Servants of the Damned

I've been pretty put off by big name lawyers in America in the first time I read She Said and Catch and Kill and saw how Harvey Weinstein was able to intimidate and threaten his victims, any witnesses and the journalists wanting to uncover his crimes - by employing high powered lawyers and using their full legal apparatus against those who possibly couldn't afford costly legal challenges.

And this book only increases my ire and makes me more pessimistic because nothing is going to change. Big law and politics and multibillion dollar corporations are all deeply intertwined and nothing's gonna separate them. Corporations will continue to spend significant amounts of money on their lawyers so that they can do whatever they want with impunity and as less government oversight as possible; the big law firms will throw all their power at the government lawyers who probably will never have enough budgets to confront big corporations; and lawyers and high level government officials will just keep changing their jobs from law firm to government to lobbying to law firm ... till it's just a vicious circle, where all these people with money and power get what they want, and the public is left with nothing.

Jones Day is just one part of this big corrupt enterprise, which the author goes deep into explaining the origins of and how as the firm grew, it changed from a principled midwestern law firm to a right wing legal organization where power is prime and there is no ethical boundary while serving a client. I don't know why I keep reading these books which just make me despair more, but I guess atleast knowing a bit about the reality of our world is much better than being totally ignorant.