It’s hard when there is a client tragedy. Michael Cochrane, a civil litigation lawyer at Brauti Thorning LLP in Toronto, shares a deeply personal and unsettling experience that no lawyer ever expects to face.
He writes about the moment he learned that one of his clients had been shot and killed by police. The news wasn’t just shocking; it forced him to confront the emotional weight of his role in ways he had never anticipated.
This client wasn’t involved in a high-stakes criminal trial or a volatile legal battle. He was going through what should have been a routine divorce.
There were no red flags, no warning signs that things would escalate into something catastrophic. But then came the devastating news—the man had killed his wife, and shortly after, the police took his life.
What Lawyers Deal With
For Cochrane, this wasn’t just another case. It was a jarring reminder that the legal system, for all its rules and processes, can’t account for the unpredictability of human emotion. Lawyers deal with contracts, settlements, and courtroom arguments. They don’t expect to wake up to a phone call telling them that a client has become the subject of a police shooting.
In his article Hearts Broken All Around, published in JUST Magazine, Cochrane reflects on the shock, grief, and unanswered questions that followed. No section in law school prepares you for something like this. There is no handbook on processing mixed emotions when a case doesn’t just go sideways—it ends in tragedy.
A Client Tragedy
Beyond the personal toll, he also touches on these events’ ripple effect within the legal community. What happens when the people lawyers advocate for become headlines in the worst possible way? How do lawyers reconcile the professional detachment their job requires with the very real emotional impact of loss?
Cases are supposed to end in settlements, rulings, or agreements—not funerals. And yet, sometimes they do. It’s hard when there is a client tragedy. Let me know what you think.
