First-Class Lawyer

Gu Yan took the robe out and closed the luggage. He turned his head over to look at Yan Suizhi. “It means that you’re going up to the defence table.”

“Why are you having me go up to the defence table?” 

Gu Yan straightened up. His brows were furrowed. “Are you sure you’re here for an internship?”

He never wore his emotions on his face. Aside from the layers upon layers of frostiness, no one could read anything much else.

For a time, Yan Suizhi was unable to make sense of the reason for which he asked this. So, he looked into his eyes and put upon the most self-assured tone to ask, “Of course. This question of yours sure is interesting; what do you think I came here for, if not to be an intern?”

Gu Yan uttered a neutral “oh”, and said, “Until now, I still haven’t seen half a smidge of the attitude an intern should have on you at all.” 

“What kind of attitude?”

“Just imagine it. If other interns were told they would be going up to the defence table, what reaction do you think they’d have?”

What reaction?

“Shivering, with stars shooting out of their eyes,” Yan Suizhi casually replied.

“…”

What the hell is with that description.

Gu Yan, “…And you? What reaction did you have? I almost suspected that I wasn’t giving you a chance to practise but sending you to the firing squad.”

“A chance to practise?” Yan Suizhi felt that he had captured a key point. His heart suddenly relaxed and he laughed, “Don’t blame me for that. You keep a taut face the whole day and can’t go three sentences without antagonising me once; of course I’d overreact, thinking that you’re mocking me for stealing your job again, just like you did back at the detention centre.” 

Amazing. He promptly tossed the dirty laundry back at someone else’s face instead.

Gu Yan was quickly about to laugh with rage by his coquettish style of counterattack. He flung the lawyer’s robe onto the bed, pointing at the door, and he said, “Get out.”

Yan Suizhi broke into laughter as soon as he heard those words.

Things were still normal if Gu Yan was still insisting on kicking him out. It appeared that Gu Yan hadn’t realised anything yet. Or perhaps he was a little suspicious? But not so far that he had managed to verify anything. 

It was only after he finished laughing and took another look back at Gu Yan that he realised the expression on this student of his had turned even uglier.

“You still have the nerve to laugh?”

Not only did Yan Suizhi not ‘get out’, he even dragged an armchair over and sat himself down on it. He softened his tone, smiling, “I do still have the attitude that interns should have, it’s just that my reaction is slightly delayed. Are you really getting me to take defence counsel tomorrow?”

Gu Yan’s face was acerbic. “No. I changed my mind. Get out.” 

Yan Suizhi, “…”

Yan Suizhi, “Lawyer Gu?”

“…”

“Kfjmtfg Xe?” 

“…”

Yan Suizhi said in his heart, ‘Come on, isn’t it enough yet? I never tried speaking to anyone like this before. I only know how to annoy people, not how to placate them.’

Lf ifjcfv yjmx jujlcra atf jgwmtjlg jcv gjlrfv tlr ujhf ab tjnf j yglfo rajgf-vbkc klat Xe Tjc. Ccv revvfcis, tf wjvf j nfgs rboa fzmijwjalbc bo fcilutafcwfca. Lf wegwegfv, “P pera gfwfwyfgfv rbwfatlcu. P ralii tjnf atja.”

Cr tf rjlv atlr, tf olrtfv bea jc lafw ogbw tlr mbja qbmxfa, obgmlyis qgfrrlcu la lcab Xe Tjc’r qjiw. “Lfgf, obg sbe. Gbc’a yf jcugs jcswbgf, Kfjmtfg Xe.” 

Gu Yan’s eyebrows knit together. He looked down at it. Where there was nothing before, a candy now lay in the palm of his hand.

Lawyer Gu, “…………”

That handsome face of his looked close to cracking from the frigid chill radiating off it.

“How many candies do you really have on you?” 

Yan Suizhi said unperturbed, “I ran out at first, but the lady at the front desk gave me one when we left the restaurant we had dinner at. Didn’t she give you one too? Oh, it must be because you always have on such a stern face; you could give someone frostbite with it.”

Gu Yan, “…”

This flagrant method of coaxing couldn’t be more cutting. Yet, several minutes later, Gu Yan and Yan Suizhi sat facing each other by the huge French windows, a portable photon computer resting on the glass table and a thick wad of holographic papers stacked beside it.

“This is the current case file on Joshua Dale’s break-in. Read it over carefully the next few days,” Gu Yan said with an indifferent look on his face. 

Yan Suizhi more or less browsed through it. “When did you receive this case?”

“I was assigned it the morning you arrived. The documents were sent over to me near noon.”

Yan Suizhi thought back on it. That day, Gu Yan just happened to be on a call when he and the group of interns had headed upstairs. Later on when they with Fizz insistently stared one another down in awkward silence in the office, Gu Yan’s photon computer had spat out papers for an hour non-stop.

It should have been for this case. 

Although Gu Yan had yet to obtain the title of First-Class Lawyer, he was considered a head above the rest amongst the young lawyers. He was rather well-known and naturally had a considerable net worth. There was a legal statute drawn up for a set of standardised fees. By this standard, the cost of hiring a lawyer like Gu Yan truly wasn’t low; it definitely wasn’t a fee that any ordinary person would be able to afford.

Therefore, the alliance put in place a specialised system for legal aid, and all practising lawyers had their names on their list.

If a suspect couldn’t afford a lawyer, the agency would select a lawyer from among this list to defend him.

The fee was forked up by the agency. Though, naturally… it went without saying that this fee wasn’t worth mentioning next to the fee that those lawyers usually received. 

To put it bluntly, this was volunteer work, and this volunteer work had to be done.

If a lawyer received an assignment from this system, they had no choice but to accept it unless they no longer wished to practise law, for rejecting this assignment would affect a lawyer’s evaluation for promotion up the ranks.

Most lawyers would get by these assignments in a cavalier manner. They wouldn’t reject it, but they wouldn’t spend much time preparing for them either.

This was because a lawyer usually had multiple cases to juggle between at the same time. The more time they spent on this case, meant that the time they had to prepare for other cases was eaten into. Most lawyers would choose to allocate more energy and resources into cases with higher price-performance ratios. 

Just by the price point, it was clear which one would be given priority.

Assigned cases had a low win-rate. It was practically regarded as the natural order of things within this industry.

To equilibrate this situation, if a suspect felt that the lawyer wasn’t taking the case seriously enough, they could request for the lawyer to be changed. The maximum number of times a lawyer could be changed was three times.

This was the situation Joshua Dale was in now. 

With that brat’s trigger-happy temper, he wouldn’t be able to afford a one-hour consultation with a lawyer even if he sold his organs.

The system had previously assigned two lawyers to him, but it was obvious that those two trash lawyers had barely put in any effort into tackling this case, causing Joshua to bare his teeth and spit vitriol at anyone and everyone.

Gu Yan was the third lawyer.

Joshua had already used his two chances to change lawyers. No matter how much he lashed out at Gu Yan, he couldn’t send him packing. Moreover… with Lawyer Gu’s temper, it’d be hard to determine who would want to stomp off in the end. 

“No guardian… has a sister…” Yan Suizhi glanced at the picture attached to the documents. “Yo, I couldn’t recognise him from this picture at first glance. Is the difference between washed and unwashed hair that big?”

While Joshua Dale in the animated photo was skinny, his cheeks were not as sunken as the way they were in the detention centre, framed with dark shadows under his eyes. His eyes were still bright, not ferocious and bloodshot with rage.

The difference in his past and present mental state was too big. Yan Suizhi was really unable to tell they were the same person.

Nevertheless, even from the photo, it was obvious that this boy had a poor temper. The deep, ingrained impatience in his disposition was visible to the naked eye. 

Gu Yan, “The things that you pay attention to are all over the place. Can staring at a photo help you to nuance your case?”

People in their profession were well-trained in how to quickly skim through mountains of data to sieve out key points. The focus of this type of background information on the suspect always tended to be contained within the text, so they would often only sweep a cursory glance past the profile shots and not look too closely at them.

But Yan Suizhi had different habits. He always placed a lot of attention on the photos.

“I’m just browsing through them,” Yan Suizhi answered flippantly, yet his eyes went on to study the photo on the next page. 

That was a photo of Joshua Dale’s sister.

“Rosie Dale. She’s that kid’s younger sister. It’s written that she’s 8 years old in the file.” Yan Suizhi lifted an index finger and tapped it against the picture. “She’s got to be five at most, don’t you think? Are they trying to mislead us again? Which year must they have dug this official data from—ah? Gu… ahem, Teacher. Come take a look, doesn’t this girl look familiar?”

Gu Yan glanced over, then leaned in for a closer look. He frowned. “Where have we seen her?”

“She’s that girl by the corner of the wall!” Yan Suizhi recalled. 

Like Joshua’s photo, his sister’s photo was already far different from how she actually looked like. Not only was the age different, but the girl in the picture also had plump cheeks. While her complexion couldn’t be considered beautiful and rosy, she still looked healthy, and was by no means sallow. Her dark eyes were big and bright with a touch of innocence.

A brief spell of silence fell over them as they both thought of something.

Yan Suizhi leaned back against his seat, his legs crossed. He gently kicked Gu Yan and jutted his chin. With a smile, he said, “Was this photo useful?”

Gu Yan stayed professional; as he made a mark underneath the photo, he replied, “Mn.” 

“So, tell me. Is there anything wrong with the things I pay attention to?”

Never lifting his head, Gu Yan wrote a short note next to the photo. “Not yet.”

“With interns that can help without making a mess, would you still want them to ‘get out’?”

Gu Yan finally looked up. “It’s all the same. Know your place.” 

Yan Suizhi, “…”

Yan Suizhi snickered, but didn’t stoop down to Student Gu’s level. He roughly flipped through the rest of the documents on the suspect. “I looked through it earlier. It isn’t hard for Joshua Dale to be granted bail. You can even say that it’s very simple.”

What did he mean by that?

It was simple in the sense that he only needed to fulfill the conditions for bail. As long as nothing unexpected cropped up, the judge would grant bail. 

“All he has to do is pay the bail bond, or have someone sign to be his bailor,” said Yan Suizhi, “however…”

This jinxed kid didn’t have any money, nor anyone.

—

Neither of them spent much time sleeping that night, at most taking a quick rest on the sofa for a while. By the time they finished going through all the material in the case file and marking the key points, it was already dawn. 

“I think that you actually didn’t have to book a hotel,” Yan Suizhi said to Gu Yan before he returned to his room to wash up. “This is no different from us sleeping in the streets… oh, right. There’s heating.”

Gu Yan, “…”

At 9:30 a.m., Yan Suizhi and Gu Yan got off the taxi at the gate of the criminal court.

“Sirs, please go through the security check,” the tall security officer at the entrance at the courthouse said. “Smart devices, photon computers, briefcases… all of them have to be checked.” 

This was a necessary procedure to enter the courthouse in order to prevent overly emotional people from hiding bombs in their pockets and sending the judges, lawyers, and suspects in court with them to heaven.

At 9:40 a.m., a wave of hearings concluded at Courtroom 7. Yan Suizhi and Gu Yan entered the courtroom with the crowd in a file of twos and threes.

The judge who was seated above at the bench raised his eyes and glanced over, and his face instantly stiffened. He held up his glasses and gave a stern look over at Yan Suizhi dressed in the lawyer’s robe. He grumbled, “Even students who have yet to graduate dare to go up to the defence table now. Is this a joke…”

Yan Suizhi, “…” Hey, old chum. Do you really think that I wouldn’t be able to hear you if you keep your voice down?