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:
“The vanishing volatile froth of the present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the Adamantine Record of the past.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“But thus I counsel you, my friends: mistrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is strong!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)