Lawyers are intellectual prostitutes. Think about it. They will defend whatever position you pay them to defend.
Can you imagine if you ask an engineer "what's your opinion on the maximum load this bridge can take?" he answered "for a fee, I will claim that my opinion is what you tell me". In any other profession this would be corruption, but when it comes to lawyers that's their job. Intellectual prostitutes.
I have no education in law, and know next to nothing of its practice, but I do know that a lawyer's role is not necessarily to believe their client's innocence, but to make sure the system in which they are operating is adhering to the law even if the expected outcome is a guilty verdict.
No no those are lawyers for poor people like you and me.
When we talk about lawyers for companies and billionaires it's a completely different game.
Remember last time a lawyer said they wouldn't represent facebook because they didn't necessarily believe their innocence? Right, never happened. Because on that league, the game is to twist the meaning of words so much that the judge starts to doubt he understands the law himself.
> Can you imagine if you ask an engineer "what's your opinion on the maximum load this bridge can take?" he answered "for a fee, I will claim that my opinion is what you tell me".
> An expert witness, particularly in common law countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, is a person whose opinion by virtue of education, training, certification, skills or experience, is accepted by the judge as an expert. The judge may consider the witness's specialized (scientific, technical or other) opinion about evidence or about facts before the court within the expert's area of expertise, to be referred to as an "expert opinion".
Usually both sides have an expert witness, the implications of that are self-evident. Don't even need to factor in knowledge about human nature to understand what is happening.
To be fair, the deviation from the truth an expert witness may grant tends to be bounded. Whereas the deviation a lawyer may attempt is unbounded. In many cases the bounds don't matter much as the case contains sufficient uncertainly to be a contest of spin targeted at the psychology of the jury.
What you're describing is selection bias: Obviously I'm going to choose an engineer that agrees with me, and I'm not going to bring one that doesn't agree with me. But I'm not allowed to pay him to defend a side.
With lawyers, paying to defend a side is the whole point.
Can you imagine if you ask an engineer "what's your opinion on the maximum load this bridge can take?" he answered "for a fee, I will claim that my opinion is what you tell me". In any other profession this would be corruption, but when it comes to lawyers that's their job. Intellectual prostitutes.