Abuse by Lawyers: Recognising Misconduct, Coercion and Your Options
- Megan Maysie
- 5 hours ago
- 11 min read
Abuse by lawyers. Whether it’s litigation abuse or professional misconduct- including fees that almost and sometimes do bankrupt the parties- for those people caught up in a litigious experience, it can feel more like a black hole into which your energy, resources, and time sink.
“Men are tight-fisted in keeping control of their fortunes, but when it comes to the matter of wasting time, they are positively extravagant in the one area where there is honour in being miserly.”- Seneca
And this is often the crux of the problem: Lawyers work within a system, and that system converts time to money in the form of legal costs. While people generally consult lawyers because they are seeking justice, once you’re in the system, you’re a case.
Why can the experience of engaging with the legal system itself become psychologically traumatic?
Predators: Lawyers Abusing Clients
The legal industry frequently invokes the importance of its "reputation," yet actions consistently speak louder than words. While a shrinking breed of diligent jurists still practices with skill and genuine integrity, they are increasingly overshadowed by a culture that prioritizes power plays over justice. By a group of abusive lawyers.
The Dark Triad and the "God-Complex"
Some research has found law students score higher than average on Dark Triad- narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy- personality traits, while other studies suggest large corporate legal environments can reinforce highly competitive behaviours through reward structures such as billable hours. These findings do not describe most lawyers, but they raise important questions about how professional culture shapes conduct.
Because questions arise over whether these environments fuel a "God-complex," where lawyers cease to be advocates and instead manipulate the law as an extraction machine for ego and profit.
The Toxic Mask: Performance vs. Reality
Many lawyers feel pressured to adopt a "toxic mask" to survive. This manifests in two ways:
Psychological Masking & Workplace Toxicity: Suppressing humanity and neurodivergence to maintain a facade of unshakeable, robotic competence.
Toxic “Mask-ulinity" and Professional Ideology: Rejecting vulnerability and health precautions to project an image of invulnerability.
Behind this mask, however, often lies the bully. As discussed in Lawyer Bullying Tactics, aggressive behavior is frequently rationalized as necessary advocacy, but in reality, it is a tool for intimidation. In Gods of Law, we see that this abuse is not just a personal failing- it’s a systemic design that weaponizes trauma against vulnerable litigants to ensure financial attrition. As noted:
Trauma inflicted upon clients is not just a byproduct of the system, but a revealing mirror that exposes the hollowness of the abusers.
The Vulnerability of the Practitioner
There's more to lawyer abuse than meets the eye. We must also acknowledge that the industry's reluctance to adopt trauma-informed practices is a double-edged sword. Lawyers themselves suffer from vicarious trauma, yet the stigma against mental health keeps them trapped in a cycle of maladaptive responses. When lawyers fail to manage their own trauma, they often project it onto their clients, transforming a legal dispute into a site of institutional betrayal.
When Advocacy Becomes Abuse
When an industry financially rewards prolonged litigation, it creates structural incentives that can permit client exploitation. It is a multi-layered violation: the bullying, the manufactured delays, and the financial exploitation. When a profession abandons its duty to the client in favor of its own survival, It’s the most vulnerable who bear the cost.
This is how abuse of power by a lawyer unfolds…
Procedural Injustice
Tom R. Tyler’s work on procedural justice (particularly Why People Obey the Law) is foundational for understanding abuse by lawyers. People obey the law, believe in justice, and therefore trust lawyers. But sometimes that trust is misplaced. Legal professional misconduct is a reality.
Procedural injustice isn't just unfair rules. It's a system designed to force a layperson to navigate a system designed by and for professionals. Tyler’s work shows that people value the process as much as the outcome. But when that process is weaponized (delay, complexity, jargon), the trauma is magnified. The key concepts are:
Voice: People want the opportunity to tell their side of the story. When a legal system (or regulator) denies this through procedural hurdles or dismissiveness, the feeling of being unheard- or shut out and shut down- becomes a primary source of trauma.
Neutrality: The process must be transparent and based on consistent rules, not backroom deals or biased applications.
Respect: This is the interpersonal side. Even if a person loses their case, they are more likely to accept the outcome if they feel they were treated with dignity and that the authority figure took their concerns seriously.
Trustworthiness: This involves the perception that the authority is sincerely trying to do what is right. When this is broken- as described the Institutional Betrayal and Systemic Injustice sections of this article- the entire legal system loses its legitimacy in the eyes of the victim.
Voice and respect are not simply components of procedural justice. They’re essential if the legal profession wishes to retain public trust and amplify the aspirations of the legal industry to be regarded as a profession, to lean into good reputation, which is perceived as rapidly declining.
In a December 2024 Gallup poll, on ethical careers as perceived by the public, lawyers sat at around 17% "High/Very High" and 33% "Low/Very Low." At the bottom were lobbyists and lawmakers (Members of Congress). Lawyers ranked near the bottom too.
When lawyers get it right, the research confirms that even if a litigant loses their case, they can find closure if they feel they were heard and treated as human. But the statistics suggest that most the time, they aren’t getting it right. The trauma arises when the process denies them both a fair outcome and the basic dignity of being heard.
When the system fails core tenets of Procedural Justice- (Voice, Neutrality, Respect, Trust), it isn't just inconvenient- it is a psychologically re-traumatization event.
And when the process itself becomes the predator, we stop looking at procedural failure and start looking at something much darker: Institutional Betrayal.
Institutional Betrayal: When Accountability Causes Further Harm
Systemic injustice and lawyer conduct converge as a second trauma: institutional betrayal. The first trauma is the reason for being within the legal system- a motor vehicle accident, an estate after losing a loved one, an accident that leads to personal injury, a divorce, or the bitter fight over child custody. These are primary sources of trauma.
The second trauma is the discovery that the system designed for protection (the law and its regulator) is indifferent or actively complicit in the delay. That realization is the psychological turning point. Dr Jennifer Joy Freyd, PhD. has worked extensively on betrayal trauma, betrayal blindness, DARVO, institutional betrayal, and institutional courage.
Her valuable work is seminal and covers several pivotal elements of trauma:
Betrayal trauma: When someone you trust and/or someone who has power over you mistreats you. Betrayal trauma is associated with measurable harm, both physical and mental- she describes it as toxic.
Institutional betrayal: Developed from betrayal trauma theory, institutional betrayal is when the institution you trust or depend upon mistreats you- including a failure to protect you when protection is a reasonable expectation. Again, both mental and physical measurable harm ensues.
Betrayal blindness: The unawareness, not-knowing, and forgetting exhibited by people towards betrayal. She notes that victims, perpetrators, and witnesses may display betrayal blindness in order to preserve relationships, institutions, and social systems upon which they depend.
Institutional DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender): When the system makes you feel like you are the problem for complaining, Freyd’s work gives you the language to name that process as a standard institutional mechanism, not your own lack sanity. It’s gaslighting.
Jennifer Freyd defines institutional betrayal as harm caused not only by individual wrongdoing but also by an institution's failure to prevent or respond appropriately to that wrongdoing. Importantly, it includes acts of omission- for example, failing to protect people when they have a reasonable expectation of protection. It's about what happens after someone seeks accountability for the first layer of trauma.
These concepts explain what happens when institutions that people reasonably depend on fail to protect them or respond appropriately to harm. The key isn't that the institution is malicious- it's that the institution's response can itself become part of the injury, much like a person post trauma seeks redress in the legal industry but comes up against what feels like a brick wall over an extended period- that depletes resources at an alarming rate. Litigation is exhorbitantly expensive (this alone makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, to access justice).
And when faced with overtly bad lawyer conduct, when a lawyer abuses their client, some turn to the legal regulator- but often, a whole new trauma takes shape. Someone enters the process believing:
there are professional standards;
misconduct will be investigated fairly;
reporting protects others;
the regulator exists to uphold the profession's integrity.
If the process instead feels opaque, dismissive, or procedurally stacked against them, the resulting distress isn't just about the original lawyer's conduct. It's also about the loss of trust in the institution that was expected to provide accountability.
The value of Freyd's work is that it gives a well-established conceptual framework for people within this gauntlet to understand how it all happened.
Architecture of Systemic Injustice: Abuse By the Legal System
Procedural justice explains which features of a process tend to build or erode that trust. Institutional betrayal explains why the experience can feel like a profound breach of trust. Systemic justice goes to the design of the system, and it’s flaws that protect the lawyers, rather than society as a whole.
Most lawyers are not malicious. Most judges are not corrupt. Yet, many people emerge from litigation financially devastated, psychologically exhausted, and profoundly betrayed.
This contradiction exists because systemic injustice- the architecture of injustice- is rarely the result of a single bad actor. It emerges when institutional incentives reward behaviors that conflict with the human purpose of justice. As the late legal scholar Deborah Rhode argued, the shameful irony of the legal system is that the profession prioritizes its own economic self-interest and procedural comfort over the public it’s sworn to serve.
The Structural Drivers of Systemic Injustice:
The Repeat Player Advantage: Legal scholar Marc Galanter's, Why the Haves Come Out Ahead (1974) observed that institutional litigants with vast resources hold enduring advantages over ordinary people. For the individual, litigation is a one-time crisis; for the repeat player, it’s just a cost of doing business.
Institutional Self-Regulation: Rhode’s research confirms that the legal regulator’s current system of self-regulation consistently protects the profession’s reputation at the expense of victim accountability. When the fox guards the henhouse, the resulting perception is that the system protects itself before protecting the public..
And the consequence isn’t just an unfair outcome- it’s the erosion of public confidence. When the legal process becomes an exhausting contest of endurance rather than a search for truth, it creates a secondary trauma. Systemic injustice differs from misconduct. Misconduct is an individual breaking the rules; systemic injustice occurs when everyone follows the rules, yet the cumulative effect still produces unnecessary harm.
Institutional Courage
Institutional betrayal naturally leads into considering institutional courage: If the problem is systemic rather than merely individual, then institutions face a choice. They can acknowledge the problem and respond with integrity- or they can protect themselves. When they choose self-protection over accountability, people experience institutional betrayal.
Institutional courage is what happens when organisations choose transparency, accountability and learning instead of defensiveness. Dr Jennifer Freyd. has worked extensively on subjects including betrayal trauma, institutional betrayal, and institutional courage, including addressing institutional DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender) and has much to contribute to lawyers seeking to serve their clients, toserve justice.
Institutional courage was developed by Freyd's group as the opposite of institutional betrayal and includes things like:
transparency;
accountability;
responding well to disclosures;
learning from mistakes;
protecting those who report wrongdoing.
While institutional betrayal is the second layer of trauma, it takes institutional courage to go some way towards resolving it. It’s what a truly professional system should look like.
Institutional courage is one thing. But the courage of one person to speak truth to power? Well, that takes an entirely different form of courage. Real courage. No safety in numbers.
Whistleblowers in the Legal Industry
Institutional courage is what happens when organisations choose transparency, accountability and learning instead of defensiveness. But it rarely begins from within. It’s usually often prompted by people willing to report wrongdoing to the legal regulator despite the personal cost. That moments a client contemplates, can I report a lawyer for misconduct?
Is a Complainant a Whistleblower?
The practitioners you’d think, would be more invested in maintaining a professional industry, but it doesn’t work that way. The flaws and gaps enable them to push the boundaries on conduct, and extract more, which brings up an interesting point on whether complainants to law societies or legal councils legally are whistleblowers.
Strictly speaking, they’re not. Professionals often recognise that reporting misconduct carries risks and may warrant protections, yet members of the public may face comparable emotional and practical burdens when reporting misconduct, yet generally do so without equivalent institutional safeguards.
If a profession imposes an ethical duty on its own members to report misconduct but simultaneously recognises that doing so requires protections because of the risks involved, it highlights that reporting wrongdoing can carry significant personal costs. Yet complainants often undertake a similar act of reporting without equivalent structural protections.
Both may encounter similar dynamics: exposing misconduct, challenging institutional interests, and potentially facing personal or procedural burdens as a result. But complainants are individuals speaking truth to power, for whom, arguably, protection is vastly more necessary than for practitioners seeking to maintain collegial relationships.
Because a complainant isn't necessarily "out to get" a lawyer. In many cases they're acting like a whistleblower: alerting the profession to conduct they believe falls below its own ethical standards. Whether the complaint is upheld is a separate question, but the act of reporting can and should be understood as an attempt to improve the integrity of the system.
Yet many complainants experience challenges commonly associated with whistleblowing, including isolation, credibility challenges, and the emotional burden of reporting misconduct. It often feels like a gauntlet to traverse- First the trauma for which they seek justice, next the trauma of dealing with a predatory practitioner, and when turning to the "authorities” a third layer of trauma often awaits.
For Those Subjected to Abuse by Lawyers, Time is Fleeting
This is NOT another article about bad lawyers. It’s bigger than that. It's about what happens when traumatised people enter systems that were not designed around trauma- and add an extra layer. And it happens where:
A profession's legitimacy depends on public confidence,
Public confidence depends in part on effective accountability,
Accountability mechanisms are perceived as ineffective or unfair, and trust in both the profession and the broader justice system can be undermined.
The philosopher Seneca's philosophy is about living well. And that’s what is taken from ordinary people spiraling down the legal industry: Living well. After the initial traumatic their lives are often on hold as they seek to understand the injustice, to access justice, to help them heal. But the system isn’t built that way. It’s a business model.
Seneca warned that time is our most precious possession because, once lost, it cannot be recovered. For many people, prolonged litigation extracts precisely that price. The legal system may demand money, but it also consumes something far more valuable: months and years that could have been spent healing instead of fighting, rebuilding instead of waiting, and living instead of litigating.
The legal system doesn't merely consume financial resources; it often consumes time- the one resource that no court can restore. And the present slips away.
"Present time is very brief, so brief, indeed, that to some there seems to be none; for it is always in motion, it ever flows and hurries on…”Seneca
Let the victims of abuse understand just one thing- it’s your time, it’s your life. Do everything you need to do, and do it diligently. If you have the energy remaining to fight the system after a long and difficult road, by all means, fight the system. But perhaps you would be better served by using that energy to heal, to rebuild, to live. To live to fight another day.
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