Pixar’s filmmaking discipline as analog to successful contingency work
The lawyer stood watching the drone show overhead. What had appeared to be a July 4th celebration over the water resolved into something else entirely. Hundreds of coordinated drones formed shapes against the night sky. A spaceman. A cowboy. “Is that Woodie?” the lawyer heard someone say. It was indeed. The light show, reaching its end, formed up to let folks know a Pixar movie was now in theaters. An ad. More ingenuity than a billboard, the lawyer thought. Which should come as no surprise for those who know anything about Pixar’s history and creativity. Its path and moviemaking becomes a surprisingly good analog with insights for contingent fee case building.
Hardware to Hollywood
For those who don’t know the Pixar story: it started as a graphics group in the late 1970s inside Lucasfilm, built to sell an expensive computer called the Pixar Image Computer. Never particularly successful, it was sold to Steve Jobs shortly after Jobs was ousted from Apple. Pixar as machine maker continued to underperform. Pixar developed a small animation team to make demo films to help sell the machines. One short, Tin Toy, won an Oscar in 1988. The hardware never caught on. But Disney took notice of the animation and reached out to Pixar. By 1995, the collaboration Toy Story became the first fully computer-animated blockbuster. From computer company to movie studio in fifteen years.Â
Moviemaking (and contingent fee work) involves years-long creative investments with no revenue until the very end. Both require betting real capital on uncertain outcomes. Both carry projects where many generate modest returns (and sometimes loses) while a few carry the whole slate. And both benefit enormously from production discipline. Pixar didn’t succeed by being more creative. It succeeded by being more rigorous.
The greenlight decision
Studios greenlight projects. Contingent fee lawyers take cases. Both decisions set the budget, the timeline, and the risk exposure. Both deserve more rigor than they sometimes receive. The initial case evaluation answers the tripod questions upon which all successful cases stand. Liability: can it be proved, and just how contested will it be? Damages: are they sufficient to justify the investment ahead? Collectability: is there insurance, assets, or some other source to satisfy a judgment? A case that fails any leg of the tripod is a script that doesn’t get produced. There are situations where one leg is an unknown. Huge damages with uncertain liability, for example. The potential there may deserve investment to develop the liability leg. But one must be judicious on how many challenging cases one takes at a time or risk financial collapse.
Tracking the production
Pixar famously tracked time on all production aspects, using total “people weeks” as measuring stick. Which sequences took longer than estimated? Where did the budget assumptions break down? That data shaped how the next film got planned and built. Contingent fee lawyers usually don’t track time (in fact some of you reading this probably unconsciously shook their heads in a “no” reading this.) But consider it. An estimated time investment analysis set at intake, then measured against the actual at the case’s end, helps one learn about case selection and missteps. An estimated budget at case workup, with updates at major case moments, again shows the lawyer things the gut misses. When actual costs start running ahead of estimates, it warrants analysis and conversations with the client about the best path forward.
When Pixar hit the wall
Ed Catmull writes candidly in Creativity, Inc. (an entertaining read and inspirational source for this column’s analog) about early productions that went sideways. Sequences weren’t working. Productions ran over. The discipline required to stop, reassess, and rebuild rather than push a broken version to completion was lacking. The instinct to keep going, to protect the sunk investment, is powerful. It is also how mediocre films get made and how mediocre cases get tried.
The mid-case review is the equivalent of Pixar’s Braintrust session. With a Pixar film there is a moment where leadership sits together to rigorously evaluate the project and whether it tracks the original greenlight decision. For cases, a mid-case review, coupled with a focus group, becomes a structured moment to ask: does this case still look like the case we greenlighted? Has liability held up through discovery? Have damages developed as projected, or are there gaps? Is the defense digging in harder than the budget assumed? If the answers are unfavorable, the choice is conscious: invest more with clear eyes, restructure the approach, or work toward a damage-control resolution and move on.
Outro
Back to the show. A few hundred small machines, precisely coordinated, had created something no single drone could do alone (there’s a learning there too.) The lawyer walked toward the underground, heading home, turning the Pixar story over. Hardware company transitions into animation studio by attending to its strengths and cutting its weaknesses. Animation studio becomes industry standard by building discipline to match ambition. Consider implementing some of Pixar’s tools to level up one’s practice.
Bios:
Miles B. Cooper is a partner at Coopers LLP, where they help the seriously injured, people grieving the loss of loved ones, preventable disaster victims, and all bicyclists. Miles also consults on trial matters and associates in as trial counsel. He has served as lead counsel, co-counsel, second seat, and schlepper over his career, and is an American Board of Trial Advocates member.
