Courts, Legal Ethics

Lawyers Whose Lawyers May Themselves Need Lawyers: Trump’s Crackpot Legal Team Of Indictees

There is nothing noble or necessary about being paid handsomely to represent a billionaire’s personal interests.

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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty)

I’ve never bought into some lawyers’ self-aggrandizing perspective on the legal industry. If I have to sit through one more speech at some convention where a powerful person calls it a “noble profession,” I might get hurt if it is indeed possible to injure yourself by rolling your eyes too hard.

“We’re society’s garbagemen,” my buddy Franz put it a bit more accurately one time over a few cocktails. That’s not a dig at the hardworking folks in the sanitation business: quite the opposite.

Trash collectors are important. Without them we would all have dysentery. However, unlike lawyers, actual sanitation workers usually don’t get together and give speeches to one another about how noble they all are.

So, it was with some shame and disappointment, but unfortunately not much surprise, that I sat around in late 2020 like everyone else watching most of the people in Trump’s circle who claimed to be lawyers try to steal Christmas democracy. It was unpleasant.

Now, Donald Trump and 18 other people have been charged as part of the Georgia criminal indictment. No fewer than eight of these people are lawyers.

Outside of the legal community, no one is going, “Wow, eight of those indicted along with Trump are lawyers? Weird, lawyers have such a strict code of ethics.” No, laypeople are saying, “Lawyers, huh, that figures.” There’s a reason the Corleone family consigliere is a lawyer.

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We have a problem in the legal field by chalking this sort of thing up to having a few bad eggs. The ethics code itself, and the bastardization of it that the rest of us sit back and allow to happen, is why nearly half of the accused racketeers just criminally charged for trying to end American democracy are lawyers.

Rule 1.3 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct requires a lawyer to act with diligence, which a comment to Rule 1.3 says includes acting with “zeal in advocacy upon the client’s behalf.” It’s got a bunch of other mealy-mouthed language that is all very lawyerly in allowing any attorney who’s in trouble a fair chance at squirming their way out of it. This is what the lawyers who just love showing up on cable news networks are referring to when they crow about their duty to zealously represent their clients’ interests.

The official ABA interpretation of Rule 1.3 is bad (some jurisdictions have already recognized this and changed it to remove the word “zeal”). Even though they’d just find some other way to justify it, lawyers hide behind zealous advocacy all the time to do all sorts of horrible stuff. Then they have the gall to claim the moral high ground by arguing it was their ethical duty as a lawyer to do horrible stuff because it was required to zealously advance their client’s interests.

There is something noble about representing an indigent criminal defendant, even one accused of a horrible crime. This is necessary within our system of justice to make sure the state meets its burden without trampling the rights of the accused.

On the other hand, there is nothing noble or necessary about being paid handsomely to represent a billionaire’s personal interests. If that is what you’re doing as a lawyer, it’s fine as long as you’re doing it within the bounds of the law and, probably more importantly, within the bounds of good taste.

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But your reward in that case is the money. Your peers and the public at large can and should judge you harshly, and the Rules of Professional Conduct should not give you moral cover.

In fact, rather than what the comment to Rule 1.3 does say, the Rules should probably say something more like, “Look, this is your job and you should do it well, but at the end of the day your job is not who you are, and if a client asks you to do something gross, even if it’s legal, tell that client, ‘No.’”

Anyhow, it’s good to see these Trump team legal doofuses finally facing some real consequences with the Georgia indictment. Just wait to hear all the “we were only being zealous advocates” and “everyone deserves legal representation” bullshit.  Unless they get public defenders (highly doubtful), I hope you’ll join me in judging harshly whichever mercenaries step in to defend them.

The lawyers who turn up to defend these lawyers best tread carefully though. Right now, Georgia is a dangerous place for seedy legal crackpots, and if you’re zealously representing any of these Trump team clients, you’re at risk of becoming one yourself.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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