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Comment by conorgil145 | Hacker News Reader

Just goes to show that if you make the extra effort a lot of the time things will tend to work out. This guy was extremely prepared and didn't even need the information that he gathered with an awesome day's worth of coding because the lawyers thought he wouldn't even show up!

Nice work though. Hopefully all of the work he did will help someone else save some $$ too because he said that he posted the DB online.

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Here's an addendum to my story:

I called my Dad, a lawyer, as I was walking out of the courthouse to brag that I was officially 1-0 in trial and planned on keeping it that way.

I told him that I was upset all my preparation went to waste. He said it wasn't wasted, as you've said. Basically, in these types of areas... they just try to win the cases against the unprepared, and don't even bother with the people who are prepared. He said you'd be amazed how often that simply showing up prepared is sufficient to win without a fight. (he wasn't talking about tax assessment stuff in particular, just in general low-end legal stuff).

Your dad is absolutely right. I've been in court 4 times to date, all of those business related. Each time we were prepared to the hilt. One party didn't show, we won that one by default. The second had his case fall apart on the first day because of our evidence. #3 and #4 (both in Germany) took a little longer but we also won those.

For every one of those cases except for the 1st I'm pretty sure that it was our preparation that won the case, that plus the determination to see it through to the end. It helped that we were 'in the right' but that is definitely not always enough, you have to show that and you have to show it convincingly.

The more prepared you are, the less likely you will go to try. I spent a week preparing to depose the opposing party -- 15 minutes before it started, he offered us close to what we sued for.

>Just goes to show that if you make the extra effort a lot of the time things will tend to work out.

That makes no sense. His effort had no influence on how things worked out.

Not true. The lawyers probably assumed he was prepared because he showed up, and he showed up carrying 100 pages of something.

If you're sitting on the best possible hand in Texas Hold 'Em, and you get your opponent to fold without ever having to show your hand, your hand had influence on how things worked out. Presumably, you wouldn't have been as confident and aggressive with your hand if it wasn't good.

You could, of course, bluff, but that's a risk.

You're assuming things that could be very well not be true. Maybe he would have gotten the same offer if he just showed up empty handed and maybe your imaginary poker player would have folded regardless of your aggressiveness. Believing the effort didn't all go to waste sure feels better though.

Would you show up empty handed? I wouldn't.

In general, I don't consider preparation wasted effort even if I don't need to call up the actual materials I prepared. If I was better at signaling preparation without actually doing so (read: bluffing), maybe that wouldn't be the case.

I go into situation A with expected reward 100. I receive reward 100.

Yes - I might have gotten reward 100 by going into the situation with expected reward -12 .. but that would be a dumb thing to do.

That is the nature of acting intelligently under uncertainty - you assume things that might not be true (but probably are).

If you have the best possible hand in Texas Hold'Em, and your opponent folds - he's the one who made the right move, not you.

It was insurance -- so it was still valuable, because the outcome wasn't known in advance.

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