So you want to be my attorney: Portrait of Two Prominent Attorneys as Middle-Aged Men

Michael Avenatti's Past Won't Stop Him From Running in 2020 | Time

Avenatti and his most prominent client, Trump accuser,
Stormy Daniels.

Avenatti drinks approximately 15 shots of espresso each day–and makes sure everyone around him knows it. His chiseled jaw seems perpetually jutted forward, his wiry frame coiled. Veins bulge on the temples of his egg-shaped head. ....

Filings in a related bankruptcy case show that Avenatti’s firm had tax troubles. Court documents dated January 2018 reveal that Avenatti had paid $1.5 million of an outstanding $2.4 million tax liability but that the firm still owed the IRS approximately $880,000. Federal attorneys claimed in May that Avenatti had missed the first installment of that payment. Avenatti says his firm has “fully satisfied” all of its tax liabilities. The U.S. attorney’s office in L.A. declined to comment.

It wasn’t just fellow lawyers with whom Avenatti had troubles. In 2013 Avenatti teamed up with the actor Patrick Dempsey to buy the Seattle-based coffee chain Tully’s. But just two months after they finalized the deal, Dempsey sued to get out of the partnership, claiming in court that Avenatti had borrowed $2 million to help buy the company without telling him. Avenatti had purchased the Tully’s chain through a company he established in December 2012 called Global Baristas. In 2017 the IRS claimed Global Baristas owed $5 million in federal taxes. In March 2018 Tully’s closed all its stores.

New York magazine piece on David Boies

Weinstein, left, his counsel, Boies right

To those outside this professional circle, though, the Black Cube operation was appalling. In response, Boies issued a carefully worded email to his firm. He wrote that Weinstein’s “request to contract with investigators seemed at the time, like a reasonable accommodation for a longtime client,” but acknowledged it was “not thought through” and conceded that it “was a mistake to contract with, and pay on behalf of a client, investigators who we did not select and did not control.” He tried to rationalize away the conflict-of-interest issue by saying he thought he was actually serving the interests of the Times by testing the reliability of its sources. But beyond that, Boies sought to assign most responsibility to Weinstein and “his other counsel,” who he said were more closely involved in overseeing Black Cube. “Had I known at the time that this contract would have been used for the services that I now understand it was used for, I would never have signed it,” he wrote. “I would never knowingly participate in an effort to intimidate or silence women or anyone else … That is not who I am.”

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The takeaway, at least from these two vignettes:  surgeons get blood on their hands, lawyers....criminality.....hard not to get soiled from one or the other if you're in medicine or law....