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:
“O love, my love! if I no more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,—
How then should sound upon Life’s darkening slope
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
The wind of Death’s imperishable wing?”
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)
“There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)