His point is that nobody forced these lawyers to represent Bannon. They chose to, for ideology or money. If the former, then they are just as dispicable as he is. If the latter, then they failed to notice that Bannon and his grifter ilk don’t pay up.
Thus, no sympathy.
You can choose to not represent a client in a civil suit if you don’t want to, though. You don’t HAVE to take on every case that comes across your desk. My grandfather’s second wife drained his accounts, fed him high dose benadryl, and attempted to sue the family in civil court and almost every lawyer in town rejected her as a client except the one that was known as “the sleazy lawyer” by all his associates.
(He would even add, in a hearing, the Sleazy Lawyer who owns Four Lexuses, so he knew)
So don’t give me that, I’ve seen it in action.
Aw, that’s cute.
You actually seem to believe the social contract works and is always enforced and executed in good faith.
Ty, gonna stick that in my folder of “facts that may come up in a crossword puzzle”.
Who pays them?
I think Bannon and Trump have an outsized corrupting influence. Trump’s recent family doctor signed a letter, written by Trump, lying about Trump’s health saying he was the healthiest man to ever seek the presidency. His childhood family doctor likely lied about a bonespur to keep Trump from being drafted. Most MD’s don’t routinely commit fraud, it speaks to their character if they’re covering for him. There is a reason they say MAGA means making attorneys get attorneys. Mob lawyers are different than most attorneys. Bannon and Trump are at the mobster level of malfeasance.
It’s a story every lawyer has dealt with. The client pays your retainer (presumably the $375K in this case). The trial starts, you burn through the retainer, and you start sending bills. The client doesn’t pay but keeps promising they will, and you generally can’t back out of representation during a trial unless there are circumstances more extreme than unpaid bills. You can petition the judge to let you back out, but if the trial is underway, it’s not likely to be granted. So the bills pile up. Then when things have slowed down and the bills are way overdue, you tell the client to pay up or you’ll sue. And once you sue, you obviously can’t continue representing the client, so you ask to be released from the representation. As they’ve done here.
But please, keep telling me how my profession works.
And yet the firm is asking the judge to release them from representing Bannon on that very basis: unpaid bills. Which, in my experience of corporate law firms, is extreme enough to be The Worst Thing in the World.
I have the luxury of being able to fire a client who turns out to be a jerk without going through your profession’s very necessary rigamarole, but I do make sure that my clients can and will pay before I take them on. But then I run the kind of business where I do not talk about “letting the bills pile up” as if it’s no big deal (the lawyers I know definitely don’t do that either).
I’ve never once had to sue a client for unpaid bills in decades. I’ve never had an invoice age more than 60 days, and rarely more than 30. And you’re asking me to have sympathy for attorneys who didn’t vet a high-profile client like Bannon before taking his six-figure retainer (no doubt anticipating many more figures to come)?
Wait, I thought you represent the Constitution and not the client. Come on, counselor, a little consistency in your argument here…
Seriously, even we benighted non-lawyers already understand the point of your clumsy yet lofty statement: in representing a client, a attorney also represents the law of the land. However, as @KathyPartdeux noted, it’s the client and not the Constitution that’s expected to pay the bill. And this case is all about the money and how the firm screwed up dealing with it. You obviously have more sympathy for bunglers than the rest of us.
That’s so weird; I thought the topic was about Steve Bannon stiffing his lawyers, not you personally and your… profession.
I would guess that you’re smart enough to check on whether a client has a long history of stiffing his lawyers/contractors/employees and either demand overpayment up front, or funds transferred to an escrow acct in anticipation of future services, or just decline to represent that client.
These lawyers did not do that, and the likely result happened.
Thus, no sympathy. I mean, if the general public knows that these grifters don’t pay their bills, then the legal community certainly does.
Come on, it’s not like the prospective client was so cartoonishly untrustworthy that he got evicted from a medieval castle he rented for lying to the owner about his plans to use it as a fascist training institute. Who could have guessed?
So can he start serving his sentenced time now, as his lawyers are not working on his appeal?
I gotta believe most lawyers would be smart enough to avoid taking on a client like Bannon, though. This outcome was almost as predictable as a lawyer getting screwed over by Trump.
Anybody can get behind in their bills…
It just so happens that -this- guy is PURE EVIL.
He’s not “behind on his bills.” He’s a cheat. He’s not some kind of working stiff, struggling to make ends meet.
He chooses to do this, as a testament to his own superiority - just like Alex Jones, Trump, Stone, and the other grifters. Paying other people for the work they do is a sign of weakness.
If you explain the joke it is no longer funny. I got it right away.
Now, now… we need to give violent insurrectionists the benefit of the doubt! /s
Seemed like gracchus got it, which was why the “more like haw haw” was funny.
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