To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person - few love a spokesman for the despised and the damned.

Apologists for the profession contend that lawyers are as honest as other men, but this is not very encouraging.

In reality, the [American legal] system promotes chicanery, outright deceit, and other egregious conduct by trial lawyers.

To bring in a lawyer means a real peril to solution of the crime because, under our adversary system, he deems that his sole duty is to protect his client—guilty or innocent—and that, in such a capacity, he owes no duty whatever to help society solve its crime problem. Under this conception of criminal procedure, any lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to police under any circumstances.

You're irritating me. It's not a good thing to start off by irritating the person who's supposed to decide your case.

The defendant in a courtroom is little more than a patient on an operating table without the benefit of anaesthesia. He has to watch what's happening, but he can't do anything about it. He hasn't the understanding of the law, the ability to try cases or any of the other skills required of his lawyer. So the lawyer is a projection of the defendant. He's doing everything the defendant would do if he were able—short of suborning perjury and other nonpermissible tactics.

Lawyer even sounds like liar.

It has helped me keep in mind all times that not all lawyers always work in the best interests of their clients. It is a very delicate situation. If a lawyer does not appear to the judge to be working in the best interest of the clients, I think the way to deal with that is to have hearings on the record and hope that the parties might appear.Sometimes from the bench, or sometimes in a conference on the record, the court is in a position to give guidance that not only is for the ears of the attorney, but may also be for the ears of the litigant, him or herself.

As one civil-liberties lawyer, who is concerned about the sometimes vigilante attitude toward accused rapists, puts it: "Some people regard rape as so heinous an offense that they would not even regard innocence as a defense."

Those who think the information brought out at a criminal trial is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth are fools. Prosecuting or defending a case is nothing more than getting to those people who will talk for your side, who will say what you want said.

In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one.

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

I am a lawyer. I think that one of the most fundamental responsibilities, not only of every citizen, but particularly of lawyers, is to give testimony in a court of law, to give it honestly and willingly, and it will be a very unhappy day for Anglo-Saxon justice when a man, even a man in public life, is too timid to state what he knows and what he has heard about a defendant in a criminal trial for fear that defendant might be convicted. That would to me be the ultimate timidity.

One very important thing that young lawyers must know is that when one argues a case and later in the evening you ponder over it and say, that’s what I should have said (but you never said it), that’s the only regret. It could have been the winning point or something you wish you had not said, which is even worse. If you get angry at that point in the courtroom, losing your temper can be a disaster. You can’t afford it because your client suffers and nobody likes you for it. It all comes with age and practice.