Our own Stephen Gillers offers thoughts, including discussion of legal ethics issues, at The Nation. Excerpt:
An obscure legal ethics rule will have a leading role in Silver’s trial. The rule allows one lawyer to share a fee with another lawyer even if the first lawyer does no work. The rule requires written disclosures to the client, and it requires that the first lawyer accept responsibility for the other lawyer’s work in writing. Silver’s likely defense—already signaled—will be that it is both legal and ethical for a lawyer who does no work to share fees. Or if he violated the ethics rule by failing to do the required paperwork, he should be professionally disciplined, not federally prosecuted.
The thirty-five-page criminal complaint has the government’s response. It alleges that Silver used the ethics rule as a ruse to launder payments that were, in truth, in exchange for political favors, not client referrals. The complaint’s five counts charge that Silver did political favors to two real estate developers and a doctor, that in exchange for the favors the developers hired one law firm and the doctor steered patients to another law firm and that Silver got a cut of the fees that each firm earned from these clients. Of course, political favors are not crimes. They are what politicians do. But if they do them in exchange for money, it’s theft of the honest services they owe constituents and extortion, which are the crimes, along with conspiracy, leveled against Silver.