Lawyers who agree to take on a case have a responsibility to their client to represent them to the best of their ability, even if they find their client to be morally reprehensible.
My father is a lawyer. I asked him once why he didn't do family law anymore. He told me about a case where he was able to get a father full custody of his children. But by the end of the case my father wasn't convinced that his client was innocent of molesting the children.
That's a fact they accept from the first day of law school, which is why many lawyers focus on winning a case at all cost rather than trying to prove their client isn't a scumbag.
Defendant lawyer here.
It was a fatal dependency claim. Mother with 5 children, loving father taken away by my client's negligence. When it came to pay the dependants, I discovered that the children weren't the deceased father's. Wife had affairs and fathered children to other men.
We paid her children nothing. Two days before the conference where we outlined our strict position our client gets a phone call from dead father's best friend.
Before the father died the best friend came clean about the affair with his wife. Father forgave him, told him that he knew and loved them anyway. We get out of paying these children anything, and I've always felt bad about it, feeling as though I let one of the world's most beautiful human's down in the dead father.
The Lawyers of Reddit were asked "what cases are you sorry you won?", and their responses are sure to make you feel better about your job.
I represented the woman in this. Guy and girl lived together for a decade as a couple. She cheated on him so he left town. He ended up moving to Michigan and got a good job building cars. The guy retired a few years ago and got some kind of ERISA money from his pension. She found out about the settlement and ended up suing and getting half of the $ because she was his common-law wife.
Read 10 Honest Lawyers Reveal The Cases That They Actually Regret Winning here
Lawyers who agree to take on a case have a responsibility to their client to represent them to the best of their ability, even if they find their client to be morally reprehensible.
Reading through the other posts and comments on the reddit thread is just... really depressing. Informative, but god, so awful. I guess it's good to know that at least some of these lawyers regret what they've done.