If a potential client comes to you asking you to take their case, how much research (beyond what the client tells you) do you do? If you know nothing or next to nothing about the potential client, but have some interest in the basic subject of their case, does it make a difference in your approach?
On another board I frequent, a lawyer I know tangentially is being raked over the coals for taking a case dealing with (in part) animal neglect/abuse. The lawyer in her private life is involved with these same animals in a serious hobbyist/semi-professional sort of way. There are a plethora of people saying that because she agreed to defend her, she’s as bad as her client (who is definitely guilty of some level of neglect, plus shafting HER clients, lying about ownerships of animals, among other things. FWIW, there are indications that this person’s mental health is not all it should be, either).
Those having a field day w/ RO contend that the lawyer should have known what a crook/scum/abuser her client is and declined to take her case. However, despite being involved in the breeding and showing of the same species, there’s no real connection because they do very different things with those animals - it’s like assuming that a Classic Car buff will automatically know a mid-level stock car racer. They may have heard the name and know a bit about the car they drive, but not much more.
I have no dog in this fight, I’m not asking for legal advice, I’m just curious (or nosy, depending on the POV) Thanks!
I’m not a lawyer and don’t play one on TV. However anyone charged with a crime is entitled to legal representation. I have no trouble with a lawyer representing any client - even a mass murderer.
Depends on the case, the client and most likely the fees. Doing research on your own is expensive and time consuming and I don’t do it unless I think its worth it. Most of the time what its a lot more useful to ask the client for specific documents and read over them, that is enough to identify any holes in the story or claim.
In your example, I wonder if you are getting wooshed, the lawyer has from what your posts says revealed more than what is advisable.
No, the lawyer has not revealed anything (not to me anyway or on the board) The woman she’s representing has a huge client base, and has, over the years done some incredibly shoddy things and a fair amount of illegal stuff (like not paying suppliers) and, due the the small-world nature of the business, many many people know and are finally becoming more vocal about the problems they’ve had.
I don’t think the lawyer is doing anything other than her job. I’d like to have a little fodder for the “How Dare She!” crowd, but I realize that I’m probably bordering on the “someone’s wrong on the internet” syndrome.
A lawyer’s job isn’t to determine guilt - that’s for judges and juries. Lawyers are there to make the most compelling argument given the circumstances - if this is done for both sides to a trial, then it gives the judge or jury all of the information they need to make their decision. If one side is represented poorly, it might lead to the judge or jury to come to a decision that is unfair to one side or the other.
There is absolutely no reason she should have refused the case “because the client is guilty”. If criminal defense attorneys refused to defend everyone they thought was guilty they wouldn’t be representing anyone at all. Certainly, her personal beliefs can figure in to whether she represents a given client (I know a judge, for example, who refused to represent white supremacists when he was in private practice; since he was black, it didn’t really come up a lot, but it was problematic when he was a public defender). That doesn’t mean other people should be able to tell her who to represent.
You’re going to get very different answers depending on the types of law the attorney in question practices and how closely the new case relates to those fields.
Most lawyers in the US deal with a fairly limited range of legal issues. I work for a civil defense firm that represents insurance companies, and none of the partners have to do any research before taking a case. If our client is being sued by someone who they ran over, they pretty much know what sort of legal issues might arise in the litigation. The only exceptions are the cases they take on outside their practice areas- say, representing a client’s kid in a juvenile delinquency adjudication as a favor.
There are some “full service” lawyers, but they tend to be located in small towns that wouldn’t support specialized practices. Those guys may have to do lots of research.
IANAL but…
Darth has it right. A lawyer’s job is to defend their client against whatever the prosecution throws at them.
They cannot lie or misrepresent, or ask question on the stand that elicit what they know (strongly suspect?) to be perjured testimony; but they can state the clients’ case in such a way to show it is not as bad as claimed, and ensure peripheral details do not cloud the case.
For example, whether a person pays their suppliers over the years has no bearing on abuse/neglect. The only possible reason to mention it in the trial would be, for example, to show that “your honour, she failed to feed the animals at times because she could not even afford to pay her feed suppliers and had no food”. The prosecutor cannot simply drag up extraneous character references to make the judge (or jury) think less of the person.
Not sure when you can drag in “character reference” testimony.
I suspect the majority of this research starts with lengthy interviews with the client to determine what the (alleged) facts of the case are. If the lawyer is going to base the case on certain “facts”, I assume they will get independent verification - is she really going broke? Bank account. Is there any paper trail that expected food deliveries were delayed? orders and deliveries documents. After a comparison of facts and the client’s story the average lawyer should get a good idea how reliable the client’s version is.
I wonder (like the OP) how often the lawyer needs to dig into the fine points of law and find odd precedents? I would imagine your typical case is pretty open-and-shut legally and athe only question is the details of the particular case.
The character (or sliminess) of a lawyer comes into play when they misrepresent or twist the situation to smear someone innocent to defend their client. While some lawyers may not be above the “blame the rape victim” type of tactics, just like everyone else the majority just do the job they are hired to do. The prosecutor makes the crime look as bad as possible, and the defence makes it look less so. You don’t have to enjoy or approve of child molestation or puppy torture to defend someone accused of it.
Surprised that no one’s yet mentioned screening for conflicts of interest. At the firm I worked at, this sort of research was done before any substantive information about the case was discussed. Certainly before any information that could be considered confidential was discussed. They were a civil litigation firm though, and I don’t know how often this comes up in criminal law (which is I think what the OP is talking about), when the lawyer isn’t dealing with co-defendants.
Is it often that attorneys participate in the same hobbies as their clients, particularly if the client’s alleged odious actions while in that hobby are the subject of the litigation? On the one hand, the attorney doesn’t have to spend a lot of time educating themselves about the hobby, the mores, commercial standards within that hobby, etc… On the other hand, could the attorney end up being called as a witness, or expose herself to accusations that the attorney wasn’t zealously representing the client?
A lawyers job is to act in the interest of their client. It would be appropriate for them to refuse to represent a client if they felt that their personal feelings would not allow them to act in the interest of the client.
When a heinous murderer or child molester avails themselves of competent counsel, and is ultimately convicted, then it increases public confidence that the correct person was convicted. In many cases when such “get off on a technicality” the case against them wasn’t so great to begin with.
Brief hijack. ** RNATB** first party stuff? Still there’s always some crazy cases where the facts will test the boundaries of policy language, and you’ll learn way more about a particular area of the law than you ever dreamed about. But, you’re correct, that’s not something researched before taking the case…
OP, I’m sure I’m missing it, but are we talking a civil or criminal case? If criminal, the guilt of the accused shouldn’t factor into it, and unless the accusations were reprehensible and grounded in admitted, fully competent fact, many private attorneys might want to pass, but no matter the crime it’s my opinion that even the likely guilty should be able to hire an attorney. But, if there was an inkling there was truth to some morally reprehensible behavior, the attorney should have interviewed the potential client enough to determine if there would be red flags as to future knowledge/behavior that might make the attorney want to withdraw. Such a withdrawal may harm the person’s case.
As a civil lawyer, I’d review the complaint/petition and make a decision to take the case assuming the complained-of facts were true and after meeting with the client. Some civil lawyers would make such a decision based on the availability of legal defenses and not care so much about the facts if the lawsuit is clearly defensible. To each their own.
Sure do. We call it first party representation here. Assuming you’re still in Florida your bad faith liability is stronger than ours, but it’s still difficult work given the potential penalties. Congrats, have fun, and with that type of law you might get to first-chair some jury trials early on.
Misspoke above, should read “If criminal, the guilt of the accused shouldn’t factor into it, and unless the accusations were reprehensible and grounded in admitted, fully competent fact, many private attorneys might * not* want to pass…”
If you’re a criminal defense lawyer, your job is defending people who’re crooks, scum, abusers, etc. Not to mention drug addicts, the mentally ill, and the innocent accused. So basically they’re attacking her for doing her job. So she should tell them to fuck themselves, and concentrate on doing their jobs, not hers.
More seriously, I have a cousin that’s a lawyer, and stuff like this is why she only does corporate law. Criminal Defense, while a worthwhile and noble career, gets besmirched by the general public too much to be worth the hassle, in her opinion.
I used to work for a number of criminal attorneys (as an attorney), mostly handling motion practice and appeals. What I can tell you is that the best ones do it primarily for ego and money - at least the ones in private practice.
Now that’s was a pretty broad brush stroke there so let me back up a bit. I’ve also known attorneys who have spent their entire careers in the Public Defender’s office or working for the Administrative Offices of the Court. I think it is safe to say that in the latter cases, neither of those motivations are prominent but rather such people are more of an altruistic slant.
Similarly, I would imagine that many people even in private practice would match that profile. My point is that this was not my personal experience when talking about the lawyers who tended to have the best reputations. In fact there were some appeals I was reluctant to work on simply because of the heinous nature of the cases.
As to research, you don’t necessarily care if the client is guilty or innocent, however you do care about being surprised at trial by evidence the prosecution might admit that is contrary to what you may have been lead to believe. And even prior to that point, if it seems that you will be negotiating a plea bargain, you will want to have as much accurate information as possible so you know when you are getting a good deal or a lousy deal. Although to be honest, that end of things was below (above?) my pay grade.
You learn pretty early on in your legal career that there are certain people who simply do not or will not get the point that (unlike in the movies) lawyers represent clients because that’s their job, not because they personally believe that what their client does or did is or was right.
You can try to explain the point and some will understand it, but some won’t, and there’s not much to be done about the latter.
The thread on the other board has now been locked, but still I’m glad to know that I wasn’t totally off base in my thinking, which was pretty much this:
I used to get quite indignant about some of the drug cases for which I wrote brief supporting motions to suppress evidence as the result of an illegal search and seizure.
OK, yes. All of these people were drug dealers and guilty as hell, but it still pissed me off because the only reason they were pulled over was because of profiling. In fact it was a standing joke - if you were black, with Florida plates and driving north on the NJ Turnpike, add 20 minutes to your expected travel time. Why? Because you *would *be pulled over by state troopers and you *would *“consent” to a search of your vehicle.
Every judge in the county knew this and we knew that they knew this. I would go to lunch with different attorneys and sometimes a judge would be among the friends at the table, so it was no secret. But the troopers would a) intimidate the people at the scene and/or b) lie their asses off in court. And since a motion hearing is evidentiary and a trooper’s testimony will be given great weight, it was virtually always a losing battle despite the known realities.
