Public Defenders Work Hard for Clients but They’re Not Allowed to Work Too Hard
There is a reflexive narrative the system relies on: if you are appointed a public defender, you will be represented by someone who is part of the same machine that is prosecuting you. That narrative is lazy and inaccurate. Many public defenders are deeply committed, intelligent, and principled lawyers who care about their clients and fight tirelessly on their behalf. Some of the most skilled criminal defense attorneys in the country began, or continue, their work in public defense.
But the structure they operate within is not built for maximal advocacy. It is built for volume, efficiency, and cost containment, and that structure creates an impossible tension.
If They Work Too Hard, They Risk Losing Contracts and Damaging Connections
Public defenders often do not just answer to judges and ethical standards. They answer to contracts, funding agreements, county budgets, political pressures, performance metrics, and caseload limits that look reasonable on paper and overwhelming in real life. Hanging over all of it is the uncomfortable reality that if a public defender pushes too hard, takes too much time, demands too many hearings, litigates too aggressively, or disrupts the system too often, that defender can quietly become known as “difficult.”
Difficult does not mean ineffective. Difficult means expensive. Difficult means inconvenient. Difficult means bad for institutional flow, and being bad for flow carries consequences.
The Quiet Risk of Doing Too Good of a Job
Most people assume that working harder for a client would always be rewarded. In theory, it should be. In practice, doing exceptional work in public defense can place a lawyer in an adversarial position not just with prosecutors, but with the very entities responsible for funding and retaining them.
Public defenders who fight relentlessly do not just slow the system down. They expose it. They challenge assumptions. They force uncomfortable questions. They require extra time, extra hearings, extra scrutiny, and extra resources — all of which the system resents.
While many public defenders want to dig deeper, push harder, and demand more, they are doing so inside a framework that quietly penalizes disruption. The result is subtle pressure to manage advocacy in a way that does not threaten the structure that employs them. This does not mean your public defender does not care. It means the system has placed a ceiling on how much care can be expressed without consequence.
A critical reality in Washington State is that a significant number of public defenders are not direct government employees at all. They work for private law firms that hold court contracts to provide public defense services. Those contracts are not permanent. They are renewable. They are discretionary. They can be terminated.
And that creates a power dynamic that almost no defendant understands.
A Public Defender Who Advocates Too Hard Will Lose Their Contract
If a public defender — or the firm employing them — develops a reputation for being too aggressive, too disruptive, too effective at embarrassing police and/or prosecutors, or too willing to force the system into scrutiny, those contracts can simply disappear. Not through formal discipline. Not through professional censure. Just through quiet non-renewal.
A firm that makes the court system look inefficient, exposes repeated investigative failures, or repeatedly humiliates law enforcement in public proceedings becomes “a problem.” Not because it is unethical or ineffective, but because it disrupts institutional comfort. That disruption carries financial consequences. The work dries up. The contracts move elsewhere.
So when a public defender operates inside that structure, the message is unmistakable, even if unspoken: fight hard, but not too hard; advocate, but not in a way that destabilizes the machinery that pays you; defend your client, but not at the expense of the ecosystem that feeds your firm.
That tension is not theoretical. It is built into the economics of the system.
The Impossible Math of Public Defense
Even the most dedicated public defenders operate under crushing caseloads that defy logic. One attorney may carry dozens, sometimes hundreds, of open cases simultaneously. Each case deserves attention, investigation, collaboration, and reflection. Each case involves a person whose life is on pause.
But attention is finite. Time is finite. Energy is finite. The result is triage, not strategy.
Meetings become shorter than they should be. Preparation is done under pressure. Opportunities for deeper investigation may never materialize, not because the lawyer does not want to pursue them, but because the infrastructure makes sustained pursuit nearly impossible. And if that lawyer tries to treat every case as though it deserves maximum time and maximum resistance, the system notices. The caseload backs up. The numbers look inefficient. The contract starts to look “problematic.”
Why this matters
As a defendant, you are sitting across from a lawyer who may genuinely care about your outcome, but that lawyer is embedded in a structure that rewards conformity and expediency more than relentless advocacy. That tension is not philosophical. It is practical. It affects how often motions are filed, how aggressively evidence is challenged, how much energy is available for deep strategy, and how far the lawyer can push without being punished by the very system they rely on to keep practicing.
This is why some of the most principled public defenders eventually leave the system altogether, because the only way to fully serve their clients is to step outside the structure that restricts them.
Where Knauss Law Fits
Knauss Law exists outside that framework entirely. It does not answer to county contracts, political funding structures, or institutional expectations about “efficiency.” The obligation is singular: the client.
That independence matters, because truly aggressive defense often requires being willing to slow the system down, challenge authority, demand uncomfortable scrutiny, and drain institutional patience. That level of commitment can only exist when a lawyer’s livelihood is not tied to pleasing the very system they are fighting against.
This is not a knock on public defenders as people. It is a recognition of the environment they are forced to operate in. The unfortunate truth is that the system creates defenders who must constantly balance loyalty to their clients with survival inside the system that supports them, and that is a burden no accused person should have to unknowingly carry.
425-300-5566