The Truth About Seaweed
"We don’t really know much about the people at the company, do we? He was a workaholic, after all."
Attorney Kim Joo-young defended me in an awkward tone.
He studied Attorney Kwon Jin-woo’s expression.
Blue blood, through and through. A family full of lawyers, no doubt.
On closer inspection, Attorney Kwon’s clothes were no different from a partner’s.
A suit as luxurious as Attorney Kim’s, with a silk tie. And the watch glinting at his wrist was from an absurdly expensive brand, the kind Min Ho-jun had said you had to wait a full year to buy.
Then, suddenly, a hard shove landed in Attorney Kim’s side. A silent order to cooperate.
This isn’t a royal audience.
For corporate cases, speed was everything, so I had requested cooperation from Continent Law Firm. Now I was wondering whether that had been a mistake.
"Do-hyuk doesn’t really know people he hasn’t worked closely with. Is that right?"
"...Yes. Nothing comes to mind. How many years does he have in?"
"Kwon’s in his second year, I think?"
Attorney Kwon nodded irritably.
Seeing that, Attorney Kim cleared his throat.
"Anyway, we’ll be working together for a while, so let’s try to get along. All right, Kwon?"
"...Sure."
"Introduce yourself properly."
Forced to his feet, Attorney Kwon stuck out his lower lip.
When dealing with someone immature, I had to make sure I didn’t become childish myself.
Start with business and keep it business.
I took his hand, though I could feel the hostility in it.
"I’m Cha Do-hyuk."
"Kwon Jin-woo, from Continent’s major crimes team."
The moment I let go of his hand, he shook it off as if it were stained with germs.
He looks younger than me, but still in his thirties somehow. Second year, too. Even with a top-tier law school degree, that should be difficult. How did he get hired?
It wasn’t official, but Continent had an age limit.
For new hires, they had never taken anyone under twenty-eight for women or under thirty for men. An unwritten rule exploiting a loophole in the law, if anything.
Under Article 4-4 of the Act on the Prohibition of Age Discrimination in Employment and Promotion of Employment of Older Persons, you couldn’t discriminate by age without a reasonable cause.
So they simply left age off the recruitment notice.
Which meant that if he was here, then...
Could he have passed the bar exam, delayed going to the training institute, and then come in that way?
Rare, but considering he was in his early to mid-thirties, it fit.
Continent preferred people who had passed the bar after taking the usual route through law school, right after those who had passed the old judicial exam.
Of course that made sense.
"What exam did you pass?" I asked.
It was a little brazen, and a name I’d never heard before. Still, if he could follow along without causing trouble, it was a tolerable annoyance.
That thought lasted only until I saw the deeply offended frown on Attorney Kwon’s face.
"...I’m a fifth-year law school graduate."
This is the 16th year of law school graduates, and he’s a second-year attorney from the 5th class?
It felt like he must have failed the bar at least once. But there was no way Continent would hire someone with a failed bar-exam record.
Unless he had gotten in on experience to avoid the age limit.
"Did you graduate from the Police University?"
It was an economic crime case, but it hadn’t been sent to the prosecution yet. Given Continent’s habit of throwing every possible resource at a case for the money they were paid, he would need to be someone who could at least talk the police into being flexible.
"I did KATUSA. I graduated from a university in the U.S."
He studied in the States and then came to a Korean law school.
Now I understood how he had gotten into Continent.
Being KATUSA almost certainly meant foreign-language preference.
Continent gave priority to foreign languages, certifications, and engineering majors among bar-passers. It didn’t mean they would always hire them, but they were preferred.
Normally, a fifth-year law school graduate should have entered in 2013 and taken the bar for the first time in 2016.
If he was a second-year attorney from the 5th class, that meant he had either taken leave like it was nothing or failed the bar three or four times.
Did they stuff in a blue-blood family-nepotism hire?
It was a case I had asked about for a client’s sake, and one Continent had agreed to work on at my request.
They had inserted a lawyer who wasn’t even specialized in the case into a matter the press had been tearing apart day after day.
So this is just a way to pad his résumé.
Yes. This was Continent.
Continent, which used whatever means necessary to build a league of its own.
I forced down the anger surging deep in my chest.
Maybe the family-network boost would actually have a positive effect on the case as a whole.
Noticing the intent behind my question, Attorney Kim began policing Attorney Kwon.
"Kwon. Do-hyuk is older and more senior than you, so mind your manners. Understood?"
"Yeees."
He had lived his life without worrying about what others thought, so he answered with obvious half-attention.
"All right, all right. Let’s start the briefing on the Miryum seaweed case. Kwon, you handle the briefing."
"Yes, sir."
Attorney Kwon took out the materials, handed them around, and cleared his throat.
"Miryum has built an image as a good company in the public eye, with all kinds of positive stories attached to the name and a price freeze that lasted for years."
Ah. This briefing is already a mess.
"However, A, the supplier of Miryum’s seaweed-processing products, is under investigation by the Coast Guard after allegedly taking seaweed harvested in Korea earlier this year to China, a secondary processing site, and mixing it with Chinese seaweed before selling it."
There wasn’t a single person in that room who didn’t already know that.
What I wanted were the major points at issue.
How unfavorable were the charges for us under the Customs Act, the Act on Labeling of Origin, and the like?
The issues aren’t even organized properly. Why leave out illegal import-export offenses and prohibitions on false origin labeling for agricultural and fishery products?
I was starting to doubt whether he was even a second-year attorney, never mind a law school graduate, and my head began to ache.
"This was reported exclusively by SBC News. The media reported it as follows."
"......"
"‘Miryum, which transformed Chinese seaweed into Korean seaweed with medicine,’ ‘Miryum’s outrageous conduct aimed at Wando, the nation’s largest seaweed-producing region’..."
I met Attorney Kim’s eyes across the table.
He gave an embarrassed little smile.
He’s still young.
Young? At thirty? No, if he can’t even handle his own work properly, does youth excuse everything?
I flicked my eyes at him, urging him to cut it short. Or I would.
"Ahem. So, Attorney Kwon, you did bring the issue summary, right?"
"Yes. According to the statement Miryum submitted, the seaweed supplier had previously mixed Chinese and Korean seaweed when supplying to a company other than Miryum."
That’s not an issue summary. Did you even look at the guide?
It was enough to make me want to tear my hair out.
"R-right. And?"
Attorney Kim spoke while writhing awkwardly in place, but he was only reading the black text aloud.
Listening to the two of them, I was suddenly reminded of Kim’s request for a guide.
So this is why he asked me to guide him. A second-year couldn’t even identify the issues.
In a typical major case, the lead attorney identified the evidentiary issues and assigned them to junior lawyers. It was the most efficient use of time.
But in a case like Miryum’s, where the issue was clear-cut, the junior lawyer was usually asked to write up the first draft as a way to build experience.
If something was lacking, you could fill it in; if the issues were completely off, you could just tell them to rewrite it.
But now...
I didn’t have time to tell them to redo it. I was the one who would have to write the opinion.
This isn’t why I agreed to work with Continent.
Corporate cases were a race against time, so multiple lawyers usually divided up the issues among themselves.
The lead attorney coordinated if any of those issues clashed.
But here, there were only two of them.
I stared at the table, more than half of it still empty.
"......"
No matter how busy they were, there was no excuse for the food and pharmaceuticals team not showing up to the first meeting.
If they were truly swamped, they should have sent a senior associate or a junior associate. That would have been the normal thing to do.
They’re not adding anyone else.
There was no other way to read it: Continent was looking down on Miryum.
As my stomach kept boiling with anger, I thought of Executive Director Ham Won-kyung.
He was the legal partner of my longtime rival, Bapsim, and the one who had entrusted the matter to Continent and then to me.
If I’m thinking about the client, I have to handle everything myself, from the research to the litigation.
One of the key issues.
I had to tear into the charge of violating the Act on Labeling of Origin of Agricultural and Fishery Products first.
I slid over the guide I had prepared.
"Attorney Kim."
"Hmm?"
"The person who tipped off the Yeosu Coast Guard seems to be a competitor of Company A, the one supplying seaweed to Miryum. Is that right?"
"That’s right. Probably a company that also supplies Miryum."
Attorney Kim said it was information he had gotten from a police acquaintance.
A public secret, one both Miryum and I already knew.
"So the part we need to focus on among the charges is the violation of the Act on Labeling of Origin of Agricultural and Fishery Products, correct?"
The Customs Act wasn’t a major issue, since once it was established whether the seaweed was Chinese or Korean, the violation would be determined automatically.
"Exactly."
Therefore...
"We need to verify the difference between Chinese and Korean seaweed first."
Attorney Kwon cut me off.
"According to the materials I collected, Korean seaweed has an even edge, nearly straight, and the thallus is thin. Chinese seaweed, on the other hand..."
I cut him off too.
"The edge is uneven and jagged, the thallus is thicker, and the color is a comparatively dark blackish green?"
"Attorney Cha. I’m speaking right now."
He had cut me off first, then acted offended. He really was young.
Which meant I was going to enjoy this.
"Attorney Kwon, do you really think there’s a clear difference between Chinese and Korean seaweed? The seaweed Miryum uses, I mean."
"Of course there is. If you look at the materials I prepared, you can see that drying it out flat like this makes the difference obvious. You’d notice if they were mixed together, but because it arrives cut up, people don’t realize."
Good grief.
He had only skimmed the surface.
"Would that really be the case?"
"Attorney Cha, did you come here without studying?"
As if.
"The seaweed characteristics you just mentioned are actually those of Wando seaweed. Not Korean seaweed."
"You mean Wando and Korean seaweed are different? What kind of absurdity is that?"
"You didn’t know?"
"...?"
"In 2014, Korea and China cooperated to develop a new variety of seaweed. It’s currently being cultivated in the West Sea, and the cultivar is called Gwanjeon No. 1."
I smiled at him.
"It’s the strain harvested by Company A, the supplier to Miryum."
"...!"
"Attorney Kwon, did you really come prepared?"
Honestly, it didn’t look like it.