Trial
Days in a room, deciding years of work. Fewer than one case in twenty gets here.
Where you are
The end of the main line — and not necessarily the end.
You can still end this here.
How settlement works →Cost so far
You are now at roughly 63× the cost of answering that first letter.
What this is
Voir dire — jury selection, unless it's a bench trial before a judge alone.
Opening statements — each side's roadmap. Not argument; a promise about what the evidence will show.
Plaintiff's case — they go first, because they carry the burden of proof. Their witnesses on direct examination, then your lawyer on cross-examination.
Your case — your witnesses, and the other side gets to cross them.
Closing arguments — now it's argument.
Jury instructions — the judge tells the jury the rules.
Deliberation and verdict — however long it takes.
A court reporter records everything. Every word becomes a transcript, and the transcript is what any appeal is built from.
What it costs you
Large, and it burns fastest of anything on the map — a full trial team, in a room, every day, plus experts, plus the war-room hours after court that you also pay for.
Typical time: days to weeks in the room. The court controls the calendar, not you, and dates move.
What it's actually like
Slower and stranger than you expect. Long stretches of procedural detail. Objections and sidebars. A jury whose reactions you cannot read and will spend every evening trying to.
If you testify: hours of questions from someone whose job is to make you look bad, using your own documents, read aloud, out of the context you remember. Your lawyer can object. Your lawyer cannot rescue you. This is why witness prep was worth what it cost.
And you don't control the story. You get to present evidence within rules of admissibility that will exclude things you think are obviously important. Founders find this the hardest part — the complete loss of narrative control over their own company.
What you decide here
Very little, and that's the point. By the time you're in the room, the decisions have been made. What remains is whether to settle mid-trial, which happens more than people think — after a bad ruling, after a witness goes poorly, after both sides watch the same jury react.
Even here, you can still end it
The map shows a settle line under Trial for a reason. Cases settle after opening statements. They settle after a key witness. They settle while a jury is deliberating, because both sides suddenly prefer a known number to an unknown one.
A verdict is also not necessarily the end — which is the next page, and the part founders never see coming. → How settlement works
Where Story fits
Story doesn't try cases. Story's job was everything to the left of this box: scoping the claim early enough to price it honestly, putting the right Alliance litigator on it, keeping the record clean enough that discovery stayed small, and planning the business around a process that was always going to take longer than anyone wanted.
If you are standing here, the useful question is not what Story could have done for this case. It is what the next five years look like with the paper in order.
This is general educational information from the attorneys who build Story. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney-client relationship, and it is simplified — litigation procedure varies significantly by jurisdiction and by case. Talk to a licensed attorney about your actual situation.
We're lawyers, remember? Please read this important note:
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