Will Allegheny County interns receive improv training? Yes, and play Dungeons & Dragons too
When the 20 summer interns arrive in June for their stint at the Allegheny County public defender’s office, part of their 10-week training will be all fun and games.
Sarah Linder Marx, senior deputy director of public outreach and staff development who oversees intern training, will lead the cohort of 10 1Ls and 10 2Ls through trainings that use improvisational comedy games along with a Dungeons & Dragons game tailored to the Pittsburgh office and the local area.
“The goal is to avoid the whole legal paper-pushing kind of internship. We really want to make them into good lawyers,” says Linder Marx, who is a part of the Upright Citizens Brigade Pittsburgh community.
Improvisational comedy is a form of theater where performers spontaneously create scenes and dialogue without scripts. It requires deep listening as well as agreeing with and building upon others’ ideas in a process known as “yes, and”—the type of skills that lawyers need, she says.
The theater games will come into play in a public speaking workshop that she also conducted last year for the interns. “It was very improv-coded,” she says. “You ‘yes, and’ with the judge—the judge doesn’t want you to say no to them, right?”
The improv-influenced public speaking program is scheduled to be held in a local courtroom the morning of the second Friday in June, she says, followed by an afternoon training based on Dungeons & Dragons, the collaborative tabletop game that involves complex rules and regulations.
“The goal is to avoid the whole legal paper-pushing kind of internship,” Sarah Linder Marx says. (Photo by Laura Petrilla)
In the role-playing game, players create fictional personas with specific backstories and special abilities as they set off together on adventures through an imaginary world. Then they roll dice to solve problems, but they must do so within the myriad rules overseen by the dungeon master, who informs the players how the world reacts to their decisions.
But, Linder Marx says, she’s “reskinned” the game, changing the locations and characters to be specific to people in the defender’s office and places around town.
“The problem they are solving is they’re looking for our chief public defender, who left to do legal research, and they cannot locate him,” she adds.
Linder Marx started playing the game while in law school during COVID-19. She’s met with University of Iowa College of Law professor Mihailis Diamantis, who last year taught a one-week, one-credit intersession course last summer called “Foundations of Corporate Law” and loosely based on D&D–style quests.
But her one-day afternoon program will be run a little differently. Unlike Diamantis, who taught the course largely on his own, Linder Marx has support.
“I’ve got a whole army of nerds who are, like, chomping at the bit to come help me with this project,” she says. “Everyone is really psyched.”
The interns, who will be given a heads up two weeks before the program do develop their avatar for the game, will be broken into four or five groups that must collaborate to solve the mystery, and each group’s dungeon master is a staff member. “We’ve got our deputy director of our trial division as a dungeon master, and so is our manager of our juvenile division and a prelim attorney,” she says.
After three to four hours of game-playing, the class will then discuss lessons learned, she says.
“We’ll come back together and talk about the ways in which each of them played the game, and I presume it’ll be very different,” she adds.
Other programming for the interns is more traditional, like practicing approaching the lectern to say, “may it please the court,” she says. “My goal is to do things that are fun and also push different skills that are harder to instruct.”
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