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OUR STORY
The strongest case doesn't always win. The best story does.
Every lawyer has heard it: the one with the best story wins. Very few have a systematic way to find that story, measure it, or build it into the strategic spine of their case, from the very first client conversation. That's not a talent problem. It's a method problem.
It Started With a Dog Named Wolfgang
"The quality that made Wolfgang disruptive everywhere else was the exact quality that made him extraordinary when the moment was right."
My father believed in books the way some people believe in religion. When I was one year old, and nowhere near old enough to read, he gave me my first one anyway.
It was called Away Went Wolfgang! In the village where Wolfgang lived, every dog had a job: helping the policeman, tending the sheep, even running a flower stand. Wolfgang wanted desperately to contribute, but nothing stuck. He ate the sausages. He dropped the briefcase. He chased the cat. (The cat had a fit.) When the little old lady he lived with tried to take him along to carry her milk to market, he shot off, knocked over the musicians, toppled the mayor, and sent the milk pitcher flying. Heartbroken, she told him she'd have to give him away.
But, she gave him one last chance. The street was blocked, so Wolfgang ran around the village church instead, over the cobblestones, bumpety bumpety bump. This time the old lady sat on the milk can. When they reached the market, the milk was gone, but...in its place was butter. The village celebrated. (Even the cat came around.) And Wolfgang was finally a hero, doing exactly what he did best, the one thing no other dog in the village could do.
That story gave me my first narrative principle, before I could read a word: the transformational journey. The quality that made Wolfgang disruptive everywhere else was the exact quality that made him extraordinary when the moment was right. He didn't change, but the context did. And that changed everything.
Away Went Wolfgang!
Written and illustrated by Virginia Kahl
Every client who walks into your office is Wolfgang. They have a quality that has been disruptive, misunderstood, or overlooked. StoryBar exists to find that quality in your client's story, and put it in the right context to win.
Growing up between worlds
"I learned to find the story that would land with this particular person in this particular moment, because belonging depended on it."
I grew up in three countries — Ghana, Switzerland, and the United States — the perennial new kid, moving between utterly different cultures, languages, and social worlds. What could have been isolating turned out to be the best education I ever got. I learned to read rooms fast, build trust with strangers, and find the story that would land with a particular person in a particular moment and place, because my survival depended on it.
I didn't realize at the time that I was developing the foundational skill of my career.
I didn't have the language for it until years later, when I encountered the philosopher Martin Buber's concept of I and Thou. Buber argued that there are only two ways to relate to another human being — as a Thou, a whole person deserving of genuine connection, or as an It, an object to be categorized and moved past. As a child, I instinctively learned how to make strangers see me as a Thou. That is what the best stories do for litigants.
With my sister
Ghana, 1963
architecture
What my mother built
The Architecture of Persuasion
Labelle Prussin, b. 1929
My mother was an architect. Watching her work, I learned that you can never solve a problem from one angle. Every project - designing homes for over 80,000 villagers dislocated by a dam project, a zoo, a jail - required holding multiple competing truths at once: technical and aesthetic, functional and human, immediate and long-term. She found the designs that honored all of them, and she never sacrificed one to serve another.
That way of seeing shaped how I approached every case during my 30 years of law practice. It also gave StoryBar its tagline: The Architecture of Persuasion.
A great building is a narrative, not a decoration. It has to serve specific people in a specific place, hold up under any conditions, and be felt, not just understood. Its design and intent drives every structural and aethetic decision. Great case narrative works exactly the same way. Both require intention, rigorous principles, and craft, before a single stone is laid.
CAREER
The career that built the methodology
What looks like a varied career is really one long education in human persuasion. None of it was a detour - all of it was the method.
Founder | CEO
ULUstory, PBC: Power Up Your Stories
Developed revolutionary technology to help anyone build their best stories
VP/General Counsel
Mulligan Security Corp.
In-house counsel, where legal strategy meets business reality
Faculty, Communications
Iona University
Teaching forced me to turn instinct into precise method
and rubric
CEO
Interfacet LLC: Communicate to Connect
The methodology got a name. Communication as a designed experience.
Employment Law Partner
Kirkpatrick & Silverberg LLP
Private clients with often challenging stories, to help them be heard
Deputy General Counsel & Director, Legal Affairs
NYS Dept of Env Conservation
Complex, high-stakes disputes between multiple stakeholders.
Director, Westchester Regional Office
NYS Attorney General's Office
With 1000s of consumer and other complaints to address every year, we mastered mediation, negotiation, and pragmatic solutions
App Developer
diversityDNA, StoryWeaver, ULUstory & StoryBar Coach
Translated academic ideas into practical technology to help people communicate better
TEDxNCC Speaker
18 minutes to make one idea impossible to forget: mine was power of stories
The Moth - Storyteller
No notes, no slides, just a story that had to hold a roomful of strangers
