That case you so desperately want, the one that will launch you into the stratosphere and add your name to the pantheon of great and important lawyers.  The one that will destroy you. The  high profile case.

Walter C. Bansley III took on a case that seized the State of Connecticut, defending Joshua Komisarjevsky, accused with Stephen Hayes of the 2007  Cheshire home-invasion :

July 2007, Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes invaded a home in Cheshire; beat and tied up Dr. William Petit; raped and strangled his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit; molested one of their daughters; and set the family’s house on fire before attempting to flee.

The two daughters — 17-year-old Hayley Petit and 11-year-old Michaela Petit, both of whom had been tied to their beds — died of smoke inhalation. Petit escaped to a neighbor’s home.

 Certainly in Connecticut, and likely everywhere else in the country, this case was huge news.  This is why Bansley’s name is a household word in America, right?  What? You’ve never heard of him? 

Lesson number one: The story is about the case, not the lawyer.  Sure, sometimes the lawyer becomes well known outside of legal circles, but in the vast majority of cases, the lawyer is background noise in the story and even if they garner a little public recognition, it’s soon forgotten when the next big case comes along.

What does last, however, is the impact of a case like this.  From the Hartford Courant :

“I have had clients leave me after they learned I was involved in this case,” Bansley said. “They recognized that I would be working 50 to 60 hours a week on this and would not have the time for them. When this case is over, I will really have no practice left.”

Since taking the Komisarjevsky case, Bansley has lost friends, he said. When bricks were thrown through the windows of his New Haven law office, he moved to a location he now keeps secret.

Unless you’ve had the pleasure of dealing with a case of this magnitude, combined with the incessant intrusion of the media looking to engage you in lengthy discussion on a near constant basis because you become the source of their material and exist so they have something to write about day after day, you can’t begin to appreciate the time suck a high profile case can be.

Rather than be a draw for new clients, it scares them away.  First, the hard factor is time, as you simply have no time to handle anything else, and existing clients who loved you dearly before hand become less enamored when you can’t be found or reached for days.

The soft factor is perception, that a lawyer so “important” is too important for their cases, and they become afraid to call, thinking their murder isn’t worthy of your very important time.  While some potential clients, often with psychological issues of their own, think an important lawyer is suddenly worthy of their shoplifting case, these generally aren’t the sort of clients you want.  You wonder why old clients and good cases are going elsewhere as you are tied up with the big case.  This is why.

But at least there’s the money, right?  Big cases bring big bucks?

On top of all of that, Bansley battles the growing public perception that defending Komisarjevsky is making the three-member defense team rich.

Defense attorneys say it’s quite the contrary.

From 2007 through Sept. 1 of this year, the state spent $506,509.79 on Komisarjevsky’s defense, according to Deborah Del Prete Sullivan, legal counsel and executive assistant public defender of the Office of the Chief Public Defender.

Of that amount, Bansley was paid $200,648.43. Jeremiah Donovan received $192,380.30, and Todd A. Bussert was paid $97,317.61, according to Del Prete Sullivan.

On the surface, $200k doesn’t seem too terrible, but if you do some basic math, you see it’s only about $50,000 a year.  Not quite food stamp territory, but he’s definitely studying the dollar menu when he dines out.  For a good lawyer, or one with a couple of kids who like to eat every day, this isn’t going to provide for a lavish lifestyle.

There are remarkably few big cases that pay well, mostly because few defendants in these cases have any assets to speak of, such that the lawyers are living off the largesse of the state.  And in those rarest of the rare, the high profile case involving a wealthy defendant, even they aren’t always inclined to compensate for the amount of time involved.  Aside from the time spent daily working on the case itself, the amount of time eaten up by the media is absolutely mindboggling.  Think of calls at home at 11 p.m. because of a deadline the next day and the compulsion not to piss off a reporter whose information and friendship (or at least absence of animosity) you may need.

Granted, a few lawyers have transformed their transitory notoriety into public personas that have garnered television gigs, like Star Jones, Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren.  A few others have tried and, while seeming to have traction for a brief period, ended up falling by the wayside.   Judge Judy Sheindlin pulled down $28 million last year, but not everybody can make a career of being snippy,

There are a bunch of lawyers, young and old, dying to get their hands on a high profile case, to make their name and launch their careers.  Or kill their careers as they case may be.  And I haven’t even mentioned the worst thing that can happen, that you get the big case and the world finds out that you’re not the next Clarence Darrow, but that you’re crappy lawyer.  That can happen too.

H/T Ed at  BlawgReview