Power & Narrative · September 2026 · Devika Tandon
I spent two years inside federal correctional institutions as a DOJ attorney and law enforcement officer. What I learned about power, narrative, and the cost of broken systems changed everything about how I practice law.
I was not incarcerated. I was the attorney.
That distinction matters, and it also doesn't — not in the way you might think. For two years I served as an Attorney-Advisor with the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Prisons: agency counsel and federally certified law enforcement officer across four federal correctional institutions in the Central District of California. I advised executive staff on constitutional law, civil rights claims, and operational risk. I worked investigations with the FBI, the DEA, the U.S. Attorney's Office. I completed the academy in Glynco. I conducted pat searches. I walked the institutions.
I was inside in a way that very few attorneys — very few people — ever are. Close enough to watch how these places actually function. Close enough to understand what they cost. What I learned about power in that role changed everything that came after.
Power is never where the organization chart says it is.
The formal hierarchy tells one story. The informal one tells a completely different one — and the informal one is always the real one. Who controls information. Who has the relationship with the U.S. Attorney's office that can move something in 48 hours. Who can slow a decision to a halt without ever appearing to oppose it. The most effective people inside any institution, including the most constrained ones, understand this distinction viscerally. They don't fight the formal structure. They read it, note its limits, and operate around them.
I watched corrections officers with no title and no budget shape outcomes that senior administrators couldn't. I watched incarcerated people with extraordinary situational intelligence navigate a system designed to render them powerless. And I watched well-resourced institutions fail — repeatedly — because they kept arguing with the org chart instead of understanding the room.
I have carried this into every boardroom, donor meeting, and strategy session since. The question I ask first is never "who has the title." It's "who has the relationship, and who has the information."
Narrative controls reality in ways that legal frameworks alone cannot.
I watched the same set of facts produce completely different outcomes depending on how they were framed — by whom, in what context, with what relationships behind the words. The legal standard mattered. The story mattered more.
This is not cynicism. It is one of the most precise observations I can offer about how human institutions actually work.
The organizations that understand this use narrative as a strategic tool — with the same discipline they bring to legal compliance or financial planning. They know that the strongest argument in the room is not always the most legally correct one. It is the one that fits inside a frame the decision-maker already holds. The ones that don't understand this wonder why their strongest arguments keep failing to land.
Inside the institutions I worked, narrative was operational. We used it to de-escalate situations that paperwork alone could never have reached. We used it to build relationships across every level of a system that wasn't designed for relationships. The attorneys who were most effective weren't always the ones with the sharpest legal analysis. They were the ones who understood that every room has a story already in motion — and knew how to enter it.
The people most harmed by broken systems are almost always the ones with the least access to the language and infrastructure that would allow them to navigate those systems.
This is not an accident. It is a design feature. Before the Bureau of Prisons, I was at Immigrant Defenders Law Center — representing unaccompanied minors in deportation defense. Children navigating one of the most adversarial legal systems in the world: often without family, often without language, always without power. The stakes were permanent. The margin for error was zero.
The through-line between those two roles is not obvious on a resume. It is completely obvious to me.
In both contexts I was watching what happens when people — and organizations — encounter systems that were not built for them, and don't have the counsel, the narrative infrastructure, or the institutional relationships to navigate those systems effectively. The consequences are not theoretical. They are children separated from the only country they have ever known. They are missions that deserved to land and didn't. They are organizations doing extraordinary work that the right people never heard about.
That gap — between the quality of the work and the capacity to move through systems designed for someone else — is the gap Ideate Legal was built to close.
Not because legal services are scarce. They aren't.
But because senior strategic counsel that combines legal fluency with narrative expertise, real institutional knowledge, and relationships across sectors is extraordinarily rare. Most organizations never have access to it — not because they don't need it, but because it was never built for them.
The organizations I work with are trying to change things that matter. I have been inside enough rooms — federal institutions, immigration courtrooms, nonprofit boardrooms, startup war rooms, donor cultivation dinners, and high-profile panels — to understand what they are actually up against.
And I know how to help them move.
Devika Tandon is the Founder and Managing Partner of Ideate Legal and The Civic Room. She advises mission-driven organizations, founders, and executives at the intersection of law, strategy, and narrative.