The Scene Is the Strategy
How AI Turns Psychodramatic Methods Into Courtroom Preparation
Psychodrama originated not as a legal tool, but as a form of group psychotherapy. Developed by J.L. Moreno in the early twentieth century, psychodrama uses dramatic enactment, role playing, and reenactment of lived experience to achieve therapeutic ends. Rather than relying solely on verbal narration, psychodrama places individuals back into significant moments of their lives and allows those moments to be explored through action, sensation, and relationship.¹
In that clinical setting, the director guides the process. The director helps establish the scene, selects roles, prompts sensory awareness, and ensures that the enactment remains safe, grounded and contained. The purpose is not theatrical performance for its own sake, but deeper understanding of the experience as it was lived.
This clinical origin matters for trial lawyers, because people who enter the criminal justice system almost always carry trauma, whether as criminal defendants, civil plaintiffs or defendants, complainants, or witnesses. That trauma is not merely psychological. As Bessel van der Kolk has famously explained, “the body keeps the score.” Experiences of threat, fear, helplessness, or shock are stored somatically as well as cognitively. Long after the event, the body may remember what the conscious mind cannot easily articulate.² Can there by any doubt that when someone is investigated and questioned about alleged criminal activity, arrested, booked, and then prosecuted, they have suffered trauma?
Scene Setting in Psychodrama: A Foundational Concept
At the foundation of psychodrama is scene setting. Scene setting is the deliberate reconstruction of an event in first-person, present-tense experience. It involves anchoring the individual in place, time, sensory input, physical posture, emotional state, and relational context. Rather than asking “what happened,” the director asks “where are you,” “what do you see,” “what do you hear,” “what is your body doing,” and “what feels most present right now.”³
In a criminal case, the director/lawyer must decide what scene or scenes are most relevant to the case theory they are developing. What is most important for they jury to see and feel? This may be the scene of the roadside investigation in a DUI case, the time the defendant’s home was searched, the place where the self-defense occurred, or any other place and time that is of critical importance to an overall understanding of the case.
Why Scene Setting Matters in Trial Work
This principle has direct relevance to trial practice because trial work often turns on events that occurred under conditions of threat, fear, and time pressure. In those moments, behavior is shaped not by deliberation but by perception. Scene setting is the method by which psychodrama accesses that perceptual reality.
Consider a self-defense case governed by a stand-your-ground statute. A client encounters an aggressor in a confined space. There is no clear avenue of retreat. The aggressor closes distance rapidly. A firearm is produced and discharged. The threat is neutralized. The client survives. Later, the same individual is charged with murder.
By the time the lawyer enters the case, the event has been flattened into witness statements, forensic diagrams, and legal conclusions. The doctrinal question becomes whether the use of force was justified under the statute. But the experiential question precedes the legal one: what did the client actually perceive in the moment that triggered the use of force?
Psychodrama insists that this question cannot be answered abstractly.
Trauma, Perception, and the Limits of Narrative Memory
Trauma research reinforces this point. As Bessel van der Kolk has explained, experiences of threat are encoded not only cognitively but somatically. Under stress, perception narrows, time distorts, and attention locks onto threat cues. The body remembers what the conscious mind may later struggle to organize into linear narrative.
When lawyers ask witnesses to recount these moments later, we often demand coherence from experiences that were never lived coherently.
Scene setting provides a corrective framework.
By reconstructing the event in first-person, present-tense experience, the lawyer shifts focus from hindsight logic to lived constraint. Where the aggressor was positioned. How quickly distance closed. What objects limited movement. What lighting conditions existed. Whether escape was realistically available. These are not embellishments. They are the conditions that determine whether a stand-your-ground claim is intelligible.
The Lawyer as Director of the Scene
In the courtroom context, the lawyer necessarily becomes the director.
The lawyer decides how the scene is framed, which moments are emphasized, and how the jury is invited into the event. To do that responsibly, it is useful for the lawyer to have entered the scene internally before presenting it externally. This is not therapy though it may have a strong emotion impact. But the lawyer is using this for preparation. It is the disciplined effort to understand the experiential reality of the moment so that the legal analysis rests on perceptual truth rather than abstraction.
Why This Skill Has Traditionally Been Rare
Historically, lawyers have lacked a practical way to do this kind of work on their own. Psychodrama requires formal training, skilled facilitation, and sustained practice over time. Trial practice operates under compressed timelines and immediate demands. Time is a constraint, but so is cost.
Achieving competence in psychodrama, and then learning how to integrate it responsibly into courtroom practice, typically requires years, if not decades, of training, supervision, and experiential learning. For lawyers, the pathway to becoming a certified psychodrama practitioner minimally occurs in 6-8 years of dedicated study.
Accordingly the financial investment is substantial, and the overlap between deep psychodramatic expertise and high-level trial advocacy is rare. As a result, there are relatively few practitioners trained meaningfully in both modalities.
How AI Changes the Practical Equation
This is where large language models alter the practical equation, though like all things AI related, it must be approached with caution along with a realistic understanding of the limitations. While using AI to “simulate” a psychodramatic encounter may be useful, it is not the same as using a trained psychodramatist.
But, when used carefully, an AI system can approximate the directorial function of scene setting. It does not process trauma or determine facts. What it can do is guide the lawyer through structured perceptual inquiry, prompting attention to space, movement, sensory input, and internal state in a disciplined and repeatable way. It can certainly serve as a warm-up to a “real” in person psychodrama experience.
For example, a lawyer preparing a stand-your-ground defense might prompt:
“Guide me through this event as if I am standing in the scene in first-person, present-tense experience. Using the materials I provide, help me notice distance, positioning, available exits, lighting, movement, and what my body is attending to as the threat unfolds.”
As the lawyer responds, the AI can slow the scene and surface details that are often compressed out of written summaries. The lawyer may recognize that the aggressor closed distance faster than memory suggests, that no safe retreat existed, or that attention was fixed on a single cue signaling imminent harm.
While this information inevitably provokes deeper questions about the case, it does not itself create new facts. But it does clarify and expand the reality of perception.
From Scene Setting to Examination Strategy
The same method informs cross-examination. A lawyer might prompt:
“Help me reconstruct this encounter from the officer’s or eyewitness’s perspective, focusing on what could realistically be perceived and processed in real time under stress.”
From this exploration, perceptual limits become concrete. Lines of sight, lighting conditions, divided attention, and assumption-driven interpretation emerge as testable constraints. These insights translate directly into more precise, controlled questioning.
Scene-based preparation also strengthens opening and closing statements. Jurors do not experience cases as timelines. They experience them as stories composed of scenes. When a lawyer accurately presents the scenes depicting the physical and emotional conditions under which a decision was made, jurors are better able to evaluate reasonableness, fear, and necessity within the legal framework they are given. The result is a closer approximation of justice.
The Core Principle
AI functions here as an enabling technology. It allows lawyers to perform a form of psychodramatic preparation that previously required rare expertise, significant time, and substantial cost. Used responsibly, it helps the lawyer enter the scene, examine perception, and build strategy around how events were actually experienced.
The principle is straightforward. If the scene shaped the decision, the scene must shape the strategy. But, as indicated, the use of AI in this fashion is not a substitute for working with a trained psychodramatist. Psychodrama is, after all, an experiential method. To find a certified practitioner near you, navigate over the member directory for the American Board of Psychodrama Examiners where you can search by location.
In the next article, the focus will move from where you are in the scene to who you are within it, through the psychodramatic technique of role reversal and the ways AI can guide lawyers into disciplined perspective-taking that directly informs examination strategy.
About the Author
Patrick T. Barone is a criminal defense attorney and nationally recognized advocate whose work bridges trial practice, psychodrama, and the ethical use of artificial intelligence in law. He is a board‑certified trainer, educator and practitioner of psychodrama, sociometry, and group psychotherapy, a credential held by a very small number of lawyers nationwide. He is the founder of the Barone Defense Firm, where he represents clients in serious criminal matters and applies psychodrama‑informed and AI‑assisted strategies to case preparation, witness work, and narrative development. He also writes and speaks nationally on the responsible integration of generative AI into legal practice.