Is it possible (serious question) that attorneys sometimes turn down these cases on the basis of morality, but that we don’t hear about them for that very reason?

This happens all the time! It may shock some people here, but I actually do believe there are at least a few ethical attorneys out there who do this.

The problem is that you can then walk next door and see if THAT attorney will turn you down. Etc.

ALL attorneys have to turn it down, not just some, and the only way that will happen is if ethical violations actually result in real and effective disciplinary action. Since the odds of that happening are vanishingly small (to put it mildly), well…

It’s a fantasy, given the countless practical difficulties, and given that plaintiff lawyers & judges will find some jurisdictional basis to allow the suits anyway. Worked for boxing in the movie Gangs of New York, however.

I guess there’s always Mexico.

BUT (and that’s a huge but). I strongly believe that lawyer’s ethics rules are actively encouraging (or at least enabling) bad clients/lawsuits.

Essentially, I think that “duty of zealous representation” is not a good idea and instead main lawyer’s duty should be to have justice served (yes, he may take a somewhat one-sided point of view, but not a totally one-sided view as is the case now).

Not a lawyer, so I have to ask… can’t the lawyer?
For example, say something like, “well, I can’t tell you if suing this doctor is the right thing to do, you’ll have to make that decision… and if you do decide to sue, I’ll carry out my responsibilities with all the zeal the law allows,” followed by “but you should know that the possible consequences for the doctor are X Y and Z?”

Is it possible (serious question) that attorneys sometimes turn down these cases on the basis of morality, but that we don’t hear about them for that very reason?

Or is it perhaps that once a potential client is sitting in the chair and telling the attorney why he’s there, the attorney says “screw it, he wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want that doctor’s mercedes?

Again, not pretending to know, but interested.

But many such stories don’t. My old law firm defended suits for an internationally regarded children’s hospital that would routinely save the lives of premature and other endangered infants. As a result, many newborns who would have died shortly after birth in less sophisticated hospitals were saved. But these babies had high mortality rates later, because they were on the margin of survival. So of course the parents routinely sued the doctors who had heroically save their newborns earlier.

While you had to sympathasize with the parents’ grief, I often wondered how they could live with themselves. I wonder if, years later after the emotions ebb, they ever think back on the wrong that they’ve done to their doctors.

I don’t know who could communicate this, but no one in the system really explains to clients that their lawyers cannot make their moral choices for them. Indeed, the duty of zealous representation may sometimes require lawyers to do things that, while compliant with the rules of ethics, are immoral. I guess it’s easy to rationalize advice of counsel as a reason for doing something that, deep down, you know is wrong.