It's Always a Question of Trust
My wife's grandfather used to have a saying that was already not too uncommon. "Lawyers are liars" is what he kept saying and he wanted none of his kids or grandkids to become lawyers. He thought they had all mastered the art of twisting facts or making the good people look guilty, whereas the guilty parties somehow become "victims" (through creative storytelling).
There's a widespread stigma of lawyers being manipulative and chronically dishonest, so that they do the same with their finances ought not be so shocking. Almost half a decade ago I saw how our employer was likely embezzling money (before realising that it had also embezzled my colleagues and I; a very large pension provided later formally confirmed this to my colleagues and I). It seemed like money paid by a client for hosting bills (Bytemark) was instead diverted elsewhere and our boss, already sheltering himself in the US after a rather ugly divorce (his second divorce), was 'shuffling' through credit cards trying to pay a client's set of bills (that the client had already paid for). Put another way, he was not only borrowing lots of money; he was misusing money meant for one purpose to cover other things, e.g. paying salaries using money allocated for critical operations.
From what I can gather (and could gather years ago), the solicitors' firm we chose 2 years ago was financially stable and unlikely to misuse funds. Now, in 2026, it's hard to say the same about any law firm. Here in Manchester, for instance, a lot of law firms shut down and some got 'folded' (absorbed) into larger ones - basically an "exit" (a way of dissolving). The same goes for the old and Manchester-based firm of our solicitor, based on its last financial report (before it ceased to exist).
One aspect we'd like to show (having long explored it) in the coming years is the true state of law firms. They all pretend to be vastly bigger than they really are ("skeleton crews"), they pretend to be doing exceptionally well (even when they're on the verge of collapse), and they can become "leeches" to their clients, whom they eventually exploit for business purposes irrespective of their clients' interests.
Techrights has long written about lawyers, typically patent lawyers and sometimes copyright lawyers (we wrote more about defamation lawyers when the pestering began to intensify in 2015) and it's a topic not many news sites are willing to touch because it's considered "risky" when thin-skinned men with a law degree (they mostly use women as "props") try to crush criticism and censor negative reviews. █
Image source: Trial of a Sow and Pigs at Lavegny