For a decade I was a transaction attorney, closing more than $350 million in equity across real estate and operating businesses — hundreds of contracts, partnerships, and closings. And in nearly every one, the same quiet failure sat underneath. The family’s will was drafted by someone who never saw the business. The business was structured by someone who never asked about the family. The operating agreement said nothing about what happens when a partner dies, divorces, or simply wants out. The purchase contract assumed a future nobody had actually talked through. The trust was signed and never funded.
A contract can be perfectly drafted and still fail, because it only answers the questions someone thought to ask. Each professional was competent. None of them spoke to each other.
The law calls those separate matters — estate here, business there, contracts somewhere else. A life doesn’t. When the day finally came that the documents were needed, what failed was never the drafting — it was the gaps between the people who drafted them, and the questions no document was asked to hold.
Tercet is a law practice built the other way. One counselor who sees your family, your business, your contracts, your money, and your legacy as one picture, on a flat fee you know before the work begins, in plain English, with the attorney himself across the table. A tercet is three lines of verse that only become whole together. That is the point.
Tercet is one of four practices under Vault Human — a family of companies built on a single idea: the world hands your life to you in pieces, and someone should be able to hold it whole. The essay that started all of it is called The Fracture.
— Russ Michaels
