Shadow counsel

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 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. Lawyer and former prosecutor and judge Leslie Crocker Snyder invoked the privilege for a defendant whose trial she presided over so he could be safe as an informant against a drug ring leader he was afraid would replace his counsel. Despite its full legal allowance, Snyder faced serious backlash from opposition deliberately being uninformed in the interest of maintaining the trial's security. [News 1]

Some fictional, yet informative, examples would be the Law & Order episode "Shadow" (season 8, episode 8) and the Law & Order: SVU episode "Ace" (season 11, episode 22). Snyder was a consultant for the franchise and even had guest appearances in Law & Order.

Another fictional yet informative example is in Season 5 of The Practice, episode 10 "Friends and Ex-Lovers," wherein Judge Roberta Kittleson (Holland Taylor) orders Eugene Young (Steve Harris) to act as shadow counsel for a defendant on drug charges after the defendant admits to D.A. Helen Gamble (Lara Flynn Boyle) and Kittleson that he is not truly represented by counsel as his lawyer doesn't represent his interests. He claims his lawyer works for his employer(s) and that they hired the attorney to represent him as a ploy to ensure he doesn't speak to the police. The defendant reaches out to Kittleson & Gamble for help securing a plea deal that his defense attorney blatantly refused multiple times, and also asks for help to keep his family safe. Kittleson won't allow a conversation to take place with the defendant and Helen Gamble in her chambers without SOME form of defense attorney present, so she steps out and runs into Eugene Young and says, "I need you to just stand here while I figure this out," and to "just hold the wall up for a second, please." Eugene hears the defendant say he wants to plead guilty and immediately tries to abandon ship, but Kittleson makes Eugene wait and listen to the rest. The defendant then explains about the employer/attorney conflict and Kittleson orders Eugene to be his shadow counsel, to which Eugene replies with, "Shadow what?" Judge Kittleson then offers an explanation as to what it and she means by this order.