Lawyers all make mistakes, and most of us have made big ones. When it happens to you, will you fight for your client, or yourself?

Today, a vivid reminder from the Supreme Court that choosing wrong just might make you the wrong kinda famous.

The heart of it (record cites omitted, eviscerating alteration in original):

Horwitz and Butts, as they have subsequently acknowledged, failed to meet with Christeson until more than six weeks after his petition was due. There is no evidence that they communicated with their client at all during this time. They finally filed the petition on August 5, 2005—117 days too late. They have since claimed that their failure to meet with their client and timely file his habeas petition resulted from a simple miscalculation of the AEDPA limitations period (and in defending themselves, they may have disclosed privileged client communications). But a legal ethics expert, reviewing counsel’s handling of Christeson’s habeas petition, stated in a report submitted to the District Court: “[I]f this was not abandonment, I am not sure what would be.”

* * *

[I]n their response to the District Court’s order to address the substitution motion, Horwitz and Butts characterized the potential arguments in favor of equitable tolling as “ludicrous,” and asserted that they had “a legal basis and rationale for the [erroneous] calculation of the filing date.”

Thirteen times the Supreme Court’s opinion identifies Horwitz and Butts by name. The case is Christeson v. Roper.

UPDATE: my original post was remiss in failing also to mention the heroes of the tale, New York attorney Joseph Perkovich and Philadelphia attorney Jennifer Merrigan. The opinion makes plain enough their extraordinary work for Christeson (more backstory in this Linda Greenhouse column in the New York Times), even without mentioning that their work was entirely pro bono. Perkovich and Merrigan: the right kinda of famous.