Wyland awoke on his couch late in the evening. The couch creaked as he sat up. It was an old leather couch that was saggy and comfortable and always cool to the touch. He liked this couch, and fell asleep on it often. Papers and files and his cell phone were spread out before him on the coffee table. The room was quiet, although the faint drone of traffic could be heard through the windows.
He had his first meeting with the new clients in the morning, and he had hoped that studying the material given to him would bring him insight. It didn't. He hoped now that the meeting would provide new clues.
He sighed as he mindlessly ruffled through the papers. There were so many words and references and pictures, but there was so little information. He stood up and ejected a disk from his laptop. The disk contained a compilation of suspected recorded instances and, of course, the one relevant to this case.
Wyland is a lawyer. Not a good one. Not even a mediocre one, but still, he is a lawyer. He is proud of it, he is paid well, and people are usually impressed when he says he is a lawyer.
Sometimes, he gets annoying lawyer jokes, usually from drunk assholes at the bar.
"Hey, what do ya call two thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?"
Wyland would frown and fake ignorance. "What?"
"A good start!"
Then they would laugh, clap him on the back and stumble off.
Wyland hated the bar.
When he was a young man fresh out of law school, and his life was full of possibilities, hopes and dreams, he pursued a career in corporate law at Lancolme Financial, then, after being fired from that position, he persued criminal law. He did that for many years, before getting his current position as a consulting partner with Brand, Williamson and Gilliarm. He liked this job, or he thought he did. He was a specialist, an expert at certain kinds of cases. They had need of just such an expert, but that was the most depressing thing about this job.
The thing was, he never won cases. He was fired from Lancolme Financial for not winning cases. These were open and shut cases of copyright abuse, patent infringement and intellectual property theft, and he just couldn't win cases. He watched (probably) innocent people go to jail because he couldn't win a case to save their life.
Criminal law was easier to take because Wyland could assure himself that if they were picked up by the cops, and the DA or prosecutor thought they had a case, then who was he to say they weren't criminals? These people had already lost, he thought. But, part of him always knew that he was the failure; he was the loser, he had always lost before even walking into the courtroom. That fact, oddly enough, had now become his greatest asset.
BWR, you see, specializes in odd cases, complex cases and cases with a low chance of success. He was the go-to guy when they knew they had no chance of winning, or sometimes, when they needed to lose, to set precedent.
They still tried, though, and the clients, of course, never had any idea they they had been handed over to the one guy that would torpedo their hopes, and would, no matter what, lose the case for them. They never took a case without getting paid, so Wyland was paid to fail. His track record was kept a closely guarded secret.
Above all, burning deep within him now, was a desire to win this case. He had felt the same about other cases, but there was something about this case that really got to him, really made him want to win. He had to figure this out. This would redeem him. This would show them all that he could be a winner. Everyone would still get paid, and he would win, and then his whole life would change.
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