I actually know of a few things, though it's more a matter of wanting something that would be realistic, and I don't know enough about legal issues to know for sure. Granted, I watch a ton of Law and Order, but if that's like most shows, a real lawyer would probably recognize things that would be unlikely or unrealistic in there that I wouldn't.
L&O isn't too bad. Most of the issues involve the speed at which cases move. One reason that publishing's speed doesn't bother me is it's about as fast as the legal system. If anything, the legal system is slower.
These answers are
fantastic btw. Thanks for everyone's help!
Here's some more clarification on what I'm looking for. Again, I have two options. The first is this idea that she does something iffy at trial and then switches sides partly because she's not happy with what she did. It can involve money, though I might want to go a different direction with it because there are a lot of politicians in the story who are getting taken down on bribery and corruption or fraud or any number of other monetary issues, so if I can do something a little different with her, it might be better.
You need to understand that prosecutors and defense attorneys are fairly similar, compared to say a big league corporate attorney. For both, it's more alligence to the system than anything else. Criminal law is very much about checks and balances, and for my money, the English and US system, giving a preference to the innocence of the defendant, works the best. This is compared to systems where the defendant is presumed to be guilty. We screw up, but probably less than other countries.
Young attorneys don't knowingly violate the Code of Professional Ethics. They do it by accident. That's why I gave you the example that I did. Although it is a clear cut situation, it's something that comes up frequently enough and it's hard to think of the correct answer while you're standing on your feet.
I can't think of any behavior that would come up at trial that wouldn't be obvious to the judge, with the exception of suppressing evidence. And for a criminal defense attorney, that's a hard one to get to. A criminal defense attorney, unlike the prosecutor, has no duty to produce evidence. In civil cases, the duty to produce evidence comes through the use of interrogatories.
An inappropriate sexual relationship (judge maybe?) could work, though I'm not sure I want to turn the reader off her, and prostituting herself to get her way is...well, squicky.
It could happen. Definitely I know of a couple of relationships between judges and attorneys. But the legal world is small and people talk. You'd know who was screwing who fairly quickly, and normally steps are taken to reduce the issue. I know one case where the judge was not allowed to see or hear anything about any of the cases his girlfriend was involved in.
A little more detail: I have the main MC who is the one doing the blackmailing, and the lawyer girl who is either a secondary MC or a high-ranking second-tier character. Basically, I'm setting up a situation where she wants to take down the MC for one thing that could quite literally ruin his life and put him in jail for years, and I want him to come up with something on her he can use to stop her. They're both actually pretty much the good guys in the story as the villains are outside, and both are fighting the same antagonists, just in different ways. And it probably works better if she's a little more on the good side of morality just because the actual MC is pretty morally ambiguous.
I really can't come up with anything better than what I gave you.
So really I need something he could ruin her career with, but if I can avoid having it be straight up related to money that would be nice. On the other hand, because she's pretty much a good person and her whole motive throughout the story is that she's upset with some rather unethical behavior going on in the chain above her (and they're forcing her to go along as well), it needs to be something that wouldn't make her look like a total sleaze bag.
The perjury thing I was thinking of was more along the lines of putting a client on the stand and encouraging him to lie about something rather than finding out after the fact that he had lied. The only thing is, it would be nearly impossible to prove, correct? Short of the client later saying "The lawyer told me to lie" and even then if the client has a self-serving motive (getting out of perjury conviction lol) he's not going to be exactly trustworthy either.
No attorney would encourage a witness to lie. You don't need to. For example, let's say you have an eyewitness who's going to lie and say they just saw John at the scene, and not Tom, your client. Witness has told you they actually saw both. Question to the witness would be "Did you see John at the scene?" You would not ask if the witness saw anybody else. You'd work at developing the inference that the witness only saw John. "The whole truth" is rarely encouraged by either side in a trial. We want to shape the story to our client's favor.
My other option is to do something a little different, like have her do something before her career actually begins that would still get her kicked out. My current thinking is something like she plagiarizes a paper during her final term in school. If she did it and got away with it, then the MC could find out about it easily enough from an old roommate or something, and it would be easy enough to prove. If she's at a high-ranking school, it's possible she could have her degree revoked, and I would be amazed if she didn't lose her job for it.
Yeah, I suppose, although I've never heard of it. And my guess is someone that dishonest isn't going to improve as an attorney and would probably have other honesty issues.
That has an advantage because it's something that a person could be pushed into under enormous pressure, and it's separated enough from her legal career that she can easily have grown beyond that sort of thing. I'm just not certain that it sounds serious enough to really hang over her head.
I've been reading through codes of conduct, but this is like reading a foreign language.
My degrees are in psychology so I get jargon, but it's just nuts. I'm going to have to learn a lot just to do the research for this one, but it should be fun. I'm also going to look up specific cases in which people were disbarred and see if anything seems inspiring.
The Code of Professional Ethics is in simple English. It becomes nuanced at points, but it's real simple.
I'm loving these thoughts, though. This is incredibly helpful.