Trump’s Legal Team Confederacy of Dunces

When one is an attorney, one does not have any obligation to take a legal case if you are conflicted as to the morality of the case and/or the guilt of defendant. Indeed, in a normal court setting, it is unethical for an attorney to argue a defense he/she knows is false so as to work a fraud on the tribunal. Sadly, some attorneys turn a blind to this ethical obligation.  We are now witnessing, in my opinion, a huge ethical fail on the part of Trump's impeachment defense team.   In the case of Jay Sekulow and Pam Bondi, the ethical lapse is no surprise given their histories.  Ditto for Alan Dershowitz who is now arguing the exact opposite of what he argued during the Clinton impeachment leaving one to wonder whether the man has any shame since publicity and whatever Trump is paying him would seem to be all that maters. A column in the Washington Post by former Republican Joe Scarborough looks at Trump's shameless (and, in my view, morally bankrupt) legal defense team.  Here are excerpts:

A confederacy of dunces stumbled onto the Senate floor this week to launch their bewildering defense of President Trump. This misfit band of lawyers brought with them arguments so stunningly stupefying, logic so fatally flawed and a cynicism so brazenly transparent that one suspects Baghdad Bob was viewing the entire spectacle with grudging respect.

On day one of Trump’s impeachment defense, [Trump's] the president’s team dismissed his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani as a minor player in the Ukrainian affair. Trump lawyer Jane Raskin said he was little more than a “shiny object designed to distract you.” Never mind that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to contact Giuliani, assuring him that “Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you.”

Before Trump made the not-so-perfect call that would eventually lead to his impeachment, Giuliani ran frequent strategy sessions from the second floor of the [Trump's] president’s Washington hotel that were focused on getting Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. Giuliani repeatedly pressured U.S. diplomats and State Department employees to push his “drug deal” (as former national security adviser John Bolton described it). At the same time, America’s Mayor kept feeding Trump a steady diet of conspiracy theories that played into the president’s preexisting prejudices against Ukraine. Far from being a bit player and “shiny object,” Giuliani helped build the Democrats’ case for Trump’s impeachment better than anyone else in the president’s inner circle.
 If the claims about Giuliani were not preposterous enough, senators were also forced to endure Kenneth Starr’s self-righteous and hypocritical warnings regarding “the culture of impeachment.” Starr had, after all, once run a four-year investigation into obscure land deals, suicide conspiracy theories and intimate sexual details involving President Bill Clinton. Starr would later claim that Clinton’s abuse of power was the “capstone” of his impeachment case, but that did not stop the former independent counsel from mournfully warning senators Monday that “the commission of a crime is by no means sufficient to warrant the removal of our duly elected president.”

As Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes said, “Does Ken Starr know he’s Ken Starr?” That embarrassing performance seemed only to confirm Trump’s previous assessment of the former Clinton prosecutor as a “lunatic” and a “disaster.”

Such insults were never thrown in the direction of Pam Bondi, another member of the president’s legal team. Bondi had safely placed herself in Trump’s good favor by refusing to pursue claims of fraud against Trump University when she was Florida’s attorney general. In 2013, the Orlando Sentinel reported that Bondi’s office was deciding whether to join in the lawsuit against Trump. Four days after the article went to print, Bondi’s reelection efforts were boosted by a $25,000 check from Trump’s foundation. Soon after, Bondi announced she would be not suing the reality TV star.

[N]either Bondi nor Starr can be shamed. The same holds true of the other attorneys on the president’s defense team, who sullied their reputations this week defending a shameless huckster, and whom history will judge harshly as those whose dunce routines continued to enable this dangerously unbalanced man.

Wherever these attorneys are admitted to the bar, it might be appropriate to commence disbarment proceedings.   They have definitely violated the code of ethics. 

Manafort’s Lawyer Said to Brief Trump Attorneys

Trump attorney Kevin Downing - guilty of ethical violations/obstructing justice?

In what at first glance appears to be a possible ethical violation worthy of disbarment not to mention possible obstruction of justice, the New York Times is reporting that one of convicted felon Paul Manafort's attorneys has been briefing Trump's on what evidence special prosecutor Robert Mueller has on Manafort and possibly other Trump co-conspirators.  This after Mueller revoked Manafort's plea deal since Manafort has been lying to federal investigators rather than fully cooperating with investigators.  That Manafort has been lying should come as no surprise given his sleazy activities in the past for four individuals and nations. What is a surprise is that a member of the bar would be working to subvert a federal investigation.  One can only hope that bar complaints are immediately filed against this individual and that they lose their law license.  Here are excerpts from the Times piece: 

A lawyer for Paul Manafort, [Trump’s] the president’s onetime campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.

The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of [Trump’s] the president’s personal lawyers [who was forced out of a prominent law firm because of his own unseemly/unethical behavior], acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed. Mr. Manafort’s lawyer Kevin M. Downing told him that prosecutors hammered away at whether [Trump] the president knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting where Russians promised to deliver damaging information on Hillary Clinton to his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. [Trump] The president has long denied knowing about the meeting in advance. “He wants Manafort to incriminate Trump,” Mr. Giuliani declared of Mr. Mueller. While Mr. Downing’s discussions with the president’s team violated no laws [but may have violated bar rules of ethics], they helped contribute to a deteriorating relationship between lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors, . . . . That conflict spilled into public view on Monday when the prosecutors took the rare step of declaring that Mr. Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying to them about a variety of subjects.

Mr. Manafort will now face sentencing on two conspiracy charges and eight counts of financial fraud — crimes that could put him behind bars for at least 10 years.

Mr. Downing did not respond to a request for comment. Though it was unclear how frequently he spoke to Mr. Trump’s lawyers or how much he revealed, his updates helped reassure Mr. Trump’s legal team that Mr. Manafort had not implicated the president in any possible wrongdoing.

Mr. Giuliani, who has taken an aggressive posture against the Russia investigation since Mr. Trump hired him in April, seized on Mr. Downing’s information to unleash lines of attack onto the special counsel. In his own recent Twitter attacks on the special counsel, [Trump] the president seemed to imply that he had inside information about the prosecutors’ lines of inquiry and frustrations. “Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie,” Mr. Trump wrote on Tuesday. [W]hen one defendant decides to cooperate with the government in a plea deal, that defense lawyer typically pulls out rather than antagonize the prosecutors who can influence the client’s sentence. For instance, a lawyer for [Trump’s] the president’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn withdrew last year from such an agreement with Mr. Trump’s lawyers before pleading guilty to a felony offense and agreeing to help the special counsel.

[L]aw enforcement experts said it was still highly unusual for Mr. Manafort’s lawyers to keep up such contacts once their client had pledged to help the prosecutors in hope of a lighter punishment for his crimes.

Mr. Manafort must have wanted to keep a line open to [Trump] the president in hope of a pardon, said Barbara McQuade, a former United States attorney who now teaches law at University of Michigan. “I’m not able to think of another reason,” she said.

If Mr. Manafort wanted to stay on the prosecutors’ good side, “it would make no sense for him to continue to share information with other subjects of the investigation,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former United States attorney and senior F.B.I. official. He added: “He is either all in or all out with respect to cooperation. Typically, there is no middle ground.”

In another development on Tuesday, Mr. Manafort categorically denied a report in The Guardian claiming that he met with Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, around the time he joined the Trump campaign in the spring of 2016. Mr. Mueller’s team has been investigating whether any associates of Mr. Trump conspired with Moscow’s operation to influence the presidential election with documents stolen from Democratic computers and distributed by WikiLeaks. Some defense lawyers have suggested that prosecutors deliberately fashioned Mr. Manafort’s plea agreement to counter a possible pardon. In forcing Mr. Manafort to forfeit almost all of his wealth — including five homes, various bank accounts and an insurance policy — prosecutors specified that they could seize his assets under civil procedures “without regard to the status of his criminal conviction.”

Harry Litman, a University of California, San Diego, law professor and a former deputy assistant attorney general, said that he had seen similar provisions in other cases. But other legal experts said it seemed tailor-made to ensure Mr. Manafort would lose much of his wealth, no matter what Mr. Trump did.

It should be noted that Trump has had difficulty attracting top, ethical legal counsel since most top law firms want nothing to do with him.  

The Liberty Council Head Encourages Anti-Transgender Violence

As suggested in the prior post, if one is worried about sexual abuse of minors, then your focus needs to be on "family values" Republicans.   While there have been ZERO reports of sexual misconduct by transgender individuals in restrooms, the same cannot be said for Republican elected officials.  Yet despite the documentation that transgender individuals pose no threat to others, what does the head of so-called "Christian law firm" Liberty Counsel do?  She states that she will be taking a pistol with her to Target stores to ostensibly protect herself from transgender sexual predators and to protest Target's announcement that transgender individuals are welcome to use the restroom of their preference. As an attorney, I find Liberty Counsel to be a despicable organizations for a number of reasons, not the least being the frauds they seek to perpetrate on courts through out right lies and fraudulent experts and deception.  All the while, of course, the organization's charlatans posture themselves as "godly Christians" and demand undeserved deference.  The Raw Story looks at this latest outrage by Liberty Counsel's morally bankrupt leadership.  Here are excerpts:

The president [high priestess] of theocratic law group The Liberty Council announced on the social medium Twitter that she plans to carry a gun with her to the women’s restroom at Target stores so that she can shoot anyone she thinks is transgender.

Blogger Joe My God wrote on Monday, “Liberty Counsel president Anita Staver declared Friday that she will be taking her Glock .45 handgun to Target as protection against assaults by transgender patrons.”

Anita Staver is married to Mat Staver, head of the legal team that defended Kentucky’s outspoken anti-marriage equality county clerk Kim Davis in her effort to deny same-sex couples the right to marry.

Conservative activists have worked themselves into a lather over Target stores’ decision to allow trans customers to use restrooms designated for their expressed gender. The group launched a #BoycottTarget campaign on social media last week.

A Bunch of Law Schools Are About to Close

There is a huge over supply of attorneys and with the huge down turn in the legal industry during the Great Recession, it's getting harder and harder for newly minted attorneys to find jobs to repay the massive debt they have incurred, often going to bottom tier law schools - why does Liberty University's law school immediately spring to mind? - and leaving them in severe financial straits.  Fortunately, younger folks seem to be waking up to the reality that law is perhaps not the best occupation.  The downside (depending on one's view) is that a number of law schools are facing closure.  A piece in Slate looks at the situation.  Here are some highlights:

In the world of law schools, every day is sort of like Black Friday.  OK, slight exaggeration. But with applications in free fall, schools are locked in a brutal competition to attract students who might theoretically one day be qualified to sit for a bar exam. And that, the New York Times reports today, has meant slashing tuition and dolling out discounts. At Northwestern University School of Law, one of the top ranked institutions in the country, “74 percent of first-year students this academic year received financial aid, compared with only 30 percent in 2009,” the paper notes. The University of Iowa, University of Arizona, and Penn State University have cut their prices. J.D.s are on sale!

It seems fairly obvious that some law schools are going to have to close in the not too distant future. Between the fall of 2010 and fall of 2013, enrollments dropped 24 percent. This year’s crop of new students should be even smaller. And while schools are doing everything in their power to pare back expenses and prop up their head counts, it seems like someone is going to fall victim to a collapsing demand. “I don’t get how the math adds up for the number of schools and the number of students,” Northwestern Dean Daniel Rodriguez, told the Times. That’s because it probably won’t.

This has been a subject of fearful discussion in the legal academy for a while. Already, Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley School of Law, a notorious diploma mill, has been forced to close its Ann Arbor campus due to sagging enrollment. But, as University of St. Thomas School of Law professor Jerry Organ writes, the history of another graduate school bust suggests bottom-tier schools might not be the only ones affected.

Many institutions opened law schools precisely because they were supposed to be cash cows and won’t be particularly psyched to suddenly start subsidizing them. Meanwhile, qualified applicants are now harder to find for schools with some semblance of standards, because the biggest application declines have occurred among students who scored in the middle-to-high range on the LSAT.

There are plenty of lousy lawyers out there and many of the younger ones - perhaps out of financial necessity - seem inclined to engage in less than ethical conduct.

7th Circuit Pounds Defenders of Indian and Wisconsin Marriage Bans

Judge Richard Posner

As an attorney I understand the concept that in court both sides to a controversy deserve representation.  However, in practice, I do not understand how attorneys can in good conscience argue positions that support discrimination and the mistreatment of other citizens or which in effect seek to subvert the United States Constitution.  To do so, in my view, makes one little better than a paid prostitute and a tawdry one at that.  Seemingly, the judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit may have subconsciously shared my view on this issue.  Whatever their views, they laid into the attorneys for the states of Indiana and Wisconsin today during oral argument who sought to defend the anti-gay animus motivated gay marriage bans of those states.   My fellow Bilerico Project contributor, John Becker was in the courtroom and filed this story (the following are highlights):

Same-sex marriage bans in Indiana and Wisconsin took a beating today at the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, where a three-judge panel greeted anti-equality arguments from Wisconsin and Indiana with a combination of skepticism and derision. The court appears poised to hand marriage equality advocates another federal court win -- and possibly their first unanimous one.

As a packed courtroom looked on, the judges -- Richard Posner, a Reagan appointee; Ann Claire Williams, appointed by Bill Clinton; and Obama appointee David F. Hamilton -- repeatedly tore into Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fischer and Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Timothy Samuelson. Posner, by far and away the fiercest interrogator, slammed Indiana's claim that their governmental concern behind regulating marriage is accidental births and "unintended children":

"So now you have a huge number of potentially abandoned children, they're put up for adoption. Don't you think it would help these children, the products of these accidental births, if their parents -- whether same-sex or different-sex -- were married?"

Fischer tried to equivocate, but Posner wasn't having it. "Answer my question," he ordered.
That interaction, which occurred just seconds into Fischer's opening statements, set the tone for the shellacking that was to follow. "Yeah, I'm going to interrupt you," Posner told an obviously frustrated Fischer. "You're just going to have to be patient."

"Would you criminalize fornication?" Posner asked sarcastically. "It sounds like a way of dealing with this unintended child problem."
Judge Williams piled on, expressing disbelief at Fischer's contention that even though same-sex couples can successfully raise children, Indiana's marriage ban should remain because "with opposite-sex couples, there is very little thought given during the sexual act sometimes to whether babies may be a consequence."

"So," Williams said, "because gay and homosexual couples actually choose to be parents, choose to take on that obligation, that difference of choice is set up differently than accidental? Here are people who actually want to have children -- know that they want to have children. It is not accidental; they make that commitment to raise children. I just don't get that."

Judge Hamilton pointed out that marriage bans are based on sex: "Bob can marry Chris if Chris is a female; Bob cannot marry Chris if Chris is a male. So that would seem to point us in the direction of heightened scrutiny."

He also noted the parallels between Indiana's anti-equality arguments and those made in the last century to justify bans on interracial marriage:

"The right to equal protection of the laws is an individual right... [and] the argument you're making is exactly the same argument that was made with respect to race in Loving v. Virginia, and it was flatly rejected by the Supreme Court.

After slamming Indiana's arguments as "ridiculous" and "absurd," Posner (left) returned to the subject of marriage discrimination and how it harms the children of same-sex couples. He asked Fischer whether he'd read a brief filed in the Wisconsin case by the Family Equality Council.

"It has a great deal of rather harrowing information about the problems created for children and their parents in the case of same-sex couples not being allowed to marry who have adopted children -- how they feel when they grow up, how what happens when one of their parents dies."

And then the clincher:  "What's on the other side of this scale outweighing these costs? Is there any empirical basis for anything you've said?"

The state of Wisconsin didn't fare any better. In fact, there were several points where Assistant Attorney General Timothy Samuelson couldn't muster any kind of an answer to the judges' withering questions.

 

Posner nearly laughed Samuelson's appeals to tradition out of court: "How can tradition be a reason for anything?" he said. "I don't get that. Once again, the Loving case: the tradition of forbidding interracial marriage went back to colonial times. It was 200 years old by the time Loving came along."

Samuelson responded that Loving was a deviation from, rather than a codification of, common law, eliciting incredulity from the court. Posner set him straight:

"Interracial marriage had been forbidden in the colonies and in many, many states... for more than 100 years... so in other words, tradition per se is not a grounds for continuing. 'We've been doing this stupid thing for 100 years, 1,000 years; we'll keep doing it because it's tradition.' You wouldn't make that argument. Don't you have to have some empirical or some practical or common-sense basis for barring these marriages? I didn't get anything out of your brief that sounded like a reason for doing this."

Later, Posner called the tradition argument "feeble" and asked whether the state had anything better. He also took issue with Samuelson's contention that the tradition of marriage discrimination is based on "experience."

"It's based on hate, isn't it?" Posner asked. When Samuelson responded in the negative, Posner replied, "You don't think there's a history of rather savage discrimination against homosexuals in the United States and the rest of the world?"

Judge Posner had similarly little use for Samuelson's appeal to democracy. "That argument doesn't get you very far. Are you really saying there shouldn't be any constitutional invalidation, ever, of a state or federal statute because that's 'anti-democratic'?"

And then, if it weren't already abundantly clear which way he'd be voting, Judge Posner tipped his hand:

"What is the rational basis for a legislative choice denying same-sex marriage? We know that these people want to get married; we think, at least I think, it's good for the kids -- what's the offsetting harm? ...These people and their adopted children are harmed by your law. Now the question is, what is the offsetting benefit of your law? Who's being helped by it?"

Samuelson repeatedly attempted to dodge the question . . . .

There's more, so read the entire post.  Overall, it was a bloodbath against the defenders of discrimination.  Should the court rule unanimously to strike down the two state bans, I suspect that the opinion will make most interesting reading.  It is also noteworthy that the most aggressive judge in challenging the smoke screen justifications of both state was a Reagan appointee.

Law Schools’ Applications Fall, Tuition Costs Soar and Jobs Are Scarce

Having been trapped by circumstances in the legal profession for decades I welcome reports that law school applications are plummeting.  The truth is that there are too many lawyers and from my experience, many of the younger ones are only too ready to cut ethical corners in their quest to make a buck.  Such pressure, of course, often tracks back directly to the insanely high debts they incurred going to law school in the first place while career prospects have greatly soured over the last 5 to 8 years.   Many other attorneys like myself who have come to realize what a lousy profession they are in dream of somehow escaping the world of law.  It's not a coincidence that attorneys have among the highest suicide rates of any profession.  The hours are horrible, clients increasingly expect 24/7 service and the pay outside of the mega firms and ambulance chasing personal injury firms isn't what it used to be.  The New York Times has another article in its continuing expose of  the reality of the legal profession that ought to be read by every individual considering law school.  Here are highlights:

Law school applications are headed for a 30-year low, reflecting increased concern over soaring tuition, crushing student debt and diminishing prospects of lucrative employment upon graduation. 

As of this month, there were 30,000 applicants to law schools for the fall, a 20 percent decrease from the same time last year and a 38 percent decline from 2010, according to the Law School Admission Council. Of some 200 law schools nationwide, only 4 have seen increases in applications this year. In 2004 there were 100,000 applicants to law schools; this year there are likely to be 54,000. 

Such startling numbers have plunged law school administrations into soul-searching debate about the future of legal education and the profession over all.

“Thirty years ago if you were looking to get on the escalator to upward mobility, you went to business or law school. Today, the law school escalator is broken.”  

After the normal dropout of some applicants, the number of those matriculating in the fall will be about 38,000, the lowest since 1977, when there were two dozen fewer law schools, according to Brian Z. Tamanaha of Washington University Law School, the author of “Failing Law Schools.”

The drop in applications is widely viewed as directly linked to perceptions of the declining job market. Many of the reasons that law jobs are disappearing are similar to those for disruptions in other knowledge-based professions, namely the growth of the Internet. Research is faster and easier, requiring fewer lawyers, and is being outsourced to less expensive locales, including West Virginia and overseas. 

Last spring, the American Bar Association released a study showing that within nine months of graduation in 2011, only 55 percent of those who finished law school found full-time jobs that required passage of the bar exam. 

“Students are doing the math,” said Michelle J. Anderson, dean of the City University of New York School of Law. “Most law schools are too expensive, the debt coming out is too high and the prospect of attaining a six-figure-income job is limited.”

“In the ’80s and ’90s, a liberal arts graduate who didn’t know what to do went to law school,” Professor Henderson of Indiana said. “Now you get $120,000 in debt and a default plan of last resort whose value is just too speculative. Students are voting with their feet. There are going to be massive layoffs in law schools this fall. We won’t have the bodies we need to meet the payroll.” 

I feel some sorrow for the new attorneys who are finding themselves in a career nightmare.  If they are smart, they will find a way out of law early enough to find other careers.   For those of us older attorneys, we are sadly trapped unless we win the lottery.

Why Don't the State Bars Enforce Ethics Rules Against Introducing False Evidence?

At yesterday's Equality Virginia legal seminar at the University of Richmond, during the course of the discussion of legitimate medical and mental health research in the context of litigation, the point was brought up about the fraudulent testimony and false research introduced in lawsuits by Christianist attorneys like Matt Staver and his kindred religious zealots at Liberty Council (an institution that I view as an ongoing blight on Virginia). Time and time again, the Christianists introduce evidence and false evidence from bogus "experts" some of which tracks to Paul Cameron. Staver has to know the proffered evidence and deliberately distorted studies are false. Cameron was thrown out of every legitimate association he once belonged to for fraudulent research and one federal judge even opined in a decision that the only fraudulent evidence before him was the testimony of Cameron. Yet Staver and others - including now Charles Cooper in Perry v. Schwarzenegger - continue to introduce the same false evidence. In Virginia, Rule 3.3 of the Code of Professional Responsibility provides in relevant part:
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Rule 3.3 Candor Toward The Tribunal
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(a) A lawyer shall not knowingly:
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. . .(4) offer evidence that the lawyer knows to be false. If a lawyer has offered material evidence and comes to know of its falsity, the lawyer shall take reasonable remedial measures.
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(d) A lawyer who receives information clearly establishing that a person other than a client has perpetrated a fraud upon a tribunal shall promptly reveal the fraud to the tribunal.
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The comments to the rule describe what constitutes remedial action:

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When evidence that a lawyer knows to be false is provided by a person who is not the client, the lawyer must refuse to offer it regardless of the client's wishes. . . . Upon ascertaining that material evidence is false, the lawyer should seek to persuade the client that the evidence should not be offered or, if it has been offered, that its false character should immediately be disclosed.
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Yet the introduction of bogus testimony held out as scientific fact (as opposed to the mere religious belief that it is under the most deferential analysis) goes on and on by Christianist counsel. When are the state bars going to start disciplining those like Staver who are knowingly seeking to work a fraud on the Courts time and time again with false testimony and false evidence? It's past time that the constant deference to religious based lies stop.

Bill McCollum's Ethical Challenge

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Divorce Wars - Another Battle and the Role of Counsel

I will not be posting much on Friday - this post was written Thursday evening - since I have yet another post-divorce hearing where the former wife will seek to further harass me and make me produce another ream of financial information that documents the fact that I do not have the funds currently to pay her what she demands. Accepting financial reality was not a strong suit on her part during our marriage and apparently little has changed. Increasingly, however, I believe a significant source of the ongoing legal circus is the fault of her latest attorney who, in my opinion is milking the ex-wife for all she can in terms of fees and taking advantage of the ex-wife's apparent thirst for vengeance. An ethical attorney would not take matters aimed solely at harassment and unnecessary litigation just to make more in fees.

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I have been in the legal profession for over 32 years and in my opinion, the former wife's attorney is one of the most ethically challenged I have encountered. Based on her bar card number, she's relatively new to the profession and she lacks years of experience. Moreover, again in my opinion, she has no qualms lying to judges and misrepresenting facts or resorting to gay bashing - the reason why I now have a court reporter now at every hearing to keep her and homophobic judges more honest. She even seems to delight in making gratuitous snide comments and remarks aimed at me or my attorney - out of the ear shot of the judges, of course.

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It has been my experience - at least among the corporate and commercial law bar - that one's word and reputation for ethical conduct as an attorneys are as valuable as gold. Trust worthy attorneys can agree on issues and matters can be more expeditiously resolved without needless nastiness and litigation. In fact, I once had a large multi-million dollar deal close and fund on my mere verbal assurance that I would issue a particular opinion post closing that the tax-credit purchaser requested. Honesty and above board conduct are invaluable in working with other attorneys - something that the ex-wife's attorney has not, in my opinion yet learned. Perhaps she never will. The reality is that if one is labeled a liar and a snake the word gets out and that attorney's clients will ultimately suffer in the form of lost compromises and increased fees and costs.