Michael Caldwell and the Logic of a Flying Pig

The pig arrived without an explanation. Small, wooden and equipped with wings, it was an odd recruit for an office concerned with technology, animation and the justice system. Michael Caldwell had brought it in. His colleagues wondered what it was doing there. Some treated it as decoration. Others continued to wonder. Eventually, somebody asked.

“It’s a flying pig. We make pigs fly.”

There was the company philosophy, standing on a table in the break room. Caldwell had given an expression of disbelief a pair of wings. In an office where people were asked to reconstruct complicated events and work toward difficult deadlines, the joke had an immediate application. The ornament required neither a password nor a quarterly presentation. It simply sat there, waiting for someone to get it.

The little scene, remembered by his colleagues in 2018, is a useful introduction to the founder of DK Global. Caldwell’s business helps legal teams give complicated information a visual form. His own explanation of its working spirit used much the same technique: put something in front of people, let them become curious, then give them the connection.

A company built around the next person’s understanding

Caldwell founded DK Global in Redlands, California, in 1998. Melissa Caldwell, his wife and fellow founder, serves as chief financial officer; Michael is founder and CEO. The partnership places both of them inside the continuing work of the business. Their names also recur together in accounts of the life around it, including activities organized for the staff.

His public education history lists California State University, San Bernardino, for 1997–1998. Then comes the company, established in the same region. Redlands has remained its base while its audience has grown to include legal professionals around the country. The geography gives his career a recognizable center: a particular city, a continuing organization, and a professional problem that travels.

The problem is understanding. Lawyers and experts can know an event in considerable detail. A person encountering the case for the first time needs a sequence, a perspective and a way to connect the parts. DK Global produces reconstructions, animations, graphics and presentations that help make those connections visible. The work asks an artist to think about the person who will eventually be looking.

The company’s clients include civil and criminal attorneys, plaintiff and defense teams, and government entities. That range means the studio’s tools serve people approaching disputes from different positions. The common requirement is a presentation that lets an audience follow the material.

Caldwell’s professional interests have also included the less picturesque business of electronic information. In October 2006, he and Ed Booth co-authored an article on electronic data discovery and preservation for Riverside Lawyer. It addressed the importance of keeping relevant documents and recognizing when outside assistance is needed. That early piece places him in the practical machinery of litigation support, where handling information properly matters before anyone begins arranging it on a screen.

By 2021, Caldwell was also listed among the faculty in Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education program materials. It is another point of contact with the profession his company serves. Alongside lawyers and judges, a litigation support founder had a place in the continuing discussion of legal practice. His career has involved both producing material for that audience and participating in its professional circles.

The view from the track

There is another setting in Caldwell’s working life: the track at Redlands Packinghouse Christian Academy. By 2018, he had volunteered as the school track team’s head coach. He had also helped establish a student store. Those are specific, local commitments, close enough to the everyday life of a school to involve the unglamorous pleasure of making something happen.

Coaching belongs naturally beside a career in explanation, although the two jobs have different scoreboards. A coach has to make an instruction useful to the person receiving it. A visual presentation has to do the same for its audience. In both settings, the recipient gets a vote on whether the explanation worked. Good intentions cannot run the lap for anyone.

DK Global’s involvement in Redlands extended to street cleanups. In 2018, the company described having adopted the major street running parallel to its office the previous year. The account also recalled an office expansion in which employees took part in choosing furniture, plants and wall decoration. It is a modest set of details, and therefore a revealing one. A workplace becomes somewhere people spend their lives through decisions of exactly that size.

These local activities give Caldwell’s story a scale that a job title cannot. The CEO appears beside students, colleagues and the practical needs of the neighborhood. A company serving attorneys across the country can still have a street outside that needs cleaning. Redlands supplies that ordinary point of contact.

Who gets to do the work

In March 2018, women accounted for half of DK Global’s staff, with women holding many of its leadership positions. Asked about the composition of the team, Caldwell appeared puzzled. He explained that he had concentrated on hiring people with the experience and qualifications for the work. His response also credited the women he had hired with contributing to their colleagues’ success.

The moment is a snapshot of that office at that time. It shows a founder being asked to describe something his colleagues could already see around them. The answer came through hiring decisions, people doing their jobs, and the way those people worked together.

Executive assistant Jacquelyn McDonald described a workplace where her children were welcome when they needed to stop by. She connected that welcome to the importance Michael and Melissa placed on family. Her observation brings the discussion down to a practical question: what happens when someone’s life arrives at the office door? In her account, there was room for it.

Caldwell’s more recent public comments to new colleagues have a similarly direct tone. When DK Global announced Josh Carter as its first accident reconstruction expert in August 2025, Caldwell welcomed him and expressed enthusiasm about what came next. A short greeting leaves a small trace, but it is still a founder speaking to someone joining the work.

The screen is only the last step

Behind the finished presentations sits a sequence of decisions. DK Global’s animation guidance begins with storyboards, then moves through modeling, surfaces, movement, lighting and rendering. The rough drawings establish the main story points before a finished scene makes them expensive to change. Experts contribute to checking the material. The image has a history before it has an audience.

For a founder, this is the operational side of the flying-pig sentiment. Agreeing to attempt something difficult creates a need for people, time and a process. The company’s planning guidance recommends early conversations; its FAQ describes a typical project window of 30–45 days, with timing dependent on the assignment. The hopeful ornament has a production schedule to keep.

The company has also explored how attorneys handle material after it has been made. TrialTouch connected courtroom presentation on an iPad with DK Global’s cloud service. It appeared in a Tennessee Bar Association technology handout in 2011 and in later professional app roundups. Photographs, documents, videos and animations could become part of the presentation an attorney controlled.

CLEAR took the question into augmented reality, offering a 360-degree field of view for examining a scene. These projects show an interest in the audience’s encounter with information, including where the viewer can look and how the presenter directs attention. The screen and the controls are part of the explanation.

The relationship continues between projects, too. In a 2018 account of its approach to customers, DK Global described keeping clients informed during production, following up on cases, visiting when staff were nearby, and meeting people at trade shows. That is an account of a service business maintained through repeated contact. Each new assignment arrives with different facts, while a familiar working relationship can carry over. For Caldwell’s company, the conversation around the visual is part of the work.

In 2026, marketing chief Aaron Saltzman described a company brand and website refresh, crediting Caldwell among the people involved. The organizing phrase was Clarify the Complex. The wording gives a compact description of the business Caldwell has continued to lead: take material that requires effort to follow and help an audience find its way through.

A little altitude

In spring 2019, the office’s interest in flight acquired a more literal outing. Michael and Melissa helped take the team to iFly in Ontario, California, for indoor skydiving. Instructors introduced the group to an upright wind tunnel. For a company with a flying pig in its lore, the choice of activity had a pleasing consistency.

It also supplied a different arrangement of expertise. The people who ordinarily built explanations were learning from someone else. The instructors knew the equipment. The visitors had to listen, try and adjust. Even an afternoon away from the office could put the familiar problem of understanding back into circulation.

Caldwell’s public story is full of these concrete settings: a school track, a neighborhood street, a studio, a wind tunnel. They put people around a founder whose business depends on helping other people follow a story. The wooden pig earns its place among them. Small enough for a break-room table, it made an abstract working idea visible. People noticed. They asked. Then they understood.