The Trial of an Undomestic Barrister | JJK x PJM

✦3| Birthday with an iPhone✦

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Nine hours later, we're all still in the meeting.

The huge mahogany table is strewn with photo-copied draft contracts, financial reports, note-pads covered in scribbles, polystyrene coffee cups and Post-its. Take out boxes from lunch are littering the floor. A secretary is distributing fresh copies of the draft agreement. Two of the lawyers from the opposition JYP firm have got up from the table and are murmuring intently in the break-out room.

Every meeting room has one of these: a little side area where you go for private conversations, or when you feel like breaking something.

The intensity of the afternoon has passed.

It's like calm before storm. Faces are flushed around the table, tempers are still high, but no one's shouting anymore.

The clients have gone. They reached agreement at about four o'clock, shook hands and sailed off in their shiny limos.

Now it's up to us, the lawyers and barristers, to work out what they said and what they actually meant (and if you think these are the same thing, you might as well give up law now) and put it all into a draft contract in time for the meeting tomorrow.

When they'll probably begin shouting some more.

I rub my dry face and take a gulp of cappuccino, before realising I've picked up the wrong cup – the stone-cold cup from four hours ago.

Yuck.

Yuck.

And I can't exactly spit it out all over the table.

I swallow the revolting mouthful with a grimace. The fluorescent lights are flickering in my eyes and I feel drained.

My role in all of these mega deals is on the finance side – so it was me who negotiated the loan agreement between our client and Bank. It was me who rescued the situation when some black hole of debt turned up in a subsidiary company. And it was me who spent about three hours this afternoon discussing the use of one single, stupid phrase in clause 29(d).

The phrase was 'best endeavours'. The opposition wanted to use 'reasonable efforts'. We won, but I can't feel my usual triumph.

All I know is, it's seven nineteen and in eleven minutes I'm supposed to be halfway across town, sitting down to dinner with my mother and brother Hoseok.

I'll have to cancel. 

My own birthday dinner.

Even as I think the thought, I can hear the outraged voice of my oldest school friend Cha Eun-woo ringing in my mind.

They can't make you stay at work on your birthday!

I cancelled on him too, last week, when we were supposed to be going to a club.

A convict* was due to be hanged the next morning and I didn't have any choice. [an offender whose offence has been proved beyond reasonable doubt with concrete evidence]

What he doesn't understand is, the deadline comes first, end of story.

Prior engagements don't count.

Birthdays don't count.

Holidays are cancelled every week.

Across the table from me is Mary Jane from the corporate department. She had twins 2 days ago and has been at the table today.