Unexpectedly Winning the Lawsuit at the First Instance

Yesterday evening I received a court SMS notifying me that the judgment in the insurer's subrogation dispute heard on July 2 had been issued. Before opening my email to view the electronic judgment, my heart was pounding. After reading it, the result was a delightful surprise: the court adopted my defense based on parallel case precedents, rejected the other side's claim that I should pay the car repair costs, and I won at the first instance. Beijing judges are truly high-caliber—when a defense is reasonable, they will adopt it.

This was the first such ruling in a comparable case in Beijing. Before this, several lawyer friends I knew who practiced in Beijing had told me without exception that I would lose, and friends working in the courts had said the same. This left me no hope of winning; my original plan was to lose at both first and second instance and then apply for retrial at the high court to see if the ruling could be reversed.

But unexpectedly, I won at the first instance. Of course, this was also the outcome I had hoped for. I wrote a written defense of over 5,000 characters and also prepared a parallel-case search report. I located the judgments of eight typical comparable cases, including cases decided along two opposite lines of reasoning, and commented on both lines from a jurisprudential standpoint to support my position.

So when the other side tried to cite opposing precedents, they found no basis to rebut me. I had anticipated their likely responses and defenses and had refuted those defenses in my written answer, on reliable legal provisions and reasoning. The judge accepted my defense and rejected all of the other side's claims.

Long clinical work has made my thinking meticulous. The other side's legal representative probably had no idea they were facing such a tricky opponent; before the hearing he looked certain of victory and spoke aggressively. But I had deeply studied the phenomenon of divergent rulings on parallel cases and had learned the relevant law, so although I was a legal novice appearing in court for the first time, I unexpectedly won.

I had once considered giving up and simply conceding, based on the opinions of my Beijing lawyer and court friends. But several friends from elsewhere kept encouraging me—especially a lawyer friend in my native Hubei who has ALS, who urged me to fight on, saying I should approach the case with the attitude of "one generation plants the trees, the next enjoys the shade." He said things depend on human effort, that conventions exist to be broken, and that someone has to break them and change past adjudication practice. He believed that even if I ultimately lost, if enough people persisted, Beijing's courts would eventually consider change.

I myself care about social and legal progress, so I steeled myself to prepare the litigation materials, mentally preparing for the worst and accepting the least favorable outcome, while also doing my homework and trying hard to win. Although the first-instance judgment is not final and the other side may appeal, the result is already much better than I expected, and it has given me confidence in the progress of the rule of law.

I am deeply grateful to the friends who have followed this case and supported me. This victory is mine, but it is also yours. As a legal novice, I won this suit only with your professional help; without you, I could not have won. Finally, I hope everyone learns my lesson: stay safe on the road. A traffic accident not only injures the body but brings a whole series of legal disputes—truly a headache.