"Drink. It's puer, made from old tea trees in Yunnan by the traditional method."

"Yes, sir! Director."

"When it's the two of us just call me sunbae-nim. Between us."

"Yes, sir!"

Within the Jo and Jang organisation there is no such title as director, strictly speaking.

It is an interest group operated in a partnership form, with several representative attorneys and a large number of individual attorneys under contract.

The attorneys under contract take retainers freely, build their own teams and take the profit.

The capacity of the senior attorneys, who rank with division heads, decides that team's performance.

And so people were needed who could control them.

People who regulate disputes with other law firms, and of course with the other teams inside the Jo and Jang organisation.

The director-grade figures are, for that reason, people who exist at Jo and Jang without a post.

Jo and Jang's old senior attorneys, made up of the representative attorneys' close associates.

Hong Ilsu, who has summoned Kim Gyeongmin now, is one of those figures.

Hong Ilsu is an attorney specialised in the corporate government-relations side.

One telephone call from him and there is no group his tongue will not work on.

He is a middleman with a name in the legal world.

Companies, the courts, the prosecution service, and beyond them the senior officials of the administration — Hong Ilsu managed all of them.

And Kim Gyeongmin, who has received a summons from a Director Hong Ilsu like that.

Kim Gyeongmin quietly drank the puer Hong Ilsu had offered.

The fermentation seemed to have been done properly, and the puer was nutty and clean.

Kim Gyeongmin emptied the whole cup of tea in silence.

Hong Ilsu has nothing particular to say either.

"Gyeongmin-a."

"Yes, sir! Sunbae-nim."

Hong Ilsu, his direct sunbae from Seoguk University's law faculty and the research society.

He is ten years older, but the two are men with a bond going back into the past.

Both having served as officers of the research society, their bond was deeper than the other members'.

The kind of relationship in which…