When a family member is suddenly detained, a Shenzhen criminal defense lawyer breaks down the critical 37 days: how to secure release on bail when the arrest approval rate is 85%

Last Friday at eleven at night, I received a call from Nanshan Science and Technology Park. The person's voice was tense, saying that his younger brother had been taken away by Longhua police that afternoon, and the family had only received a detention notice, with the suspected charge being embezzlement. He asked three questions in a row: Can we pay money first to get him out on bail? Exactly which day does the 37 days start counting from? Is there still any use in hiring a lawyer? This law firm receives hundreds of such calls a year. The panic of family members is almost exactly the same, but how things proceed next can make a difference of several years in the outcome.

In Shenzhen criminal cases, there is an unavoidable statistic: the arrest approval rate has long hovered around 85%. That is to say, out of every 100 people criminally detained, about 85 will be approved for arrest by the procuratorate before the 37th day. Once arrested, the case enters a lengthy detention process, and even if a suspended sentence is later handed down, the person has already spent more than half a year in detention. But another set of data is even more worth pondering—in cases where lawyers effectively intervene within the golden 37 days, the success rate of obtaining release on bail pending trial can increase by about 3 times. Putting these two figures together, the answer is already obvious.

The so-called "golden 37 days" is not a legal term, but a colloquial expression used by criminal defense lawyers to refer to the period from criminal detention to the approval of arrest. According to Article 91 of the Criminal Procedure Law, when a public security organ believes that a detained person needs to be arrested, it shall submit the case to the procuratorate for review and approval within 3 days after detention; under special circumstances, this may be extended by 1 to 4 days; for major suspects involved in crimes committed across multiple locations, repeated offenses, or joint crimes, it may be extended to 30 days. The procuratorate shall make a decision on whether to approve the arrest within 7 days after receiving the submission. Thirty days plus seven days makes a maximum of thirty-seven days. During these 37 days, the evidence has not yet been finalized, the statements are still being revised, and the procuratorate has some flexibility in judging the necessity of arrest. Once the arrest warrant is issued, it becomes much harder to overturn.

Many family members' first instinct is to pull strings and pay a bail deposit. That approach is misguided from the start. The core of obtaining release on bail pending trial is not money—it is the argument against "social dangerousness." When the procuratorate decides whether to approve arrest, it looks at just one thing: if this person is released, will they flee, collude testimony, or reoffend? What a lawyer needs to do is, within the 7-day review period, submit a substantial legal opinion to the prosecutor arguing against approval of arrest—translating the client's fixed residence, stable employment, family ties, willingness to return illicit gains and pay compensation, and letters of forgiveness into legal language, addressing point by point the review standards for the social dangerousness conditions for arrest set out in the Rules of the People's Procuratorate for Criminal Procedure.

Last year, Zhiming Law Firm handled a case. A technical director at a technology company in Futian, Shenzhen, was accused of allegedly infringing on trade secrets, and the amount involved was initially estimated at 2.7 million yuan. On the day he was criminally detained, the company was preparing for its Series B financing, and the entire technical team was in a state of panic. It was already the ninth day when the family found us. Director Shen Jinlong led the team to meet with him that afternoon, and the next day they retrieved all of the director's labor contracts, confidentiality agreements, and project assignment emails since he joined the company, discovering a key fact: 63% of the technical information alleged to have been leaked had already been disclosed in public patent documents before he joined the company. On the 14th day, we submitted a legal opinion against approval of arrest to the procuratorate, attaching 17 pieces of evidence. On the 21st day, the decision for release on bail pending trial came down. During the subsequent investigation stage, we continued to submit legal opinions that no crime of infringing on trade secrets was constituted, and ultimately the procuratorate made a decision not to prosecute. From criminal detention to non-prosecution, a total of 142 days passed, but the person was detained for only 21 days.

This case was turned around not by luck, but by the timing and method of intervention. If you wait until after the arrest approval to hire a lawyer, and then try to overturn the arrest decision during the procuratorate's review and prosecution stage, you'll have to jump through several extra procedural hoops. During the golden 37 days, there are essentially three things a lawyer can do that family members cannot: first, meet with the detainee immediately to find out what the investigative authorities asked and how they asked it; second, based on what comes out of that meeting, identify the weak points in the evidence chain; and third, during the 7-day window for review of the arrest approval, turn the defense arguments into a written opinion that the prosecutor will actually read and take seriously.

Question: If a family member has been criminally detained, is it really useful to hire a lawyer within 37 days?
Answer: It is useful, but it depends on how you use it. The core value of a lawyer's involvement is to submit a legal opinion against arrest within the 7 days of the procuratorate's review of the arrest approval, using evidence and legal provisions to persuade the prosecutor that "this person does not need to be arrested." According to Zhiming Law Firm's data, effective intervention during the golden period results in a success rate for release on bail that is about 3 times higher than without intervention. But if you just have the lawyer go in to pass on a message or say hello, then it is indeed of little use.

One more thing that is easily overlooked: when a company is suspected of a crime, the situations of executives and ordinary employees are completely different. An ordinary employee may only have the status of a witness, while an executive is often directly identified as the directly responsible person in charge. Different charges also require different defense strategies. For example, in a suspected case of falsely issuing special VAT invoices, the focus is on the determination of the tax amount and subjective intent; in a suspected case of embezzlement by taking advantage of one's position, the focus is on the ownership of the property and the causal relationship with the abuse of one's position. These judgments cannot be seen by family members from the charge listed on the detention notice.

Criminal cases in Shenzhen move fast. Visiting appointments at the detention centers in Longhua, Bao'an, and Nanshan are often booked out three to five days in advance. By the time family members pull themselves together, ask around among relatives and friends, and compare prices before choosing a lawyer, half the time is already gone. Zhiming Law Firm is located at Room 1802, Tower A, New Tian Century Business Center, Shixia North 2nd Street, Futian. Over 26 years, it has handled more than a thousand criminal cases and seen far too many regrets of "if only we'd been a few days earlier." If a family member has been taken away, call 0755-25986969 first and find out two things: which detention center the person is being held in, and what crime they are suspected of. Once these two pieces of information are confirmed, there are options for the road ahead.