I have had trial last until midnight in three separate trials.  The court had a compressed schedule and the trial could not run into the next week.  As a litigation lawyer, I had to get the case to the judge by the time we left in both cases.  Closing arguments started the next morning at 9.  They were not all-nighters, but very little sleep.  It is amazing the adrenaline flowing during a full day trial.  You can survive without much sleep.

As a trial attorneys I just concluded their day at 10 p.m. tonight , having started at 8:30 a.m. this morning.  A 13 and a half hour day .  And they have to be in court tomorrow at 8 a.m. 

Just wondering if any of my colleagues in other Chinese cities put in long hours in the courtroom like they did , and whether those guys go without sleep in order to prepare for court the next day. As a trial attorney you have to choice -  litigate the case in court again and again.

One of my client inquired as below:

Wife obtained a restraining order against the Husband. Husband did not appear for the 10 -day hearing, so the 209A abuse prevention order was automatically extended for a year. Apparently, the Husband filed a Motion to Vacate the restraining order. Wife was never served with a copy of the Motion to vacate, nor did she receive a copy in the mail. The only reason she even found out about the Motion to Vacate is because I represent her in her divorce case against Husband and it happened to be mentioned in pleadings filed in the divorce case. However, the date mentioned in the court pleadings is wrong and even if Wife were to rely on the information contained in the pleadings, she would have showed up on a wrong date. The restraining order and the divorce are two separate matters filed in different courts. The Motion to Vacate is scheduled to be heard this coming Thursday. Would you advice Wife not to come for the hearing as she did not received a proper notice of it?

Now I am an experienced China lawyer practicing with confidence, but I still remember the days I was a young attorney.

At that time I met a young reporter at the newspaper here in Shenzhen. She was interested in doing a profile on me and my journey as a blind lawyer opening my own practice. I was a little hesitant at first, not wanting to become known as "that blind lawyer," but I eventually decided to do it, not feeling as though I could pass up on the free chance to promote my business.

Fast-forward to today. The article came out this morning and was pretty well done. So well that, much to my terror, I've now been invited to do a live radio interview later this afternoon. So now I'm sitting here, very nervously. There's a huge difference between talking to a print reporter for an hour and potentially doing 30 minutes of a live broadcast.

I don't really have any questions, I just felt the need to type something about it, I guess to help get out this nervous energy.

Life is so good to be a lawyer here in China.

I don't think that every type of matter a Chinese lawyer might take on would or should qualify as pro bono based solely on the fact that the client was poor.

Of course we don't even know what "poor" means in this context.

I see the point in so far as if a client was being evicted wrongly or wanted to adopt a child, e.g., and couldn't pay a legal fee because they were poor, then the lawyer who took on the case I think yes this is probably valid pro bono work, and yes I may have gone to far in my statement regarding that an "organization" needs to be involved.

On the other hand, suppose the "poor" client needed legal help with the merger of his corporation, and the lawyer performed that work at no cost. Is this pro bono? I don't think so. And I think there are a lot of examples of matters a lawyer might handle which obviously benefit only that particular client. I don't think that every single case should count as 'pro bono' based only on the criteria that the client could not pay. Maybe the phrase 'for the public good' has an ill defined definition, and I don't know who decides what's pro bono and what isn't. I'm okay with allowing the individual attorney to decide, as you've suggested, so long as there's some aspect of the matter which is in the public interest, as that phrase is defined by the China attorney.

What a pity! Very few China law firms are offering pro bono legal service to the public!