Guides
(Faculty)
Great practitioners are not automatically great teachers. Ethos guides are chosen for both. They are accomplished advocates, authors, teachers, storytellers, and practitioners who have spent years developing their craft—and who know how to create the conditions in which someone else can develop theirs.
Teachers, Not Gurus
There is a temptation in trial advocacy education to study successful lawyers and try to reproduce what makes them successful. We take a different approach: you can learn from another advocate’s choices without becoming that advocate.
Guides may demonstrate how they would approach a witness, tell a story, or solve a particular trial problem—but demonstration is the beginning of the inquiry, not the answer.
Why did it work? What principle was operating? Would the same approach work for someone else?
And most importantly: What works in your hands?
Different Teachers. Different Doors.
One guide may see responsibility first. Another sees story, or the relationship, or the myth beneath the facts. Ethos does not try to eliminate those differences—we put them in the same room.
Participants are exposed to multiple ways of understanding and approaching advocacy, and can test those approaches against cases, experience, and their own judgment. That matters because eventually there will be no guide standing beside the lawyer in court.
There will only be the advocate, the case, and the moment. Our job is to help prepare the advocate for that moment.
Visiting Guides
Ethos will also invite exceptional advocates, judges, scholars, storytellers, and practitioners from disciplines beyond law when their work can deepen the study of advocacy.
The question is not whether someone comes from the traditional world of trial training, but what this person can help an advocate learn to see, understand, or do. That keeps the guides—and eventually the Institute itself—intellectually alive.
Core Guides
Ethos is guided by a core team of guides whose work represents different disciplines and different ways of understanding advocacy. They do not teach a single system. Each brings a body of knowledge to the Institute that allows advocates to encounter the work from another direction.
Trial Lawyer · Author · Teacher
Rick Friedman’s work has helped shape modern trial advocacy for decades.
Across five books and a substantial body of teaching, he has explored trial practice from both directions: the case the lawyer must build and the lawyer who must become capable of trying it.
At Ethos, Rick’s work provides one of the foundations for understanding advocacy as both craft and lifelong practice.
President, Ethos Advocacy Institute · Trial Lawyer · Trial Consultant · Author · Psychodramatist
Leigh E. Johnson’s work explores how human beings transform facts into meaning.
She is the author of Building the Case: Storytelling When Facts Are Fixed and Stakes Are High, which integrates storytelling, trial practice, jury research, psychodrama, sociometry, role theory, human behavior, and experiential learning.
Her work begins with the proposition: Story is identity under pressure.
Trial Lawyer · Psychodramatist · Teacher
Kirsten Tinglum Friedman stands at an important intersection within the Ethos curriculum: law and psychodrama.
As both a lawyer and psychodramatist, she brings an understanding of legal advocacy together with methods for exploring relationship, role, perspective, spontaneity, and human behavior through action.
At Ethos, Kirsten helps bridge the analytical world of law with the experiential world of action.
Psychodramatist · Teacher
Louise Lipman brings the discipline of psychodrama into the development of advocates.
Psychodrama begins with action. Instead of relying exclusively on discussion, participants can enter scenes, reverse roles, encounter other perspectives, observe themselves through mirroring, and explore what emerges when an experience is brought into the room.
Louise’s work helps advocates develop greater spontaneity, perspective, responsiveness, and capacity for genuine encounter.
Mythologist · Storyteller · Author
Michael Meade brings Ethos into one of humanity’s oldest classrooms: story.
Long before human beings wrote statutes or built courthouses, they used stories to understand conflict, betrayal, courage, and loss.
Michael’s work invites advocates to recognize deeper patterns and understand why some stories carry meaning far beyond the events they describe.
Musician · Voice Teacher
Advocacy is not only composed of words. It is also sound—pace, breath, silence, rhythm, and voice. Claude Stein brings the musician’s understanding of voice and expression into the Ethos classroom.
The goal is nearly the opposite of performance—advocates learn to recognize what happens when pressure or self-consciousness interferes with the natural instrument they already possess.
Musician · Teacher
Music teaches lessons that advocacy education rarely names: listening, timing, improvisation, restraint—knowing when to enter and when to leave space.
Micaela Kingslight brings these disciplines into the Ethos learning environment through music and experiential work, teaching presence and authentic expression that words alone may not teach as well.
Ethos Administrative Support
Dana has supported the coordination and administration of Ethos programs, welcomed participants, and managed many of the details that allow faculty and participants to focus on the work.
Having been part of its history, she brings valuable institutional memory and a deep understanding of the Ethos community and culture.
In Memoriam
Liz Green was a gifted consultant, coach, and teacher with a deep understanding of people and human relationships. Certified in Internal Family Systems (IFS) and experienced in psychodrama, Liz brought insight, curiosity, and humanity to her work. She had a remarkable gift for connection and for making people feel truly seen. Ethos was fortunate to have Liz as one of our guides. Liz died of cancer in July 2026. Her loss is deeply felt by the many people whose lives she touched, and her influence lives on through those she taught, supported, and loved. We remember Liz with gratitude, affection, and profound respect.
Rest in peace, Liz. You mattered, and you will be missed.
The Guides Are Larger Than the Names on This Page
Ethos is not intended to become an institution in which a small group of experts teaches everyone else indefinitely. We are building teachers.
A significant part of the Ethos guide community will be composed of volunteer lawyers who have trained in the work and return to help teach it, bringing different practice areas, courtroom experiences, and strengths.
Some will teach foundational skills. Some will lead small groups or coach individual participants. They will not be secondary guides—they will be how Ethos grows.
Learn It. Practice It. Teach It Forward.
Teaching changes the teacher. When advocates become responsible for helping someone else understand a principle, they must understand it differently themselves—they listen differently, observe differently, and learn to give feedback.
For that reason, guide development is part of the educational model: participants become alumni, alumni return to assist, assistants develop as teachers, and the knowledge moves outward.
