--- title: "Unreasonably Great: What a Two-Dollar Hot Dog Can Teach a Litigator About eDiscovery" description: Why Proteus Discovery Group borrowed a philosophy from the best restaurant in the world, and the ten principles we use to apply it to eDiscovery. --- [‹ All posts](https://blog.proteusdiscovery.com/) Est. 2015 [Information Governance](https://blog.proteusdiscovery.com/tag/information-governance) [Industry Analysis](https://blog.proteusdiscovery.com/tag/industry-analysis) [eDiscovery](https://blog.proteusdiscovery.com/tag/ediscovery) [Litigation Support](https://blog.proteusdiscovery.com/tag/litigation-support) # Unreasonably Great: What a Two-Dollar Hot Dog Can Teach a Litigator About eDiscovery Ra Ray Biederman Oct 22, 2026, 10:13:12 AM *By **Ray Biederman**, Co-Founder, Proteus Discovery Group | Founding Partner, Mattingly Burke Cohen & Biederman | Adjunct Lecturer, Indiana University* ![hero](https://blog.proteusdiscovery.com/hs-fs/hubfs/hero.png?width=1200&height=630&name=hero.png) --- ## The hot dog Will Guidara tells a story about a table at Eleven Madison Park. A group of tourists had been eating their way through New York for a week, and over coffee one of them mentioned they were leaving in the morning without having tried a street hot dog. It was late. The restaurant had three Michelin stars. The food they had just finished eating was some of the best in the world. Guidara sent a cook outside, bought a two-dollar dirty-water hot dog from the cart on the corner, cut it into four pieces, plated it, and ran it to the table. They talked about that hot dog for years. Not the duck. Not the dessert. The hot dog. I think about that story a lot, because it is the most honest description I have ever read of what service businesses actually sell. The duck was perfect. The duck was the price of admission. The hot dog was what made them a client for life. --- ## What we are actually selling I have spent twenty years in eDiscovery, most of it as a practicing litigator. I have been on both sides of the table. I have hired vendors on the worst day of a case, and I have been the vendor other lawyers called when their own worst day arrived. I have been retained as a testifying expert on document production. I teach this at Indiana University. In all of that time, I have never once seen a client renew a vendor because the vendor processed data faster than the competition. The processing is the duck. What clients actually buy, and what they renew for, and what they refer their friends to, is the confidence that comes from having a genuine expert in their corner on the day everything is on the line. Anyone with the right software can process a data set. Very few can make a lawyer under a production deadline feel like they have the smartest, calmest, most trustworthy partner in the room. That difference, between doing the work and how it feels to work with us, is the whole business. Earlier this fall, the Proteus leadership team sat down and tried to write our version of the Guidara standard. We called it Unreasonably Great. It is the internal document that defines what we expect from each other and from the client experience we are trying to build. This post is a public version of it, because our clients and prospects deserve to know what we are aiming for. ![service-vs-hospitality](https://blog.proteusdiscovery.com/hs-fs/hubfs/service-vs-hospitality.png?width=1200&height=700&name=service-vs-hospitality.png) --- ## The distinction underneath it all Guidara makes a distinction between service and hospitality. It is the single most useful idea in the book, and it is the frame underneath everything we do. **Service** is the technical delivery of the work. The production lands on time. The privilege log is clean. The numbers reconcile. The hosting invoice makes sense. Service is doing the job correctly, and it is measurable, and it is the price of admission. **Hospitality** is how all of that makes the client feel. Seen. Calm. Smarter than when the call started. Confident that someone has their back. Hospitality is doing the job in a way the client is still describing to someone a year later, and the reason they bring us into the next matter. Competence is assumed. The color is where we win. Every one of the ten principles below is just a different way of adding the color. ![ten-principles](https://blog.proteusdiscovery.com/hs-fs/hubfs/ten-principles.png?width=1200&height=1500&name=ten-principles.png) --- ## The ten principles Read these as a standard, not a suggestion. Each one is a decision anyone at Proteus can make on any matter, on any call, today. ### 1. You are the expert. Act like it. Clients do not come to us for a menu. They come for a recommendation. Handing someone five options and asking them to pick is a quiet way of making our expertise their problem. If we know the right answer, we say so. We lead with what we would do, and why. Confidence, offered with humility, is one of the most valuable things we give away. ### 2. Competence is the floor, not the ceiling. Data intact. Deadline met. Privilege log clean. None of this makes us memorable. It earns us the right to compete at all. Excellence is assumed. Everything that turns a client into a champion is built on top of flawless execution, never instead of it. "We hit the deadline" is not a highlight reel. It is the part everyone assumed was going to happen. ### 3. Always explain the so-what. A recommendation without reasoning is just an opinion. When we advise a path, we show the tradeoffs: what it costs, what it protects, what it risks, and what happens if we do nothing. When clients understand the why behind the what, they trust our judgment, and they leave a little smarter than they came in. Every interaction should make the client more capable, not more dependent. ### 4. Make them look good. Our client is almost never the last stop. Behind them sits a partner, a general counsel, a client of their own, a judge, a board. Every time we make our client look brilliant to the people they answer to, we earn a champion for life. We rarely get referred by the person we impressed. We get referred by the person we made look impressive to someone else. ### 5. Meet people in the pressure. Clients often find us on their worst day. A looming deadline. A sanctions threat. A data disaster. A case that got bigger overnight. We are the steady, competent presence in the room. Half of hospitality is simply lowering someone's blood pressure. We answer fast, speak plainly, and never let a client feel like they are the only one worried about their problem. ### 6. Do the unreasonable thing. The moments people remember for years rarely cost much money. They cost attention. The follow-up call nobody required. The one-page summary written in plain English for the partner who does not speak eDiscovery. The heads-up about a risk that was technically not our job to flag. Small, deliberate, human. That is where the legends come from. If a gesture is reasonable, a competitor is already doing it. ### 7. Honesty is the highest form of respect. Telling a client what they want to hear is easy, and it is cowardly. Telling them what they need to hear, kindly, clearly, and early, is how we prove they can trust us with the things that matter. We deliver the hard truth before it becomes an expensive surprise. A client who knows we will always shoot straight is a client for life. ### 8. When we drop it, we pick it up generously. We make mistakes. A missed date. A bad load. A call we should have made sooner. What separates us is what happens next. We own it fast, we fix it before we are asked, and we do one thing beyond the fix. A problem met with generosity does not just repair the relationship, it deepens it. Some of our most loyal clients became loyal on the day something went wrong. ### 9. Everyone owns the experience. You do not need permission to take care of a client. If anyone at Proteus sees a way to make something better for a client, that is their job, not someone else's and not later. The best hospitality comes from people who feel ownership over the outcome, not people following a script. When in doubt, take care of the client. We will sort out the rest. ### 10. Turn satisfaction into advocacy. Meeting expectations is where the work starts, not where it ends. We ask constantly what would turn "they did a good job" into "you have to work with these people." That gap, between competent and unforgettable, is the entire business. Live in it. --- ## The part that is not about clients You cannot hand a client a feeling you do not have yourself. Guidara is blunt about this: the way a team treats each other sets the ceiling on how they treat everyone else. There is no version of this where we are warm to clients and short with each other. Clients can always tell. So the same ten principles point inward too. We lead a colleague with a recommendation. We explain the so-what to the person we are handing work to. We make our teammates look good to the rest of the firm. We meet each other in the pressure. We do the unreasonable, unrequested thing for the person one desk over. When we drop something for each other, we pick it up generously. No lanes. No scorekeeping. We already keep the receipts. Every week the company channel fills with people catching each other doing exactly this. The best of it gets read back to the whole firm in our internal newsletter, which we call The Karass (for those that don't already know the subtext, Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors - and from Indianapolis. The Karass is the term he used in *Cat's Cradle* meaning a network of people linked to each other for a purpose none of them can see). When we see someone be unreasonably great, we say so, out loud. The stories are how the standard stays alive. --- ## The standard Get the work right. Then go further than anyone reasonably expects. Lead with the recommendation. Explain the impact. Make the client the hero. Do the small, deliberate, human thing no one saw coming. That is what it means to be unreasonably great, and it is why our clients become our champions. If you are a general counsel or a litigation partner who has been burned by a vendor that got the data right but made you look bad in front of your own people, I would like to talk to you. If you are a vendor reading this and the frame is useful, borrow it. The restaurant industry did not patent hospitality, and neither did we. [See how ready your organization is for your next matter →](https://proteusdiscovery.com/discovery-readiness-scorecard) --- Ray Biederman is Co-Founder and CEO of Proteus Discovery Group, a litigator-led eDiscovery firm headquartered in Indianapolis. He is also a founding partner at Mattingly Burke Cohen & Biederman LLP, where he leads commercial litigation, and an adjunct lecturer at Indiana University teaching eDiscovery, information governance, and health information protection. He has testified as an expert witness on document production and is recognized as a SuperLawyer and Best Lawyer in eDiscovery and commercial litigation. Reach him at [ray.biederman@proteusdiscovery.com](mailto:ray.biederman@proteusdiscovery.com). Ra ###### Ray Biederman Ray is the CEO and Co-Founder of Proteus. He is an active litigator and acts as eDiscovery counsel for clients at Mattingly Burke Cohen & Biederman, LLP. [‹ Previous What Does EDRM 2.0 Actually Change? A Litigator's Read of the New Model](https://blog.proteusdiscovery.com/what-does-edrm-2-0-actually-change-a-litigator-s-read-of-the-new-model) ###### Have a matter that needs a plan? Proteus is litigator-led. We scope, price, and run eDiscovery so the number you hear at the start is the number you pay. Proteus Discovery Group · Indianapolis, Indiana Defensible · Affordable · Results