this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
192 points (100.0% liked)

World News

22024 readers
136 users here now

Breaking news from around the world.

News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.


Guidelines for submissions:

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.


For US News, see the US News community.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

In familiar predicament for famously challenging client, multiple Florida lawyers decline to take Trump’s case, people familiar with the matter say.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ptz@dubvee.org 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Well, that, and contradicting them and incriminating himself publicly like 5 minutes after the lawyers make their statements doesn't help either.

[–] ritswd@beehaw.org 29 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that this is not the actual problem that is keeping lawyers away.

Many freelancers are ok to get paid and do their best work for customers who will then destroy that work and shoot themselves in the foot. It’s frustrating, but as long as you get paid, after all it’s the customer’s problem. Lawyers are the same, you can find a number of them who won’t mind.

But here my understanding of what happened was that Trump made his lawyer sign a document where he personally committed to have checked everywhere and there were no documents left, all the while Trump was lying to him and there absolutely were hidden documents. So if that lawyer had kept defending Trump, it could have come across as him being in on the lie to the feds, and being liable to the same crimes.

A lot of lawyers will be glad to take hard-earned money from frustrating clients, but won’t be keen to get themselves in actual legal trouble.

[–] SomeGuyNamedPaul@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The common joke from the other place was MAGA stood for make attorneys get attorneys. It's one thing to get paid in exposure, but it's alright another thing to get "paid" in legal exposure. As an attorney what do you do? Can you really include a weasel statement in every filing saying "this is what he told me, I have no idea if it's true but it's it's not then it's not my ass"?

Trump's built a reputation as being a hard client to represent. Even worse is that Trump attorneys have had some notably batshit crazy examples that makes it challenging to one's reputation to get lumped in with. Good attorneys have had to quit their firms in order to represent Trump.

Heck, the current vacancies are because they saw what they were up against and noped out. It's like if a place has 1.2 stars on Glassdoor, are you really gonna risk your career and jump ship to them?

[–] ritswd@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

100% agreed with everything there, except for the last paragraph, because it’s a question I've asked lawyers before (about representing a clearly losing case). What I was told is that a lawyer’s job (unless they’re paid on commission like personal injury lawyers) is not to win the case, but to accurately represent the case so the whole system works as fairly as it can. Basically, it’s to make sure that people don’t get a punishment because “the king decided so” without the actual situation being looked at, as used to be the case. So, when you represent a pure scum bag who clearly eats babies, it’s fine, because when they get locked up, you did your part in making sure they get there because they did what they did and for no other subjective reason.

Obviously “representing accurately and fairly” doesn’t work when Trump intentionally misleads his lawyers and puts them in legal hot water, which is the point you make higher and which I wholly agree with. Why would a lawyer want that kind of risk for themselves?

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)