Shadow counsel or a Shadow lawyer is a term used in law to mean an appointed, duplicate, lawyer as an auxiliary or alternate, should the original lawyer (or legal team) fail in some way.
Shadow Counsel is a term used by conspiracy theorists to mean the secret police or any sort of hidden persons with power.
Shadow counsel is a legal term referring to a second lawyer that is appointed in secrecy to protect a witness from the other defendants who may be sharing the same lawyer (and thus, the known appointed lawyer is biased). Such a situation could be a drug conspiracy or people forced into being accomplices by a mob leader. Shadow counsel advises in the best interests of the witness.
A fictional, yet informative example would be the Law and Order: SVU episode, "Ace."
Famous quotes containing the words shadow and/or counsel:
“I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination to people with meaning.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948)
“It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle’s eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.”
—Kwame Nkrumah (1900–1972)