David Boies, one of the country’s best-known lawyers, charges more than $2,000 an hour and at age 83 can have his pick of cases. This raises a question as to why he would defend disgraced former bankruptcy judge David R. Jones, who is fighting lawsuits that allege he benefited from a personal relationship with a lawyer who worked on cases in his court.

On a mild Houston day in March 2021, Judge Marvin Isgur prepared to oversee the only case on his docket that morning. It was a motion to recuse his longtime colleague on the bench, David Jones, from a case involving a bankrupt engineering company.

In Houston’s close-knit bankruptcy court, judges David R. Jones and Marvin Isgur often stood in lockstep. Former law partners, they transformed Houston from a backwater into a boomtown for high-dollar bankruptcies.

Fenwick & West lawyers were “directly involved” in FTX’s efforts to blur its relationship with a sister hedge fund before the massive crypto exchange went bust, according to a court approved examiner.

If you had to go into debt in recent years — whether it was because of overspending on your credit cards or due to unforeseen events like medical emergencies — getting out of that hole is now particularly difficult due to high interest rates. And, as the costs for essentials like housing, cars, insurance and food keep going up due to inflation, many people have been struggling to pay their bills. That can also lead to debt and make it harder to pay off previous balances.

At “Meatfest,” the judge and the lawyers were all smiles. Judge David R. Jones, who had worked for years to make Houston a destination for high-dollar bankruptcy litigation, can be seen in an October 2022 photo huddled at the barbecue with local attorneys who brought cases before him and also formed a cooking crew.

A recent article, "Overbilled by your lawyer? You are not alone," told the story of a lawyer whose firm touted expertise that she didn’t have and billed for time that she didn’t work. That story led to an e-mail captioned BRAVO from Professor Nancy B. Rapoport, of William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The romance between David R. Jones and Elizabeth Freeman caused quite the stir in legal circles. The pairing is not per se noteworthy, but when a federal bankruptcy judge gets together with a bankruptcy partner of a major law firm and continues to hear cases involving that partner/law firm, well, that kind of ethical lapse will set tongues a-wagging.