Chapter 439

Sabrina was, understandably, a little distracted during the next few hours. That didn’t stop you, Gemma and Eric from encouraging her to take charge to try and help her out. Sabrina ended up assigning you the finalisation of the witness lists, while Gemma was directed to start taking the various notes that had been made for the opening statements and forming them into a cohesive speech. That left space for Eric to double-check the motions that needed to be filed to attempt to quash various elements of evidence or specific witnesses that would hurt the case and to challenge the validity of several of the initial case filings from the main package. Sabrina took on the brunt of forming the meat of the case you would be making, organising your defensive and offensive question lists for the witnesses and laying out which evidence you would bring in for each potential witness.

You noticed, about halfway through the afternoon, that none of the Associates or Junior Partners had dropped any interning work for you all - usually, Fridays were a ‘dump day’ when they were getting their work for the week finished and dropped off stuff for you all to work on. Instead, it seemed like word had gotten around about the mock trial and that you were to be left alone, which was definitely helpful.

“OK,” Eric sighed, rubbing at his face as he leaned back from his laptop. “All I’ve got left is the motion to suppress on the character witnesses, and then finalising the motion to dismiss.”

“Did you remember to include the citations I found for the motion to suppress on the traffic cam footage from earlier in the day?” Sabrina asked.

“Umm, yeah,” Eric nodded, clicking through his open tabs. “I got them.”

“OK,” Sabrina nodded, then turned to you. “How are you doing, John?”

“Good,” you said. “Unless we find something else over the weekend I think the list should be done. The last detail is whether we can come up with a way to mitigate the fact that the broker was the brother-in-law of the victim or not.”

“Mm,” Sabrina hummed and started flipping through papers. “I actually found something for that. I’ll try to find it.”

“I’m only about halfway through the opening statements,” Gemma said. “Honestly, my natural inclination is to be a little more... fiery than we decided to go. I’m going to need some help.”

“I’ll help,” you offered.

The four of you got back to work, and you slid your chair over to sit next to Gemma as you both murmured quietly and wordsmithed the opening statements. What she’d written was good, but after the advice from Garrison and witnessing his own case, you’d all decided to follow his methodology of methodical, passionless facts for whoever the judge ended up being. The two of you ended up doing a quick secondary rewrite of what she’d already gotten done, toning things down a little more, before piecing together the second half of the speech.