So how are accused (and perhaps guilty) terrorists and drug dealers supposed to pay for their defense? I may “know my client” and even know he’s a drug dealer. Am I not supposed to represent him? I think he needs a lawyer, and he’s willing to pay.
In the US, we have to fill out a form when they pay us more than $10,000 in cash, and we tell our clients that up front. So, they ask a friend or relative to pay us, and I assume (but don’t ask) they give that person cash.
Reading your link, it appears that the rules are designed to prevent criminals from using a lawyer’s trust account simply to launder money, and not as a way to pay legitimate legal fees. That makes sense.
Yes, it’s not meant to stop them from paying you for a defence, but to prevent money-laundering.
They have to cut you a cheque or a money order, and provide some sort of photo id that you can copy and keep on your file, so that there’s a paper trail.
The payment info and the I.D. are subject to solicitor-client privilege, so if the police have grounds to believe your client is engaged in money-laundering, they have to go to court to get a warrant, and the court assesses whether they have sufficient grounds to get the information, notwithstanding the privilege.
Is it money laundering of they are paying a legitimate bill with cash? I always presumed money laundering was turning cash into plausible electronic funds for the person providing . If the lawyer is accepting legitimate payment, and not refunding anything to the client - how is that laundering? The only information-blocking move is that when paying the lawyer, who paid is privileged information.
Note too the “fine or penalty” exception. I.e., the government will happily accept any amount of cash, its provenance notwithstanding.
Suppose an estate contains more than that amount in cash; how would a lawyer distribute that to heirs pursuant to a will? I guess the probate court’s order would constitute an exception.
Buy a $100,000 house with cash (as in, stacks of bills in a duffel bag) and the bank will call the authorities. They are obligated to. If your client is doing the same should you be held to a lower standard?
In the US, certainly. There’s an IRS form for cash transactions of $10,000 or more, and it does ask for the name of the person you got it from. When they started this, the criminal defense bar tried putting “John Doe” in the form, claiming attorney client privilege. I don’t do criminal cases anymore, so I don’t know if that ended up working. I doubt it. As I said up thread, it’s not hard for most defendants with that kind of cash to find someone willing to pay their legal fees with a check.
In Canada, the Federation of Law Societies successfully challenged the federal government’s money laundering rules on the basis they infringed solicitor-client privilege. Instead, it’s governed by regulations passed by the law society in each province, as mentioned in the link I posted earlier. Their concern was that they wanted to have decisions about whether a lawyer had to disclose the information be reviewed by the courts, rather than just on the say-so of the federal government.