I always hear about rich people hiring expensive lawyers to escape punishments. How do they do that, and what stops more accessible lawyers from achieving the same result?
In: Other
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_defense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_panic_defense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_defense
The key thing is the amount of time/effort they can put in.
My mother was a lawyer in Scotland (now retired). Working in a court department, she mainly did civil cases, but defended occasional small criminal cases too. One case I helped with a little came to mind.
Someone had been charged with criminal damage, because he had damaged the car park exit barrier at the hospital emergency department. He was guilty, and admitted it, so there was no trial as such, just “proof in mitigation”, where you introduce any evidence to justify a lesser punishment.
Because he had the money to pay for it, his case was well prepared. He had already paid for all the damage before getting to court – this helps. (The court would have ordered him to pay anyway, but doing it voluntarily ahead of time looks better.) Admitting it at the earliest point is also viewed positively, rather than wasting the court’s time denying it. Since he’d been an emergency patient, there were also photos of the burns he had been there to get treated.
It’s been a few years now so I’m not entirely certain, but I think the final outcome was that he was “admonished”: the judge told him he’d done a bad thing and shouldn’t do it again – but since the record showed he had been in considerable pain at the time, had apologised and already made full financial restitution, no actual punishment was appropriate.
In other cases, sometimes there are minor technicalities that defeat the prosecution – but only if someone spends the time to find them. A speeding ticket… but the speed camera hadn’t been properly calibrated recently enough, so it can’t be used as evidence. Parking ticket – but the parking restriction sign wasn’t compliant, so not valid.
You can’t (usually) just shoot someone then buy your way out with a seven figure legal bill – but you can make the prosecution’s job a lot harder and make a much better argument for a light sentence if you’re convicted. OJ Simpson got acquitted because he had expensive lawyers *who found flaws in the evidence*: the fact the blood stained glove was the wrong size and actually suggested someone else had been involved saved him. If the glove had fitted, he’d probably be behind bars now, however good his lawyer.
First off, more accessible lawyers can absolutely achieve the same results, but I will attempt to answer the question as you posed it, presuming you’re talking about criminal defense lawyers:
There is an enormous price range of lawyers, going from a couple hundred dollars per hour to several thousand.
* On the low end, you have solo practitioners who are just starting out and making a name for themselves. With this type of lawyer, it’s possible to find an ambitious attorney who is willing to work really hard for you. However, they will not usually have a big staff, and their practical experience will be limited since they are building their reputation. This lawyer is willing to go to trial, but their legal knowledge is largely book-learned and theoretical.
* The next step up includes small firms who are most comfortable pushing paper. These are one to five-person firms who maybe have a paralegal and a couple secretaries, but they make most of their money negotiating plea deals for guilty clients. DUI, low-level drug possession, and misdemeanor theft are this type of firm’s bread and butter, so to speak. They might go to trial a few times per year.
* The next tier is a specialized criminal defense firm, often a large regional firm that might have offices in a big city. A lawyer at one of these firms has access to far more resources in terms of investigating your version of events, as well as a great deal of courtroom experience in whatever you have been charged with. They have a good understanding of legal strategy, which means deciding what parts of the state’s case to challenge and what parts to downplay. Trial experience also means they know how to perform for juries. Hiring a partner at one of these firms means you’ll have a whole team of associates and paralegals digging into your case back at the office also. Partners at this type of firm also usually have strong professional and personal relationships with not only the judges, but also their opposing counsel. They know how to tailor their arguments based on how the judge likes to control the courtroom, and they know what to expect from the prosecuting lawyer. Both attorneys and the judge might go out for happy hour or golf next week.
* The top level is the celebrity criminal defense lawyer. Robert Shapiro, Johnnie Cochran, Ann Bremner, Mark Geragos, etc. These are the attorneys who are happy to get on TV and say whatever they need to in order to sway public opinion. If you’re hiring one of these, public opinion matters to you as much as the outcome of your case does.
Tl;dr – You get what you pay for. A more expensive lawyer usually has more practical experience, knows what arguments work best and when, knows (and might be friends with) many judges and prosecutors, and has a stronger supporting team behind them.
ok so, i got 4 misdemeanor drug possession charges a while back. I went to a lawyer who said he would represent me for $500, seemed like a great deal to me. a few days later he calls me and says i should expect fines, probation & losing my license and possibly jail time because there wasn’t really much i could do to fight the charges. i didn’t like that response and after talking with family, my sister offered to hire me a lawyer. She goes and gets the guy in town with the best reputation and it costs $5000 just to retain him with the expectations it could go up to about $8k-$9k if we goto trial. fast forward a couple of months to my first court appearance. i meet my lawyer at the courthouse and he tells me that he used to goto law school and date the current DA that was assigned to my case. Told me not to worry about anything and just agree with everything he says. By time i got in front of the judge, he had already got that DA to drop 3 of the 4 drug charges. i ended up only being charged with possession of .5g of marijuana. I paid a $1200 fine and didn’t even get probation or anything else. tl;dr – always hire the expensive lawyer if you can
Courts don’t have unlimited resources so the rich people can spend their way into negotiated settlements and sentence reductions by simply dragging out the process.
Just look at how Trump is handling his legal issues down in the US. Just keep filing appeal after appeal after appeal. Delay the process so long that even if you eventually do get convicted, you die of old age before any concequences can be leveled.
Latest Answers