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The main issue at play, from what I read in this story [0], is worry he will gum up the trail by saying everything was on the advice of his lawyers. Which would

by generj 3y ago

The main issue at play, from what I read in this story [0], is worry he will gum up the trail by saying everything was on the advice of his lawyers. Which would then require hauling the lawyers in and clarifying they of course never told their client to commit fraud or “borrow” billions of dollars of customer money. >> One decision for Kaplan is whether Bankman-Fried will be allowed to blame FTX lawyers when the jury is back in the courtroom. As we previously wrote, this is called an "advice-of-counsel defense" in which SBF could argue that he sought advice from company lawyers, received advice that his conduct was legal, and "relied on that advice in good faith." [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/sam-bankman-fried-begins-testifying-in-risky-bid-to-beat-ftx-fraud-charges/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/sam-bankman-frie...

GCA10 3y ago
It's worth reading Judge Kaplan's earlier rulings related to the "advice of counsel" defense. As the judge writes, you can only invoke this if you "made a complete disclosure to counsel," right at the beginning, of what you planned to do. Sounds like the kind of situation where, once on trial, you'd need to produce an original "Memo to Lawyers" spelling out all of the intended FTX/Alameda games. Once that's on the the table, then you need to have asked the lawyers: can we do this? And then you need a clear response from the lawyers (i.e. a memo) saying: "Yep!" SBF's testimony, peeling away some of the word haze, amounts to: "I think the lawyers were loosely aware of at least some of this stuff and I don't exactly remember them telling me we couldn't do it." That's miles short of the standard (Kaplan-summarized) test. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.590939/gov.uscourts.nysd.590939.303.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...

by generj 3y ago

GCA10 3y ago

It's worth reading Judge Kaplan's earlier rulings related to the "advice of counsel" defense. As the judge writes, you can only invoke this if you "made a complete disclosure to counsel," right at the beginning, of what you planned to do. Sounds like the kind of situation where, once on trial, you'd need to produce an original "Memo to Lawyers" spelling out all of the intended FTX/Alameda games. Once that's on the the table, then you need to have asked the lawyers: can we do this? And then you need a clear response from the lawyers (i.e. a memo) saying: "Yep!" SBF's testimony, peeling away some of the word haze, amounts to: "I think the lawyers were loosely aware of at least some of this stuff and I don't exactly remember them telling me we couldn't do it." That's miles short of the standard (Kaplan-summarized) test. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.590939/gov.uscourts.nysd.590939.303.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...