Court rulings come down as either a win or a loss. But for people caught up in legal disputes, a trial is not simply a process of deciding who prevails. It may be a matter of a family's livelihood, or the experience of watching trust built over many years collapse. Sometimes it is not even easy to properly explain one's grievance to anyone at all.
Nineteen lawyers at the law firm Changcheon have published "We Take Your Side," a collection of essays on what lies behind legal disputes. Through 28 cases the lawyers actually handled, the book lays out the stories of the people involved in legal problems and the dilemmas the lawyers faced in their work.
The cases in the book range from conflicts that commonly arise around us to complex corporate disputes and criminal cases. Among the main examples are the division of property among family members, emotional feuds between neighbors, questions of trust that emerged in the course of signing contracts, and fights over insurance payouts and litigation costs. The book also covers a startup's acquisition of an overseas company, disputes among shareholders, and criminal cases involving wrongful accusations. The accounts are based on actual cases, but the names of the people and companies have been changed and the content adapted.
The book does not stop at listing winning cases or legal knowledge. It looks into the circumstances and emotions of clients that the lawyers encountered while resolving the cases, and at conflicts that are difficult to explain through legal judgment alone.
The authors share the view that even when a desired outcome cannot be won in a dispute involving a client's retirement or a family's livelihood, there is meaning in simply standing by the client and doing everything possible. Listening to a client all the way through and translating that sense of injustice into legal language is also presented as an important part of a lawyer's role.
The book is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1, "From One Person to Another," examines conflicts that arise among family members, neighbors and friends. Chapter 2, "What the Contract Did Not Say," deals with questions of trust in contractual relationships that are hard to resolve through law and documents alone. Chapter 3, "Numbers Have a Temperature, Too," introduces cases tangled in financial interests such as insurance payouts and litigation costs. Chapter 4, "The World Called a Company," covers legal conflicts that arise in corporate activity, including mergers and acquisitions, business partnerships and shareholder disputes. Chapter 5, "The Courtroom and the Weight of That Space," focuses on criminal trials and sheds light on the weight of responsibility and judgment encountered in court.
The authors placed more weight on conveying the stories of the parties involved than on difficult legal terminology or explanations of precedent. The Changcheon lawyers who co-wrote the book became known to the public through television programs. Singer and broadcaster Defconn wrote in a blurb that "just remembering the stories that appear in this book seems to be solid preparation for the kinds of things you would rather not go through in life."
Published by Dok, 272 pages.