When Will a Lawyer Need 16 Mobile Phones?
Last week, federal prosecutors seized 16 mobile phones from Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, leaving many of us wondering which lawyer needs 16 potentially work-related phones? Therefore, we asked some lawyers.
Employment lawyer Josef Peretz says 16 phones sound sketchy:
16 cell phones are insanely unreasonable for anyone in our profession if they are all active. But it looks like Cohen was somewhat of an avid record holder, as he claims to have recorded a lot of his conversations. Even so, 16 phones is high, ultra high for a non-drug lawyer (and I’m not even saying Cohen is dealing).
Civil rights lawyer Hillary Benham-Baker agreed:
I think this is very strange. I only have one cell phone. I know several attorneys who have two of them – a personal and a worker. I have never met a lawyer who has more.
A couple of lawyers told us in the background that, to be fair, phones can be stackable. Some of Cohen’s phones were BlackBerries, which means there may have been a lot of older phones in the box that Cohen never got rid of. Many have one or two old telephones in their home. If you control four phones at the same time and keep the three older generations, you end up with 16 phones.
But first of all, how to juggle four phones? Business attorney Roman Fichman sees many desirable goals:
There are legitimate business and practical reasons why lawyers would need multiple mobile phones:
- With fewer stationary telephones in use, several mobile phones are replacing multi-line telephones.
- Lawyers practicing in different practice areas often use different phone numbers to properly route calls.
- It is generally preferable to use a local number, so lawyers practicing in different states or within a state prefer a local number for that state / city / county.
- Many lawyers keep old phones because they contain data that they may not know or do not want.
- Lawyers who travel may prefer certain carriers that perform better in certain cities over other cities.
- Finally, lawyers who travel overseas often have dedicated phones for the country they are going to (for example, if traveling to China, for security reasons, the lawyer may wish to have an empty phone in case the phone is to be searched or in a locker events data pressed).
So if you catch your lawyer hoarding over a dozen phones, he may be using the Better Call Saul scenario and may just have a lot of remote clients doing business in different states or countries. Like secret real estate deals in seven states or secret trips to Prague .