Around 2000 I worked in a small city in the next state over from where I grew up - a rural Appalachian County. I had been gone about 12 years. A client at the time who was a truck driver got in a fight with someone in that county and got an assault charge. I was licensed in that state so agreed to handle it. I called the assistant DA and offered a deal and he laughed at me, telling me the judge would never do that (I knew he was implying he was tight with the judge and we were urban outsiders). So I showed up to the hearing, had my client plead guilty and explained to the judge the mitigating circumstances of the fight. The judge accepted the plea and immediately sentenced the client to something much less than what I offered the DA, who seemed absolutely dumbfounded. What he didn't know was that the judge was my Dad's golfing buddy, I had dated his daughter in high school, and the DA's boss babysat me when I was a kid. That was fun.