News emerged today that Sam Bankman-Fried has settled on a legal strategy ahead of his criminal trial this October, and it amounts to this:
The lawyers made me do it.
“Sam Bankman-Fried intends to argue he was acting in ‘good faith’ in loaning funds to FTX and Alameda executives, in setting Signal messages to auto-delete and in setting up a set of North American entities because he was following the advice of lawyers, including law firm Fenwick & West,” Nikhilesh De, CoinDesk’s regulatory editor, wrote Thursday.
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De reports on a letter from SBF’s lawyers, published Wednesday, that details this so-called “advice of counsel” strategy. SBF is accused by federal prosecutors of “multiple schemes to defraud,” including wire, commodities and securities fraud, and he faces decades in prison if found guilty.
His emerging strategy defense is certainly clever in theory, and aligns with some of the other messaging that SBF has been making since the spectacular collapse of FTX last November. The 31-year-old fallen crypto king has been presenting himself as young and hapless, too callow to have orchestrated any great evil. As he tells it, he was simply out of his depth, a creature molded by older, more experienced collaborators – like his lawyers at Fenwick & West, a mid-sized firm specializing in advising tech startups.
The question is whether this blame-the-lawyers strategy will work.
CoinDesk reached out to several defense attorneys and crypto-specialist legal minds for comment.
Ira Lee Sorkin, a defense lawyer best known for advising Bernie Madoff, said the “advice of counsel” strategy was fairly common in white-collar cases and could be productive for him. The prosecutors have to show that SBF intended to defraud, so a strategy to show that he acted on outside advice, rather than independently, could be useful.
But it comes with risks for SBF’s team. For one, his former lawyers at Fenwick & West could well be called upon as witnesses by the prosecution, an eventuality with an uncertain outcome. “It can be precarious because you are putting people who have advised you in the firing line,” Sorkin told…
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