Realities of Criminal Defense — Updated

UPDATE
Please take a moment and read Scott’s and Rick’s posts. I severely abridged their posts to the point of ruin­ing their mean­ings, and I apol­o­gize about that.
This post has been mod­i­fied in response to Rick’s com­ment below.

Yes­ter­day brought another inter­est­ing post from Scott Greenfield’s Sim­ple Jus­tice. He had been made aware of a blog by a new law school grad­u­ate with hopes of enter­ing the world of crim­i­nal defense. The author mono­logued about the moral dilemma a defense attor­ney has when rep­re­sent­ing a “guilty-as-charged” client. Her ulti­mate answer to it was that a defense attor­ney has a duty to tell her client’s story in order to achieve a fair outcome.

Scott, lodged in a les­son about the dan­gers of blog­ging (Loose blog posts Sink egos, or some­thing of the sort), explained that there is no moral dilemma. A defense attor­ney is there to beat the pros­e­cu­tion and win free­dom for his client. It is, after all, an adver­sar­ial sys­tem. (Dis­claimer: This is my sum­mary. Read his com­ment.)

That was yes­ter­day.
Details »

Published on 11/23/2009 9:16 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , , , ,

Advice for Twitter

I had an idea the other day for a ser­vice twit­ter should offer to corporate/registered accounts.
One thing peo­ple have noticed is that twit­ter seems to have very high search engine rank­ing; so that if I were to Google my name, one of the top links is my twit­ter page. That has raised some con­cerns in the past about how a lawyer can be viewed by poten­tial clients who look the lawyer up online.
My idea is to allow firms to lever­age this strong search engine rank­ing of twit­ter. A firm can have its own twit­ter ID, but, as any social media guru will tell you, it’s bet­ter to have an indi­vid­ual face peo­ple can relate to. So a firm will appoint an indi­vid­ual to be the face of the firm on twit­ter (and what­ever other social net­work it deems nec­es­sary). That’s pretty darn straight­for­ward.
Details »

Published on 11/13/2009 11:13 am.
Filed under: blog Tags: , , , , , ,

The sum is not greater than the whole of its parts

Dear World,

Social Media.
Social.
Media.
Why do these two words con­fuse the hell out of so many peo­ple? I don’t just mean con­fuse in the whim­si­cal way your par­ents might be con­fused about how to open a file in an email. I mean con­fused — to the point where peo­ple end up doing things com­pletely bass-ackwards and screw­ing them­selves over.

Yes­ter­day, Scott Green­field and Brian Tan­nebaum posted excel­lent, some­what related and extra­or­di­nar­ily rel­e­vant state­ments regard­ing the need for lawyers to sub­scribe to and fol­low an eth­i­cal guide­line. The over­lap between them lies in a lawyer’s online pres­ence, and since I am so obvi­ously steeped in online real­ity that I instantly asso­ci­ated those verbs as online col­lo­qui­alisms (“sub­scribe” to a feed and “fol­low” on twit­ter) I will focus mainly on the online aspect of the issue.
Details »

Published on 11/09/2009 11:21 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , , , ,