No one likes legal disputes (no, I'm not talking to you, attorneys), because legal disputes are what happens when something goes wrong. But when something goes wrong, it needs to be fixed even if the work required to fix it sucks.
It is hard to imagine a world in which nothing goes wrong. So it's hard to imagine a world with no legal disputes. Thus, it's a problem that causes a lot of people a lot of grief.
I have spent the last decade trying not to solve the problem of legal disputes, but, rather, trying to solve the problem of how bad legal disputes suck--namely, in terms of time and dollar cost.
When I founded Veeto, my thesis was simple: the cost of a legal dispute should go down over time, not up.
To the extent that you can figure out how to make that possible, a few things happen:
- Eliminate a lot of grief-causing uncertainty around cost - You approach closer to, or actually arrive at, the certainty of knowing exactly how much engaging in a legal dispute is going to cost you. Instead of starting with an arbitrary retainer and an agreement to pay a specified billable-hour rate, for some unknown number of hours required to do the job, you start with more fixed variables: fixed prices, fixed lengths of engagement, hard data on both outcome probability and time-to-outcome probability.
- Fewer default losses in legal disputes - As I've seen in the course of handling thousands of cases in accordance with this thesis, when you give people an economical way to pursue justice in a much larger swath of legal disputes, they do. When you bring the cost to pursue justice down, many more "case stakes," which, before, were too low to pursue, now become justifiable given the lower cost required. The ROI is there, in other words.
- Tables turn on opponents with larger "war chests" - One of the other reasons why legal disputes are thought to be such a drag are that we have this almost intuitive sense that justice is not likely to prevail, that the outcome will be less fair and more in proportion to the relative resource levels of the disputants. The reason the David and Goliath story is so appealing, in other words, is because we know that real-life tends to not work that way, especially in legal disputes. Legal battles are wars of attrition: who can afford to spend the most until the other side gives up? That's the traditional quandary. What I've found, though, is that, as legal dispute costs go down, these unfair resource-advantages go away--and at some point, the table actually turns, giving the "little guy" the greater advantage. I could write an entire series on this one point--and I will, in the future--so for now, just note the conclusion, that my thesis disrupts traditional legal advantages stemming from resource advantages.
For these reasons, one of the metrics we track is Veeto ROI, which we define as the number of dollars (in case value) you win for each dollar you give Veeto. Our average is about 30x. Where else, in business or life, can you consistently get 30x ROI?
But the point is that there are two ways to preserve and improve that ROI: improve outcome values and drive down legal costs. We do both, but the latter is the one we can control more fully. In this sense, we see it as kind of like the early Amazon thesis of lower costs, leading to lower prices, leading to higher demand, leading to an unstoppable flywheel.
Disruptive things happen when you breakthrough artificial price floors in a given market, and that is precisely what we've done with Veeto.