I find this generally a really interesting discussion. I think, from a personal standpoint, a lot of lawyers get good at separating themselves personally/ emotionally from their work. Their job, obviously within the caveats and constraints of practice rules etc, is to do as good a job for their client as possible and their success is measured by the same. Obviously, these sorts of issues are going to manifest themselves very differently in a commercial context as opposed to a criminal law setting, but I think the principle broadly stays the same.
Before I went down the commercial route, I'd planned to go to the criminal bar in Scotland (and made some headway into it before realising I wanted other things) and this was something I thought about a lot (being asked "oh how could you want to defend someone who's done XYZ?!?!"). I always found it very easy to square with myself: everyone is entitled to a fair trial and a robust defence only serves to strengthen convictions, not weaken them.
That said, I definitely acknowledge that it's easy to say from the perspective, fundamentally, of an outsider. Can I say without a doubt that, if I'd been a lawyer in the run up to the '07 crash, and knew in advance that RBS was going to collapse, that I wouldn't have drained my accounts, or wanted (key word, wanted!) to tell my parents, or my gran, to empty theirs, knowing that they could lose everything they've worked for? Tough one, and almost impossible to answer without being in the situation, but the rules remain rules and they're ultimately there for a reason across every practice area and specialism.
