This troper has only had one encounter with an amoral attorney in his natural habitat, when a very dishonest person weaseled my grandfather out of a lot of money thanks to a typo in a contract. In private life I also once played on a Neverwinter Nights server with an incredibly spiteful and aggressive player, who mocked and swore at me to provoke a response, then screenshotted my angry answer and mailed it to the admins claiming he was being harassed. (Strangely, his part wasn't included in the screenshot. Funny how that works.) He was, of course, an attorney in real life.

Having worked for a divorce attorney, this troper can say that the AmoralAttorney really exists out there. There's nothing like watching your boss intentionally drag out her client's case just to get more billing hours to make you agree with the "kill all the lawyers" sentiment. Did I mention that the client suffered from a degenerative eye disease and was almost completely blind?

One attorney based in central Florida is practically the definition of "ambulance chaser". He will represent literally anyone, no matter how shaky their case may be. This includes a man who was suing a Little League team and its owners, along with the owners of the field, when he showed up without permission to try and help set up for the game, only to fall off his own ladder that he brought to the site. He was suing for an "unsafe working environment". In fact, he was so bad that he left his old partners because THEY thought he was too bad, and both attorneys are pretty slimy in their own right.

So {{Even Evil Has Standards}}?

This troper's parents once had to deal with one. His name was Thornhill. He had brought up evidence he wasn't allowed to, stuff that had nothing to do with the case, and arrested one of them, with no formal warrant, for missing a court date they were actualy in court for. Over a bounced postmarked check. At the time, you couldn't prosecute postmarked checks in the state. When explaining him to people, this troper sums him up as "a PhoenixWright villain". The guy is now a judge, and this troper now lives out of state.

My aunt and uncle are currently suing a real estate agency for not telling them there was mold in their home. The real estate hired a lawyer who advised them to drag out the case to make my aunt have to give up her case due to the cost. Said aunt had to take out three morgates on their home to pay for the lawsuit.

This Troper isn't planning on entering this profession specifically because he could be an AmoralAttorney. When he was in his high school mock trial team, he never got an "acting" part (playing a lawyer or a witness). His strength in the team was that he could find where affirmatives had slipped up and knew when to call foul on an apposing witness. Since the preliminaries had each team fight on both sides of the case, he would often find out how the witness he was ripping to shreds could cover that hole up on our run on the case. All this trumped the emotional weights of the RippedFromTheHeadlines cases that we got, and this trope found himself building an equally strong case for a side he would hate to see win in real life.

In real life, Fred Phelps fits this definition. He was disbarred for falsifying statements (something like 26 counts in the same case).

In fact, this troper has heard that Fred Phelps created the whole Westboro Baptist Church simply to make something so controversial that people would have to cause him some harm or "libel" against him, so that he can sue them. There would be a great many flaws with such a plan...

This troper's ex-wife had one of these for a divorce attorney. Fortunately, my attorney would cut him down with things like, "We can argue for an hour over something that's worth $50 and cost them $500 in the process or we can skip the small stuff and let them work it out." This would always shut him up. Even when the guy would come up with something completely crazy, my attorney would shoot it down, often by saying, "I know the judge won't go for that." Her dirtbag attorney ended up firing her, which is illegal. I tried to get her to file a complaint with the state bar, but she wouldn't. If you're in California, don't use an attorney whose first name is the same as Jingleheimerschmitt and his last name is the middle name of same (Jingleheimerschmitt) with a Michael thrown in the middle. This moron even asked to have the judge changed because the judge was biased against his client (completely false), then settled for the judge who granted custody to OJ Simpson. I gloated about this in one of our first meetings, pointing out the case of not doing his homework. My attorney was so good that when my ex-wife's new husband was having custody problems with his own ex-wife, I recommended my attorney to them. They took the advice and suddenly started winning every battle. His evil ex now complies with the court's requests (she didn't before).

Pick any advocate or lawyer in Guernsey. Any of them. These are the same pricks who prosecute people whose accountants have stolen large sums of money and fled the country for things such as tax evasion and barring anyone who isn't a qualified and licensed accountant from handling the pay-data, despite the fact that almost every "Qualified and licensed" accountant on the island has a habit of robbing people and fleeing the jurisdiction. Did I mention that Guernsey's political system is dominated by corporations? We're essentially Shadowrun, without the magic, metahumans, cyberware and guns. (We're also overpopulated due to immigration, mainly from mainland UK, since we're so easily exploited by them for cash.)

Update from above troper: My sister was in a car crash in the early years of this millenium and is only just nearing her court case as of mid 2011. The only decent lawyer she had during this time was essentially bought out by the insurance company she's suing and is now working for them. She took all the court data she had with her. They did this a month before a supposed court date. The current lawyer is completely ephemeral as of now (a few months before the court is due to start), the one before him was an intolerable ex-taxman who went into tirades about taxation procedure when he should have been working on the case at hand and the one before that wanted her to accept an offer of £60,000 when her original request was for over £800,000, as the company refused to help her during her recuperation from two broken legs caused by a driver they covered. As a result of the crash she was unable to take over the family business, which promptly collapsed under a mix of poor sales and extremely disreputable suppliers ripping the company off. My sister still cannot work in a full capacity about a decade on and yet the lawyers still stonewall us to this day, over a dozen lawyers later.

This troper hopes to become a criminal prosecutor someday and finds it rather annoying that prosecutors are so often portrayed as the bad guy in fiction.

Heard on a radio ad: "''Friends don't let friends plead guilty.''" It starts with a banging gavel and an ominous voice declaring, one after the other, the penalties for driving under the influence of alcohol once, then twice, then three times -- which is apparently meant to evoke fear -- and proceeds to invite anyone who has been charged with driving drunk to hire him as their defense, implying heavily that this is your way out if you really ''were'' driving drunk.

This troper's parents are lawyers (both of them. Insert joke here.) I've grown up listening to them complain about the jerkass attorneys, judges, and yes clients too, that they have to deal with on a regular basis. This trope definitely exists. (Protip: Even the vast majority of lawyers know that it's Very Bad Form to tell another lawyer to work on something during Yom Kippur and the lawyer is Jewish.)

A few years ago, during a church service, we had a guest speaker. We have them frequently; I had no idea who in the heck this guy was, but he seemed important, to I listened to him...mostly.The one thing that stood out in my mind was his comment about the respective effects of good and bad parenting. He gave an example of a family of outlaws. Of their descendents, the number of theives/murderers/arsonists/rapists/general reprobates was well into the hundreds. He then gave an example of a family in which many descendents became doctors/executives/politicians/upstanding citizens...and, finally, "twenty of them became lawyers...well, I guess you can only do so much as a parent." Stupid, yes, but it seemed funny to me, at least...

This troper considered law school and decided against it after her philosophy of law professor told her she'd make a great lawyer because she was so good at forming arguments even when they were clearly utterly bankrupt.

This Troper's mothers lawyer is a douche. He told her to put me in an asylum so I wouldn't testify in an upcoming custody hearing. She did, too.