Michael Jackson's Lawyers Cheese It

Michael Jackson is a man with enough time and money to dance with a giant clay rabbit and turn into a spaceship to save the world from Joe Pesci's drug dealing, but not enough to pay his lawyers, it's been claimed.

Michael Jackson, a man in court so much that he's starting to look like Judge Judy's co-joined twin, is entangled in a case where a financial company claims that he owes it $48 million. Needless to say, for a giant case like this, Michael Jackson would need to rely on a crack legal team to help him get by. Except they've just quit working for Michael Jackson, claiming that he hadn't been paying them either.

Michael Jackson is something of a pioneer. If it wasn't for Michael Jackson's musical output, we'd have no Justin Timberlake to mock, and Michael Jackson was allegedly into Jew-hating long before Mel Gibson ever was. In fact, Michael Jackson is such a trendsetter that we're fairly sure that giraffes standing in pools of their own blood will be the Christmas hit of 2007, and even the most mediocre celebrity will be going shopping dressed as a woman by the end of summer.

But being creatively ahead of your time doesn't make you money, and Michael Jackson looks as if he's tightening his belt. Sadly, he appears to be doing this by not paying his slaves properly. Already this year Michael Jackson hasn't paid his Neverland slaves or the vet in charge of looking after all of Michael Jackson's animals while he swanned off to Bahrain. Now it appears that his lawyers feel the same.

With all the legal trouble Michael Jackson is in at the moment – like being sued by his ex-wife and this whole 'owing $48 million to an acquisition group' shebang – you'd expect that he'd want to keep his lawyers Wachtel & Masyr sweet. But Wachtel & Masyr have just been granted permission by a federal judge in Manhattan to remove themselves from the case – the second firm to do so. ABC reports:

In a letter to the judge, attorney William Wachtel described his trouble communicating with Jackson through a series of representatives.
Over months, Wachtel said, he dealt with the singer through one intermediary after another, only to be informed repeatedly that they were quitting or had been fired.

The last straw came, he said, when Jackson dropped out of contact with the firm entirely after his only face-to-face meeting with his lawyers in June, at the luxurious Hotel de Crillon in Paris.

Following this meeting, Wachtel claims that Michael Jackson dropped off their radar altogether:

"Unfortunately, Mr. Jackson has failed to respond to every e-mail and telephone message left for him over the past four weeks."

So now Michael Jackson has until September 5 to find a new legal team in the case or else he'll have to represent himself in court. Seeing as how we've seen Michael Jackson turn into a car with our own eyes, that's probably not such a hot idea.

[story by Stuart Heritage]