Advice to a Young Criminal Trial Lawyer

Keep your overhead as low as possible. You need a good laptop. You don’t need a secretary.
Join your local, state, and national criminal defense lawyers’ organizations, and join their listservs.
You don’t need ProDoc (unless you’re doing more than just criminal law). You might not even need an office at first – just a place where [...]

Cops and Lawyers

Miami criminal defense lawyer Brian Tannebaum has some interesting comments about personal relationships between Cops and Criminal Defense Lawyers.
When reading his post and the comments, it occurred to me that while cops who don’t respect us and the system are dangerous to our factually innocent clients, the cops who are most dangerous to our factually [...]

Happy Birthday to Underdog Blog

Underdog Blog, written by Jon Katz and his partner Jay Marks of Marks & Katz in Silver Spring, Maryland is one year old today. Jon and Jay have blogged every weekday but four since April 20, 2006. That’s a lot of words; Jon and Jay celebrated Underdog’s birthday a day early in action by beating [...]

DWI and Automatism

I’ve been glad to see the talk around the blawgosphere lately about the “sleep driving defense.” The two-dollar word for this defense is “automatism.” (I don’t recommend using two-dollar words when talking to people, but they can add some oomph to an argument to a court.)
Here are a couple of documents from a 2005 sleep-driving [...]

Arrest Them All, Let the Grand Jury Sort Them Out!

Austin criminal defense lawyer Jamie Spencer’s blog post on the arrest of a counterfeiter’s victim reminded me of several similar forged-instrument cases I have handled.
In the most egregious one “Charles” advertised some mechanical parts for sale on eBay. The high bidder sent him a cashier’s check for more than the value of the parts, and [...]

Different Sorts of Justice

A civil lawyer would not — should not — be satisfied if his client received procedural justice but did not receive (what the lawyer considered) substantive justice. A criminal lawyer would not — should not — be satisfied if his client received (what anyone considered) substantive justice but did not receive procedural justice.
A civil [...]

Why We Do What We Do

Here’s a fairly cogent explanation from non-defender Randy E. Barnett of why defense lawyers should keep fighting even for people who aren’t factually innocent. The meat of it is this:
Criminal lawyers are constantly asked how they can live with themselves defending those guilty of serious crimes. The full and complete answer ought to be that, [...]

Factual Guilt vs. Legal Guilt

When people talk about “defending the innocent” or “defending the guilty” they’re talking about factual guilt — did the person do what he’s accused of doing? — rather than legal innocence or guilt — has the government proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did what he’s accused of doing (and that no defenses [...]

Lawyers Doing Nothing

“Mark, I have a lawyer, and she’s not doing anything for me. I need a new lawyer.”
Sometimes the stuff that we lawyers are doing is not immediately apparent to our clients or, for that matter, to anyone. Lots of the work to be done on a criminal case — legal research, fact investigation, negotiation — [...]

Nonsexist Language

I haven’t done a very good job of using nonsexist language here.

Technorati Tags: language

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