What if you tried to run a business but nobody came? Well, that happens if you’re either selling something people don’t want or doing a poor job of it. There’s no guarantee when you open your doors that anybody will show. But Du Jour Bakery made delicious baked goods, loved by patrons, and still it’s struggling.

The answer, obviously, is that coronavirus sheltering means people are staying home, not going to the bakery and not buying the “outrageous delectables, including dozens of muffins the size of baseballs,” that would otherwise sustain the bakery as a viable enterprise.

It means Vera has three employees, where she once had 10. It means she does all the baking herself, where she once had another baker, now living back home with his parents. It means she’s taking in 40 percent of what she once did, though she’ll still turn a modest profit this month if her landlords accept $5,000 in rent, rather than the customary $8,800. (So far, no. They’re tacking the balance onto next month’s bill.)

To be fair, maintaining 40% of her pre-COVID revenues isn’t bad, and far better than many others. But isn’t there stimulus money to keep her going?

President Trump’s relief effort to aid small businesses has not been “a tremendous success” and “executed flawlessly,” as he still maintained on Friday. American banks had to turn away hundreds of thousands of small businesses for Paycheck Protection Program loans these last two weeks, suggesting that the additional $300 billion in the proposed next round of legislation most likely still won’t be enough.

Some have said they got their PPP money quickly and easily, but most tell of being caught up in a laughable circle jerk of crashed websites, promises of portals opening any day now, requirements that sole props provide corporate docs that don’t exist and other goofiness, all of which would be funny but for the fact that it meant they got no funds before the “sorry, we love you but you’re screwed” notice went out. You could call and argue with a nice person having no authority to help, if you wanted to hold for three plus hours to delightful muzak only to have the line go dead.

But what about criminal defense lawyers? We don’t sell anything delectable. We clean up misery, and while there is misery to spare, it’s not the sort of misery that keeps criminal defense lawyers afloat.

With the courts mostly closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and many cases postponed for months, what is a criminal lawyer to do?

“The impact has been huge. It’s pretty devastating,” said Emily Dixon, a sole practitioner based in Toronto. “I’m a young lawyer. My business has been totally impacted by the closure of the courts.”

Navigating the work done by various levels of private criminal defense lawyers often goes unrecognized by those who aren’t in the trenches. I remember well the glib discussions when I was a young lawyer, about how I would never go hungry as there would always be criminals. Except it wasn’t that simple, although I never explained it during the cocktail parties.

The vast majority of people charged with criminal offenses were poor shmucks arrested for the pettiest of crimes. They didn’t have a pot to piss in for themselves, no less money to pay a lawyer. They were the public defender’s bread and butter, and the closest a private criminal defense lawyer came to them was the indigent defense panel assignment, barely enough to keep the office lights on and paid months later, if at all.

In other words, there are good criminal cases and not so good, the representation of people who could afford to pay a lawyer and were willing to do so. Good honest criminals saw legal fees as a cost of doing business, the rent if you will. But there were never enough of those clients, and they’ve gone down dramatically over the past two decades.

Even so, many will go the public defender route until they know the case is sufficiently “serious” to warrant reaching deep into their pocket. By then, it was often too late, the critical initial work having been neglected and opportunity to mount a vigorous challenge squandered.

Now, even that work is in the wind.

Some criminal defence lawyers have been navigating the “new normal” in the justice system since March by representing people in remote bail hearings and guilty pleas, usually over the phone.

But for lawyers like Dixon, who mainly does trials, work has almost completely dried up, as the courts have postponed those cases. She said she genuinely does not know what she’ll do to earn a decent income over the next few months as expenses, especially office rent, still need to be paid.

Courts are closed. Phones are silent. The good honest criminals are staying home, as there’s no money to be made dying from COVID-19. The defendants who have the money, and are willing to pay the money, for a hard-working, decent criminal defense lawyer are in it for the money, as it’s just a business, except they don’t sell cupcakes. Without them out on the street committing crimes, they don’t get arrested. If they don’t get arrested, they don’t need lawyers.

Yet, criminal defense lawyers whose livelihoods rely on good honest criminals stare at their silent phone. The landlord still wants the rent. The copy machine company will wants its monthly vig, as do the telephone, legal research and internet companies. The paralegals, receptionist, maybe even a secretary, not to mention the bright-eyed associate, all need to eat as well.

Before this struck, the young criminal defense lawyer was supporting her work family and the major corporations whom she knew didn’t really love her, but whose goods and services she needed. She was doing the work she chose to do, making enough money to survive but not much more in profit than her paras were paid, and hopeful about the future when she would take down the high-profile big money cases like the few old-timers who remain in the game.

When a bakery fails, there will be some sad cupcakes in the trash out back. When a criminal defense lawyer’s phone goes from silent to disconnected, will anybody notice?