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     The case, in a nutshell, was that Maxus, a company in the oil business, had hired prestigious New York investment banker Martin Siegel and his firm Kidder, Peabody to prepare the takeover of Natomas, another company.  But after each meeting Siegel held with Maxus officials, the price of Natomas’s shares went up.  Maxus claimed that Siegel had passed along inside information to Kidder executive Ivan Boesky, who then invested in the target company, driving up its stock prices, so that when Maxus eventually acquired Natomas it had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more than it otherwise would have.  How to invoke the audience’s intuitive beliefs so as to convert a complex commercial dispute involving massive amounts of circumstantial evidence into a simple, credible, compelling story line that would point the jury to the desired verdict?

     The solution was to visually emplot the case as a struggle between Us and Them, the familiar local guy versus the big bad Other – an archetypal conception of how conflict is structured, and who should win, that goes back to the biblical tale of David and Goliath.  Maxus’s closing argument video starts by locating the parties on a map of the United States.  Its disproportionate enlargement of Texas, shaped and colored to evoke the state’s highly popular flag, encouraged the Texan jurors to identify with a home-grown plaintiff and, conversely, drawing on implicit social stereotypes, to distance themselves from the defendants – those “outsiders” from New York.  To enhance the effect, at one point jurors saw the state of Texas suddenly snap out of the graphic display as if it were shooting a line (or a lasso?) around New York.[1]  In short, the visual argument that Maxus’s lawyers used to construct the legal conflict deployed a story frame that anyone familiar with our culture’s core moral tales (or the local culture’s implicit folk knowledge) could immediately recognize and understand.  Marty Siegel, the unscrupulous outsider, is recognizably the “bad guy” in a visually narrated scenario that manifestly prompts the jury’s sympathy and animosity along well-established lines.