If you want to read about spectacular collapses you could do much better than this book.

Unless you really have a hate on for lawyers, I can't see this book being very captivating to the average reader. It's very formulaic, which would be fine if it was filled with great substance, but that's just not the case. Every chapter is simply another short, anti-climactic tale of one lawyer's fall from grace. The annoying, eventually tedious, part is the individual stories are so short that the introductory paragraph, which summarizes the tale, spoils any mystery. There's no time to get swept away in what's going on before you're brought to an abrupt end. Not to mention, you can tell this was written by a lawyer, there's no build up, just a plain emotionless statement of the facts. It reads flat, just like a legal briefing.

Another major problem I have with this is that a number of the stories end on the note that "at the time of this writing Mr/Mrs ____ were awaiting the outcome of their trial. At best, you're left with no sense of finality, at worst you start to wonder if this is just some guy's vendetta against those in the profession he didn't care for. This happens in at least 3 or 4 times out of the 15 different stories contained in the book and worst of all they all seem to be clustered at the beginning. I was left somewhat jaded early into the book (I am a guilty until proven innocent type) and while I did finish it, towards the end it got so repetitive and formulaic that I was mostly skimming the pages.

Finally, if we're comparing spectacular downfalls to spectacular downfalls, this book pales in comparison to anything ever witted on financiers. The worst lawyer in this book is found guilty of something like $40-$50 million worth of fraudulent transactions. Yawn. Compare that to a book like Den of Thieves chronicling the rise and fall of Drexel Lambert - these guys were ripping people off in the multimillions EVERY TRANSACTION. They were slapped with a HALF-BILLION DOLLAR fine from the SEC, only to finally collapse with basically every senior officer being arrested and/or sued into oblivion. Now THAT's a spectacular collapse. Not to mention much more involved and character-driven than "Client goes to Lawyer, Lawyer screws client, Lawyer disbarred, the end." over and over.

Pass.