A little more than a century ago, Italian social scientist Vilfredo Pareto observed that 80 percent of the land in Italy was the property of 20 percent of the population. Furthermore, this 80/20 relationship works fractally: that is, 80 percent of the land within that 80 percent (64 percent of the land in Italy) was the property of 20 percent of that 20 percent (4 percent). It was a Romanian-American business consultant, Joseph Juran, pictured to the left, who generalized this to the principle of "the vital few." Twenty percent of the causes are generally responsible for 80 percent of the effects; your 20 percent most enthusiastic or wealthiest customers will buy 80 percent of your product, and so forth, he wrote in the middle of the last century. The Pareto principle, in its post-Juran form, has obvious affinities with fractal geometry. The 80/20 pattern keeps recurring the further down you dig. I'm beginning to suspect the principle applies in the world of litigat...