IF you’re ever in trouble with the law — for anything, no matter how trivial — get a QC.

If you’re guilty, get a QC. If you’re not guilty, get a QC. Pay whatever it takes. Mortgage the house. Sell the kids.

Because in our quirky and confusing system of justice, the one sure bet is that if you submit to the rules of the lawyers and their status-saturated internal value system, you will do better. You might avoid jail.

You might get a lesser sentence. You might blow the opposition out of the water.

All those are distinct possibilities. What’s certain is that you will have the ear of the presiding officer from the moment you enter the courtroom.

Your side of the case will get a fair hearing.

Justice might be blind, but judges aren’t. They can tell silk from polyester a mile away.

Just ask Anthony Bell.

The multi-millionaire accountant/yachtsman was facing an apprehended violence order, and he showed up in front of the magistrate with a Queens Counsel, Ian Temby.

Temby is one of Australia’s most famous barristers: the first Commonwealth director of public prosecutions and first commissioner of ICAC who now charges thousands of dollars a day as a barrister.

Bell and Temby lined up at the opposite end of the bar table from Bell’s ex-wife, Kelly Landry. On Landry’s side were a suburban solicitor and a police sergeant.

It wasn’t an even match by any stretch of the imagination.

I’m not saying Bell got an undeserved result. I’m saying he was smart enough to use his money to rent out some serious legal grunt.

Just walking into court with a QC gives your case an air of importance.

In one of the very first cases I covered as a young court reporter, one of Sydney’s most famous QCs, Tom Hughes, walked in, sweeping his silken robe past the other lawyers as he strode to the bar table.

Hughes had a habit of clutching the two sides of his robe and hitching it up onto his shoulders, again and again, while he glanced over one shoulder or the other to see what was going on behind him.

In a day’s hearing, he’d hitch the robe up a hundred times. At the time I wondered why he didn’t just get someone to sew a press-stud in for him, so he could keep the robe on comfortably.

media_camera Smooth as silk: Ian Temby QC did a stellar job representing his client Anthony Bell. (Pic: News Corp)

Now I realise the constant adjusting of the silk was a statement of power in itself.

“Just watch Hughes,” another lawyer whispered to me in the courtroom one day. “The judges defer to him.”

In the Bell-Landry hearing, which was ostensibly about whether or not Landry was in genuine fear of Bell, Temby grilled Landry about a range of other matters, including her feeling she was at a financial disadvantage in the marriage, her hopes for a divorce settlement and her suspicions about her husband’s behaviour.

Temby’s cross-examination of Landry was a textbook example of how a QC earns his money. Under his questioning, Landry strayed far into territory that had nothing to do with the allegations of violence, and which did her no favours at all.

It was Temby who got Landry talking about how her husband paid the nanny more than her, and who got her to say she struggled to afford the weekly grocery shop for less than $600.

It was Temby who elicited Landry’s musings about her suspicions of Bell’s friendship with TV star Erin Molan (who has strongly denied any improper relationship with Bell). None of that made Landry look good.

That was the point.

In the end, Magistrate Robert Williams agreed with Temby that Landry was no longer in need of protection from Bell — despite finding she was telling the truth when she told the court they had a violent struggle in which one of their children’s heads struck a door frame. Lucky for Landry she recorded the episode and that recording was played in court. If it hadn’t been, would anyone have believed her?

The audio, played in court, was “clearly of a marriage that has broken down”, Magistrate Williams said in his finding.

“The cry of the person in need of protection (Landry) and what both parties agree is the sound of the child’s head hitting the wall can’t be forgotten, they were chilling sounds,” he said.

The magistrate said on the balance of probabilities, he couldn’t be satisfied Landry was telling the truth about another alleged episode of violence, of which there was no recording. He also said because Bell hadn’t breached the interim AVO, and hadn’t made any new threats or attempts to intimidate his wife, “there appears to be little if no opportunity of future incidents”.

The day after Bell’s AVO hearing concluded, one of Temby’s old clients was back in the headlines: Shaun Kenny-Dowall, the NRL player allegedly caught with cocaine in a nightclub. Temby’s last outing for Kenny-Dowall was when he successfully argued before magistrate Greg Grogin that the footballer was not guilty of assaulting his ex-girlfriend, Jessica Peris.

All the best to Kenny-Dowall in his current matter.

I’d say he’ll have the best help available.