Why civil trials are decided by the story jurors reconstruct, not the one we intend to tell. We map the psychology behind narrative drift and share a data-driven framework to make plaintiff narratives resilient in court and in deliberation.• lawyer’s intended structure versus juror reconstruction• intuition, stress and simplification under cognitive load• gap-filling with personal experience and substitute standards• availability, defensive attribution and system justification• emotional coherence and moral alignment as decision drivers• patterned drift points: responsibility, causation, irrelevant salience, invented motives• deliberation multiplier and dominance effects in group consensus• case story alignment audit and emotional topography mapping• structural fixes: causation sequencing, explicit motive, vivid anchors• designing simplification tools and framing system rule-breaking• strategic voir dire to surface values, credibility lenses and damages capsSend us a text https://scienceofjustice.com/