The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.
The good lawyer is the great salesman.
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.
I charge my wealthy clients a lot and put 10 per cent in a fund which I use to pay the expenses of my poorer clients. When the government gangs up on the poor schnook in the street, someone has to stand up for him.
It's fine to get paid and get a big verdict, but to go out and represent people, sometimes in unglamorous ways, is really what lawyering is all about.
One of the most fundamental questions people have about defense attorneys is, 'How can you do that? How can you go to bat everyday for a person that you may not know is guilty but you have a pretty good idea that he's not so innocent?' It's a question that defense attorneys answer for themselves by not addressing.
The lawyers who really begin to address the problems of their clients address them without recourse to our courts, although that recourse is absolutely essential in providing leverage.
I consider myself a freedom fighter, fighting for my clients.
I am not necessarily my clients. I will seek to defend them, to vindicate their rights but that doesn't mean that I necessarily think that what they did was proper.
Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else's luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.
It's the duty of a lawyer to represent anyone for whom a responsible argument could be made.
Bureaucracies tend to perpetuate themselves, whether they are multinational corporations or large government institutions such as Medicare, often at the expense of those that they are supposed to serve.
Every lawyer is an actor. The place where a lawyer's acting ability shines most is certainly in the courtroom, but it works very well in the boardroom and in the office.
Lawyers advocate more so than state their own positions.
People like me have to have the discipline only to work for clients, corporations, political people, products, services, networks that we believe in and we want to see succeed.
What makes for a good argument, at bottom, is being more prepared than anyone else in that courtroom, and being willing to fight to tell your client's story - the story of why the right view of the law and my client's interests are one and the same.
If people know you'll go to any lengths for your client, they're less likely to play games with you.
I've never found NBA owners to be deferential. I never considered them to be reliant. All that I do is knock myself out to represent their interests the best way I can and sometimes tell them, as part of my job, what they don't like to hear.
Selling is something we do for our clients - not to our clients.
It is interesting that I have gone through the process of representing clients as an ex-athlete. I am certainly not naive to think that the possibility of corruption isn't there.
… the comfortable fiction that all lawyers are skilled or even competent craftsmen in representing the fundamental rights of their clients.
Your job as a trial attorney is to try to convey to the jury the essence of the people you represent.
Sadly the job security of lawyers has been ruined, so they are less willing to defend political defendants.
I tell my students, if you ever become comfortable with your role as criminal defense lawyer, it's time to quit. It should be a constant source of discomfort, because you're dealing with incredible moral ambiguity, and you've been cast into a role which is not enviable.
Lawyers don't serve everyone... Lawyers right now can say, 'I'm not the person to help you on that issue; I don't agree with what you're trying to do;' and they can turn down that person, and they can go somewhere else.
