The Legal Underground

Some Thoughts on Representing a Convicted Rapist

I. A Court-Appointed Case, Sort Of

My first court-appointed client was a convicted rapist who was trying to get his conviction overturned on a technicality. The rapist’s case wasn’t appointed to me, exactly, but to another associate at the big civil defense firm where I started my career. The associate, who was a few years my senior, stood in my office with a box of documents. He set the box on the floor, then grinned. “You’re going to love this one,” he said.

I was pretty sure he was joking. He told me he was assigning his court-appointed case to me, and that I would be required to complete two tasks. First, I’d have to file a brief in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. Then I’d appear for an oral argument before a panel of three appellate judges. The associate said he didn’t have any clue about the legal rules I needed to know, except that I was representing the client in an appeal of the district court’s rejection of his second amended application for a writ of habeas corpus. It sounded like complete gibberish to me.

The box of documents had come from the court-appointed lawyer who’d handled the case in the district court. I leaned over my desk. The box was filled with papers. But it also contained a mysterious plastic bag. A corner was protruding from the box.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, that. That’s our client’s pubic hairs. They came with the file. You’re going to use them to get him off.”

The Horror of One Lawyer’s First Deposition

At the defense firm where I once worked, a lawyer’s first deposition was something akin to an initiation, complete with a complex hazing ritual. Even today, fourteen years later, it’s hard for me to think about. (Oh, the embarrassment!)

I wasn’t told about my first deposition until the last minute. The telling was done by an associate who’d been at the firm only a few years more than me but who was quite senior anyway.

“We’re going to have you do a deposition.”

“Oh, really. When?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

In my entire life, I’d only attended one deposition. Even though I’d been working at the firm for three months (and had worked there as a summer associate), I had only a vague notion of what went on at a deposition. Most of what I knew came from reading old transcripts.

Life on the Mississippi, or One Lawyer’s Gambling Confession

Maybe it was the casinos that saved us.

A sort of steady, monotonous equilibrium had settled over my buddies and me at the defense firm where we worked in the early 90s. We slogged through each day, then returned the next to slog through another. The sky could have been blue outside, it could have been overcast; whatever, we didn’t give it much thought. We were that busy.

But we couldn’t complain. We knew the deal going in. We knew about the stress, we knew about the demands the partners were going to place on us. We were smart, brash, confident, good at billing hours. And we billed a lot of hours.

It was one of the most prestigious firms in St. Louis, hundreds of lawyers, housed in the top floors of one of the city’s largest buildings. I’d worked there as a summer associate, then started up again after the bar exam. The firm was loosely divided into “corporate” lawyers and “litigation” lawyers. I was a litigator. Among the litigators, there was another loose division between “corporate” and “tort” litigation. I was one of the few associates lucky enough to work both sides of that second divide.

Beware the Bag Lawyer

As an associate at this large defense firm, I got plenty of trial experience, but here’s some trial experience I didn’t need: I once second-chaired a case against the infamous bag lawyer.

I say “second-chaired,” but it was me who worked up the case for trial. So perhaps I’m to blame for what happened. Our client was an insurance company with a British-sounding name. The plaintiff was an insured who our client refused to pay for a property loss because we said his claim was fraudulent.

Our opponent: the bag lawyer. How did he get this name? Well, whenever he showed up for a deposition, a hearing, or the trial itself, he carried his documents in a brown paper bag. The bag was beginning to decompose. Inside the bag, the case documents were too. When it was time to go to work, he’d fish them off the bottom and throw them on the table--a mess of tattered, smudged, disorganized bits of paper.

When I Was Just a Little Boy, or the Impossibility of Loving Richard Nixon Like a Rock . . .

Every lawyer has a story about why he or she decided to become a lawyer, and so do I. Happily for all, I have no intention of sharing mine, at least not quite so early in the week. Instead, I want take a detour down a different road, which promises a few more interesting distractions along the way. My topic, at least in a broad sense, is legal ethics.

I know what you’re thinking. For God’s sake, not again. But bear with me. First, let’s take a moment to get our historical bearings. We are living in one of those periods that blow in on the political winds every few years when lawyers, bless their hearts, can seem to do nothing right, not in the eyes of doctors, not in the eyes of big corporations, certainly not from the media’s perspective, not from the point of view of our President, very definitely not in the opinion of Rush Limbaugh. But wait. Hold on just a moment. I’m thinking of a time when I was just a little boy . . .