As a result of these practices, women are subject to any number of economic and emotional assaults by their own attorneys, who may well collude with their husbands' attorneys to manipulate a settlement favorable to the lawyers. Vulnerable spouses are overcharged, coerced into trading off property rights for the right to keep custody of their children, and manipulated in various ways into conceding their rights. Some of these practices, which will be described in detail, are unethical, others clearly illegal. There are also those vast, murky, gray areas that allow ethics and common decency to be evaded. On one hand, there are so many ethics rules, so many of them ill-defined and cast along such narrow technical lines, that what clearly seems like morally indefensible behavior to the lay person turns into a debate between lawyers over legal technicalities.
Lawyers rest their argument on what's legal rather than what's right or wrong, unfair or equitable.
For example, in a contemporary case, a matrimonial lawyer not only properly advised his affluent client that it was perfectly legal not to pay sufficient alimony if the judge agreed and ordered a low award, but then when the client decided to adopt this option, the lawyer agreed to take the case. All the while, the lawyer knew that without sufficient alimony the woman would lose all financial security and become destitute. All Rights Reserved.