Opening the black box between the day you provide an
instruction and the day you see a courtroom
Most people experience litigation in two ways: the jolt of the
initial demand and the bill that follows a month later. In between,
the matter can feel like a sealed container – documents
disappear into it and, eventually, a court date pops out. What
occupies the intervening weeks and months is less mysterious than
it seems. Litigation is a sequence of tasks, each tightly bound to
the next, and almost all of them take place long before anyone
stands up in a witness box.
Turning a grievance into a case
The first chore is storytelling. Lawyers call it "case
theory," but the idea is simple: translate frustration into a
legally coherent narrative that a judge can test. That means
sifting contracts, emails, minutes, voice notes and spreadsheets
for three or four anchor facts that can be proven beyond argument.
Anything that does not support or undercut those points
