Hello, I’m Zhan Qingyun.

For two episodes we chatted about lawyers, yet everything somehow returned to money. What was meant as a light discussion of questions friends and relatives ask reached a heavy conclusion: without money, obtaining excellent counsel is very difficult.

Now back to the subject. Beginning today, we enter the concrete stages of litigation—a long journey that I hope will not be dull.

We compared litigation to playing cards: each procedural stage is a card in counsel’s hand.

A case looks like one contest, but each stage is a separate battlefield. Every card has different requirements, substance, considerations, and strategy.

Broadly, a lawsuit proceeds through complaint, filing, service of summons, response, a scheduling conference after both sides appear, discovery, trial, judgment, and appeal.

Before examining each stage’s meaning, tactics, elegant design, and potential defects, let us rapidly survey the sequence and see what cards a lawyer holds.

It resembles checking a book’s contents before reading, a paper’s outline before its text, or an exam’s question types before answering.

Do not worry if a stage remains unclear. We will return with cases and examine different dimensions. For now, the goal is a framework and a first impression of litigation.

Legal dramas emphasize trial: confrontation, argument, and cross-examination, perhaps breaking an evasive witness into contradictions and destroying the jury’s trust.

Or counsel delivers an impassioned closing that awakens justice in impassive, bewigged judges and changes the result.

If I recommend legal dramas, I choose The Good Wife and its sequel The Good Fight.

Before watching them, my first unforgettable cross-examination and closing argument appeared in Dostoevsky’s immense The Brothers Karamazov, a novel requiring real perseverance.

Its trial is magnificent. The complex story follows a patricide without ever making fully clear which brother killed the father—one of literature’s great disputed or wrongful cases.

A long chapter presents the eldest brother’s defense counsel addressing the jury.