The ethics of the white-collar defense: answering the dinner-party question

Every lawyer who defends people accused of financial crime has been asked the question. It arrives at dinners, at weddings, occasionally from friends who mean it kindly: how do you act for those people?

The question deserves a serious answer, because underneath it sits a serious premise — that by the time the state accuses someone of corruption or fraud, the accusation has already done the work of a verdict. In Pakistan, that premise fails more often, and more instructively, than in most places. Our answer to the dinner-party question is really an answer about what accusation is, and what it is not.

The short answer

The short answer is constitutional. Article 10A of the Constitution, inserted by the Eighteenth Amendment in 2010, guarantees every person a fair trial and due process in the determination of any criminal charge. A trial in which no one tests the state's evidence is not a fair trial; it is a ceremony. The Qanun-e-Shahadat Order, 1984 places the burden of proving an offence on the party asserting it. Those rules do not exist because the framers were naive about human nature. They exist because the framers were realistic about state power — about how easily an investigation becomes an instrument, and how rarely an instrument examines itself.

The presumption of innocence, properly understood, is not a compliment paid to the accused. It is a rule about who must do the work. The state, with its investigators, its powers of arrest, its ability to freeze accounts and summon witnesses, must prove the charge. The defense lawyer's role is to hold the state to that allocation. When we act for an accused person, we are not vouching for him. We are insisting that the most powerful litigant in the country carry its own burden all the way to the end.

The longer answer

The longer answer is historical, and Pakistan's accountability law supplies it. The National Accountability Ordinance, 1999 was promulgated in November 1999 by a military government. In its original form it permitted arrest during the inquiry stage, physical remand for periods far exceeding ordinary criminal procedure — up to ninety days — and placed on the accused the burden of accounting for assets said to exceed his known sources of income. Bail was ousted from the accountability courts themselves, so that liberty depended on the constitutional jurisdiction of the High Courts under Article 199. Whatever one thinks of any individual case brought under that instrument, its architecture was built to produce pressure, and pressure produces settlements, not truth.

The perimeter has moved repeatedly since. The amendments of 2022 narrowed the National Accountability Bureau's jurisdiction, shortened permissible remand, and removed statutory presumptions against the accused [PRECISE SCOPE OF THE 2022–2024 AMENDMENTS AND CURRENT REMAND PERIODS — TO BE VERIFIED BY REVIEWING LAWYER]. In 2023 the Supreme Court struck down parts of those amendments; in 2024 a larger bench, on review, restored them [CITATIONS — TO BE VERIFIED]. Four moves of the boundary line in roughly five years. A legal regime that volatile requires, as a matter of institutional hygiene, lawyers whose entire function is to ask on any given day: where exactly is the line now, and has the state stayed on its side of it?

The Ordinance's own settlement machinery makes the point from another direction. Its provisions for voluntary return and plea bargain allow an accused to pay and walk away. A person held on remand, with his accounts frozen and his name in the papers, who pays to end it, has proved nothing about his guilt. He has proved something about the price of process. Counting such outcomes as convictions flatters the system; a defense bar exists so that the choice between fighting and paying remains a real choice.

None of this makes defense work limitless, and the dinner-party question deserves that honesty too. We do not mislead a court. We do not manufacture evidence or coach a witness into a memory he does not have. We do not assert privilege over documents that are not privileged, and we do not lend our names to concealment dressed as advice. A defense lawyer who crosses those lines has not served his client zealously; he has joined the offence. The ethics of the defense are not the absence of limits. They are the observance of exact ones — test everything the state offers, and fabricate nothing in reply.

There is a final retort the question sometimes carries: you are describing procedure, not justice. We take the opposite view. Procedure is the only justice a court can actually administer. A court cannot see into a man's heart; it can only weigh what is proved before it, under rules that bind both sides. A verdict reached without testing is not a stronger verdict — it is not a verdict at all, merely a ratification of the file the investigator built. When the defense does its work, an acquittal means the state failed to prove its case, and a conviction means it succeeded under pressure. Both outcomes are worth more afterward. That is what we are doing for those people. It is also what we are doing for everyone who has not been accused yet.

What this means for you

If you are accused, or believe you may be, remember that the presumption of innocence is real but not self-executing — it does work only when someone makes it. Engage counsel before you answer anyone. Say nothing substantive to any investigator without advice, and do not settle a case simply to end a remand; that decision, once made, is very hard to unmake. And if you are only watching someone else's case in the news, extend the courtesy you would want extended: wait for the evidence. The charge sheet is the state's opening sentence. It is never the court's last one.