Stain on the Profession
I, like most of America it seems, have become hooked on listening to the podcast entitled “The Murdaugh Murders” written and hosted, in most part, by journalist Mandy Matney. With the verdict in, we now have the ability to sit back and carefully pick through all that went wrong in the attorney life of Mr. Alex Murdaugh.
Doesn’t it all make us look bad? I mean, Mr. Murdaugh did nothing short of reassure people that attorneys should be found at the bottom of the sea. Not only has it been proven that he lied, cheated, stole and ultimately was convicted of killing two people (people that were closer to him than any others in the world), but the legacy of Mr. Murdaugh committing all of these horrible misdeeds all the while being a card carrying member of his State’s Bar cannot be softened, minimized or ignored. We as attorneys are absolutely kidding ourselves if we don’t think that we will need to rectify this reality with that of our own practices.
However, if you listened to the testimony in the trial, you would have seen that some of the witnesses in the trial were attorneys who portrayed a stark contrast to Mr. Murdaugh, and hopefully served to dispel some of the stench Mr. Murdaugh was emitting. Namely the civil attorneys who were representing clients in lawsuits against Mr. Murdaugh. Mr. Murdaugh seems to represent the extreme evil archetype of the portrait of an American lawyer. What better representative of the worst of our profession than an attorney who lied to his partners and clients, stole money from his partners and clients, who was highly addicted to controlled substances, and ultimately laid hands on those who trusted him most and ended their lives in such a brutal manner. Mr. Murdaugh managed to check every single dark box in our profession that represents bright line rules of what an attorney should never do. All of what can make us attorneys the devil existed within Mr. Murdaugh.
What are we as attorneys to learn from Mr. Murdaugh? Are we to learn anything at all, or are we to quickly cast him aside as the outlier? That Mr. Murdaugh was an anomaly; not a real attorney; not an example to be examined and then learned from? I think it is easy for us to turn away from the perilous tale of former attorney Mr. Murdaugh and label his legal life as something that was just so outrageously bad that it could not be instructive of anything set in reality. I think this is a mistake. I think we attorneys have a lot to learn from Mr. Murdaugh’s life as an attorney. Do I think we are one slippery slope from murdering our families? No. I do not believe that. But I do often think of the saying “There but for the grace of God, go I.” If we are to fully believe SOME of what Mr. Murdaugh said, then we have to believe the narrative that Mr. Murdaugh, very early in his career, started to suffer greatly from opioid addiction. So much so that for the majority of his legal career Mr. Murdaugh was, most likely, not operating with any type of unaltered legal mind. His addiction and the decisions he made while heavily addicted became the baseline by which he made all his decisions as an attorney. So that, it seems, he never had any time where he actually practiced the law in a manner that was consistent with the integrity and trust invested in all of us by the profession. He never had to think about what it meant to be a fiduciary, as he never practiced being a fiduciary as an attorney. It seems his whole legal life was based on never actually implementing the tools and skills taught to us in law school. Did he learn them to begin with? I am sure he did. But once he crossed the Bar, his first decision to never implement them was never overruled.
But, let’s be clear: Mr. Murdaugh did not murder his wife and youngest son due to his opioid addiction. Period. It is more likely than not that Mr. Murdaugh entered the legal profession as a self-centered, entitled, psychopathic young man…in my opinion. So, when he was given the trust of the legal profession, and the ability and power given to us attorneys by the profession, it was almost inevitable that Mr. Murdaugh would become the Mr. Murdaugh that just got sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
One of the many things I think we attorneys should learn from Mr. Murdaugh is that not every person that gets a J.D. should be a licensed attorney. We cannot just trust that the one little interview we get prior to taking the Bar is nearly enough to weed out those bad apples that are trying to join our ranks. Hell, once upon a time police officers were required to undergo a psychological evaluation prior to getting hired by a department (I think a lot of those requirements have gone by the waste side). I am sure there were a lot of warning signs present prior to Mr. Murdaugh’s licensure, and shortly thereafter, that made it clear that he was not a suitable person to be a licensed attorney. But those warning signs were ignored. We need to do a lot better in screening those persons who want to join our ranks. Passing the Bar and the MPRE shouldn’t be enough to just get you your license. I understand there is always the fear of discrimination when we start implementing hurdles to cross in order to graduate to a particular sect of society. But we all know some people with whom we graduated law school who we feared would become an attorney, and whom we prayed could not pass the Bar so they couldn’t become an attorney. Those same people almost always wound up getting censured or disbarred down the road for some derelict actions. So why not spare the hurt and pain they cause by just putting some additional effort in finding out their suitability to the profession?
I think what we can also take away from this horrific tale is that we need to do a hell of a better job at policing ourselves. If we are to continue to entrust in one another the duty to report other attorneys for truly unethical conduct, then we are going to have to start performing at grade A level. Because Mr. Murdaugh’s example shows us that we are performing at grade C- at best.
The Murdaugh Murders podcast was a portrait of a dysfunctional and powerful family deeply embedded in the local legal community whose most popular and bombastic member ultimately met his downfall. It was clearly meant to be informative but entertaining. However, I think it can also be instructive to us in the profession of what we can do better for the public we serve and for ourselves.
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