Discussion on answer by ohwilleke: Do Trump's lawyers have a fiduciary duty to delay the proceedings?

In addition to the above, several insulting or otherwise entirely unproductive messages have been deleted (either by mods or by the result of flags) and several insults have been edited out of messages where deletion would leave the conversation otherwise difficult to follow. Please stick to discussing what the law is rather than opinions of other people involved in the discussion, their knowledge, etc.

@user76284 I guess that's the whole point: what are the constraints? Clearly if Trump can keep delaying all his trials until after the election, and he wins the election, all his legal problems will disappear. Is that a valid legal strategy? AFAIK his lawyers aren't using it overtly, they're trying things like asking for change of venue and appealing the immunity claim.

The substantive difficulty with your response here is that, after a first delay, most cases will be back where they started: losing would still present some financial risk to the defendant, counsel would again be obliged to request a further delay, and the judge would again be obliged to grant it - and so on.

@user76284 I'm pretty sure that everyone here - and I mean everyone - understands what "necessity loophole" refers to: the fact that if an attorney's fiduciary duty necessitated the court to grant a delay on that basis alone, then it would provide the means for the majority of cases to be delayed indefinitely, and the attorneys in these cases would be obligated, by that fiduciary duty, to use it.

Conclusion: Delay is never necessary for the discharge of a fiduciary duty.

@AlexanderThe1st We can make that case more formally, with a reductio ad absurdum:

P1 Defense attorneys' fiduciary duties to their clients can necessitate a delay.

P2 The defendant's fiduciary interests cannot be better served than by acquittal (and the sooner the better.)

P3 Acquittal is always possible (even if the defendant is guilty.)

@user76284: The point is more that, when you request a delay, the judge will ask for reason why - and almost certainly "So that my client can benefit from delaying the trial to get into a position where he can stop this trial" would not pass muster. Nobody has tried that specific delay before, but lying about the reason for the delay can have dire consequences when it is discovered.

@user76284: I think the thing you're missing here is that there are necessary delays, but they are for specific reasons related to being able to show up to the court, a change in lawyers (At which point one lawyer's fiduciary duty ends, and another lawyer's begins, with some delay to catch up on the details of the case.), or the defendant has a schedule conflict with another case. The same document @ohwileke cited does note that there is a concept in the court of law of "Delayed too long" -

The premise that a fiduciary duty for defense lawyers would create such a necessity is an extraordinary (and extraordinarily implausible) one, given the consequences, and would require some justification before it could be taken seriously.

Let's go through it in a bit more detail. Firstly, neither the question, the only answer proffered so far, nor any of the comments have established that any relevant fiduciary duty exists, so the entire discussion so far has been conducted as a hypothetical one. When we look at situations where fiduciary duties do exist, they do not create any legal justification, let alone a necessity, for those bound by the duty to take actions that would otherwise be prohibited.

@user76284: You are correct in understanding that I am not a lawyer - but it is my understanding that if none of the examples I listed are the case, then there's something else that prevents lawyers from doing the "Totally Necessary Delay for my client's other fiduciary requests, honest" approach for all trials.