high stakes, but it sure feels like high stakes when you’re on a stage. I’m remembering the Seinfeld bit where he said there’s surveys, a show that the number one fear is public speaking, number two is dying. So yeah, he said you’d rather be in the cough and then talking at the funeral, but it’s an intense awareness when you’re on that stage that I’m trying to make this worthwhile for my audience. And Tim, have you ever done that? You’ve gone up and tried to entertain or …

Tim Cronin:

No, before I became a trial lawyer, I was terrified of public speaking, just terrified of it.

Erich Vieth:

I’m in a club. Public

Tim Cronin:

Speaking class in college and I hated it. And I’m not a person who’s lacking that much in confidence and I just really didn’t like it. I didn’t like it.

Ryan Myers:

That specific context, you’re like, no, not for me.

Tim Cronin:

Everybody is staring at me and then just practicing it made me more and more comfortable doing. And now I’m as comfortable in a courtroom as I am at home with my family. But yeah, it’s terrifying. And in some context, I still don’t like doing it. Sure.

Ashley Rube:

Your body had to learn in trial, you’re like, “This is okay. I’m not actually about to die.” Which is what we trick ourselves into feeling when we get up on stage or in front of a group of people and the stakes feel really high.

Ryan Myers:

And training your muscle memory over time to your instincts over time to respond in a different way to that stimulus.

Erich Vieth:

If I can raise one more thing that wasn’t obvious to me until I took the class, improv is with more than one person. So you’re not being a comedian telling long stories and so you have to work with that other person. So there is a constant awareness that there’s another person there and if you start hogging the stage, then they’re left out. So I heard the phrase somewhere brick by brick that you’re making the story but leaving room for the other person to work with you, which allows this magic to happen and it doesn’t happen without that.

Ashley Rube:

Right. We call it bringing bricks, not cathedrals. And I’m not sure who came up with that turn of phrase, but it’s impactful, especially in companies because people like to bring a bunch of ideas or plans, your entire outline to your jury assessment or whatever it might be. But at the end of the day, if I’m going to do anything collaboratively, I have to be able to slow down enough to give me the space to pivot. It’s not that people are bad at pivoting, it’s just that they’re so encumbered with stuff that they’ve given themselves no room to pivot. People call us a lot and say, “I want my team to be quicker on their feet. Improv is about being quick on your feet.” And the truth is it’s really about slowing down. Listening takes time and if I can slow down enough to listen, then I will appear to go much faster than I would if I was fumbling around with 45 ideas and trying to listen and juggle all of these things at the same time.

So we really teach people to take a beat and to take a breath and to pay attention and to slow their mind down enough that they can make a confident next choice.

Tim Cronin:

That’s what we teach our clients before their depos. Exactly. Take a second. Take a breath. About the question. Not yet. Yeah.

Ashley Rube:

And I think that we expect that knowing things should be instantaneous. Listen, AI is getting really good, but we’re not robots yet. You know what I mean? It takes the human brain a minute to process. So it’s okay to not have everything instantaneously and to need to think and to need to listen. And people freak themselves out in that couple of seconds in the moment where they go, “I don’t know the answer to this. ” Well, you might know the answer if you thought about it for just a moment.

Ryan Myers:

Took a big deep breath.

Ashley Rube:

Yeah. So we try to train people in that way.

Erich Vieth:

So as far as collaboration, being a lawyer requires a lot of alone time and God knows all of us preparing for trial, we’re sitting in our office alone and we’re trying to think through ideas. But I was trying to sketch out before this podcast all the collaborative moments and that’s where this I think might be much more interesting. I thought, well, as a lawyer, I’m often a psychologist. I’m preparing a witness who’s nervous about a deposition or I might be an ambassador. I might be trying to put on a good face for what my project is in the courtroom or in front of a judge or we’re also performers. As Tim said, it’s almost like we’re on a stage. Tim, how often in a four-day trial does something not go according to plan?

Tim Cronin:

Multiple times every single day. There is something that happens that is not how you planned the day to go. Hopefully it’s not disastrous or sometimes it seems to be and you have to make it not be. But in any trial, it’s what is Mike Tyson’s quote? Everybody has a plan.

Ryan Myers:

Yeah.

Tim Cronin:

Or in the mouth. That happens in trial. You’re going to take your hits and you have to be able to take a beat, think about how to best pivot, respond, and turn it in your favor.

Ryan Myers:

Well, and that’s I think one thing about the way that we approach it in improv in general is just training that response and expecting the unplanned and unknown to happen because it will. We all for various reasons have such strong inclinations towards control. But when we’re dealing with other people, when we’re dealing with factors and circumstances and situations, there’s all these moving parts and there’s these unknown unknowns that we cannot account for. And instead of when that happens going- I mean, denial,

Tim Cronin:

This isn’t

Ryan Myers:

Happening. Yeah, what’s happening. You have to fully accept what’s happening.

Ashley Rube:

Wrench it into my-

Ryan Myers:

And that goes into even just defining improv, the underlying principle. Most folks might be familiar with it or not, yes and. So I’m going to say yes to this circumstance and I’m going to say and to it and go with it and try to, again, figure out where I’m at now. Things have changed. I’m getting my bearings instead of responding and living in the circumstances that existed two minutes ago, but we’re no longer in that world. We’re in this world now. And so I think there are applications obviously to scene work, but again, in your context as well.

Tim Cronin:

Should we ask them to do a demo

Erich Vieth:

Here? I was going to think we should show don’t tell at this point. Great. Would you be willing to do a few minutes of something?

Ashley Rube:

Oh, sure.

Erich Vieth:

Okay. So I wrote down an idea that might be a little bit law related. So neighbor gets hurt visiting somebody’s house or is that too specific?

Ashley Rube:

Sure. Yeah, we could do something. Do you want to do just a little yes and scene?

Erich Vieth:

Sure.

Ashley Rube:

Neighbor gets hurt. So with a yes and scene, this is an exercise that we would drill. You repeat back what someone has said to you as you say yes to it and then follow up with your response because it’s interesting how quickly our brains will tweak what we hear to adjust it to what we’d prefer. So it really slows us down to pay attention. So do you want to get started?

Ryan Myers:

Yes.

Ashley Rube:

Okay.

Ryan Myers:

I’m in your kitchen.

Ashley Rube:

Yes, you’re in my kitchen and you’re standing on a puddle next to the sink.

Ryan Myers:

Yes, I’m standing on a puddle next to the sink and my feet start to slip out from under me.

Ashley Rube:

Yes. Your feet start to slip out from under you and you fall and hit your head on the counter.

Ryan Myers:

Yes, I fall and hit my head on the counter and I start rubbing the back of my neck and staring at you.

Ashley Rube:

Yes. You fall, hit your head on the counter, start rubbing your neck and staring at me and I start to panic. I start to yank you up by the arms to make sure you’re okay.

Ryan Myers:

Yes. You yank me up by the arms and my neck lulls back, my head and I go, ow, really loudly.

Ashley Rube:

Yeah, your head lulls back and you say ow really loudly and I panic more. So I grab you by the shoulders and start shaking you.

Ryan Myers:

Yes, you start grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me and now my neck is going back and forth and I’m saying ow, ow, ow, ow, louder and louder as you shake me.

Ashley Rube:

Yeah. You’re saying ow, ow, ow, louder and louder as I shake you and I continue to panic and I drop you on the floor to rush for my phone.

Ryan Myers:

Yes. You drop me on the floor to rush for your phone and I go, “I can’t feel my big

Ashley Rube:

Toe.” Yeah, you say you can’t feel your big toe. So I drop my phone and I rush over and I start squeezing your toes.

Tim Cronin:

Scene?

Ashley Rube:

Yeah. Great. Yeah. Great.

Tim Cronin:

Yes. And someone gives you my business card. Shameless

Ryan Myers:

Plug.

Tim Cronin:

Let’s

Ryan Myers:

Go.

Erich Vieth:

Yeah. So tell us what we saw or tell us what was happening here.

Ashley Rube:

So I mean, basically it’s a really slow version of anyone can hear someone’s going to get hurt at the house and I can start to think I project out and storytell in my mind of what I think would and should happen, but my scene partner’s doing the same thing and so we have to take it beat by beat by beat and I have to respond to precisely what he just offered and ask myself, well, what would I do in that situation or what would happen right after this? In an improv scene, I want to react in a specific way so that what he’s doing makes me feel something and continues to make it. In our case, in improv, we want it to get better or we want it to get worse. So I’m trying to make the injury worse in some respects because that’s comedy.

Ryan Myers:

Yep. I’m doing the same thing, trying to heighten based off of the gifts that you are giving me. I’m trying to say yes and in the context of this thing that we’re building. So if we were to do maybe a bad version of that, maybe not with such a precise opener, but if we were opening a scene and I go, “I’m your doctor and I’m here to take a look at that arm,” and Ashley goes, “I’m a cowboy or you’re not my doctor. We’re in space that’s potentially negation. And now we’re sort of in kind of liminal space trying to get our bearings in a scene that exists between both of us instead of, I have this idea that I really want to hold to. ” Instead of playing that way, we say, “Okay, I’m going to say yes to this specific thing.” Does that make sense?

Does the difference make sense? Yeah.

Ashley Rube:

That injury scene, that would’ve been, I don’t know, 15 seconds of actual acting, but when we do an exercise like that, it trains us to slow down and pay close attention so that every next move feels connected.

Erich Vieth:

I noticed that you were bringing the senses into this and the visuals and I don’t know where, I think it was Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist wrote that that vividness and detail becomes more credible. Something becomes more believable with more detail. And so I don’t know if you were intending to do that, but when you talk about throbbing toe and shaking of the shoulder and that kind of thing, I think that’s really important for lawyers to remember when you’re examining a witness to get the details so it becomes more believable, more credible, more real.

Ashley Rube:

Well, and it keeps you really present because the impulse is to jump four or five steps ahead because I’m desperate to know how this is going to turn out. I’m desperate to jump to the end. My brain just wants certainty and we’re in the middle of crafting something in front of people in real time. It’s nice to get through your first draft. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And so I’m desperate to get to the end of that first draft, but that’s the end of the show. So I need to get really comfortable and excited to live moment to moment to moment and try not to plan way ahead and jump ahead because to your point earlier, I’m not listening then. I’m thinking about other things.

Erich Vieth:

We’re going to pause our conversation at this point and thank you for agreeing to come back for another episode, Ashley Rub, Ryan Myers. Thank you. This has been another episode of The Jury’s Out. I’m Erich Vieth

Tim Cronin:

I’m Tim Cronin. We’ll see you next time.

Announcer:

The jury is out is brought to you by the Simon Law Firm. At the Simon Law Firm PC we believe in the power of pooling resources in order to create powerful results. We often lend our trial skills and experience to lawyers around the country to achieve better results for their clients. Our attorneys welcome the opportunity to work with you on your case offering vast resources, seasoned litigators, and a sterling reputation. You can contact us at 314-241-2929. And if you enjoyed the podcast, feel free to share your thoughts with John, Tim and Erich at [email protected] and subscribe today because the best lawyers never stop learning.

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