Creating "The Black Triangle," A Critical Step Before Any Trial, Deposition or Brief
Kottke.org links us to a thrilling moment in the early weeks of a videogame startup company:
In the main engineering room, there was a whoop and cry of success.
Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There, on the screen, against a single-color background, was a black triangle.
“It’s a black triangle,” she said in an amused but sarcastic voice. One of the engine programmers tried to explain, but she shook her head and went back to her office. I could almost hear her thoughts… “We’ve got ten months to deliver two games to Sony, and they are cheering over a black triangle? THAT took them nearly a month to develop?”
Of course, it was no ordinary black triangle:
It wasn’t just that we’d managed to get a triangle onto the screen. That could be done in about a day. It was the journey the triangle had taken to get up on the screen. It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit (though there were no lights, so the triangle came out looking black). The black triangle demonstrated that the foundation was finally complete – the core of a fairly complex system was completed, and we were now ready to put it to work doing cool stuff.
Sometimes lawyers just hold people's hands. Criminal defense lawyers sometimes walk the guilty through to a fair plea. Corporate lawyers sometimes translate a client's phone call and napkin scribblings on a done deal into better formatting. Estate lawyers sometimes change a few lines about a piano and a car and execute the will again.
For that, draw a triangle on the screen.
Other times, lawyers solve problems. As a trial lawyer, I spent a lot more time solving problems than holding hands.
Drawing a triangle on a screen rarely solves problems. Problem-solving requires most of the work be done before you see anything tangible at all. Here's how the videogame startup described it:
Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it – only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle.
Exactly right. Not too long ago, I was dozens of hours deep into a complicated memo going out to a business client paying by the hour. The memo was sprawling all over the place, reaching well beyond my initial task.
Then I deleted everything and started again.
Billed every penny, too. Why?
Because I needed that time. Because the matter was very important to my client, who didn't want me to draw a black triangle. They wanted me to solve the problem. A couple dozen hours into it, I had finally fought long enough with the whole universe of issues to realized how to line up all the work on the backend to create the black triangle the right way.
A black triangle I could "put to work doing cool stuff." A black triangle that would still look like a black triangle after going through business and negotiations and lawsuits and trials and appeals.
The client loved the black triangle and, better yet, loved how low my bills were after that as the black triangle held up under scrutiny. No surprises down the road, no need to throw another a couple dozen more hours at it.
Trials, depositions and briefs are problems just waiting to be solved. Get the black triangle working before you go in and you'll be amazed how "lucky" you get.
Nice article. Sometimes we are need to sit back and consider the possibilities; the good, the bad and the ugly so to speak. It is easy to get a problem and just launch, without thinking it through. The hard part is the planning and looking for the issues.
It is really difficult to deal with the another attorney that does things without thinking them through. Attorneys like that create a lot of problems for everyone. Thanks.
Gavin Craig