“The bar is an orphan,” Eric Dupond-Moretti said in a tweet on Monday.
The tenor of the bar Hervé Temime has died at the age of 65, announced the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, Monday April 10. “The bar is an orphan. Hervé Temime has just left us. He was a huge lawyer. He marked an entire generation with his intelligence, his humanity and his talent. I think fondly of his family and loved ones.”wrote the Keeper of the Seals on Twitter.
The lawyer, born in 1957 in Algiers (Algeria) and arrived in France at the age of four, began his career in 1979, recalls AFP. He focused on general criminal law and business criminal law, being part of this generation of lawyers specializing in the defense of white collar workers, with the rise of political and financial cases in the 1980s and 1990s. During his career, Hervé Temime has defended clients such as Bernard Tapie, Roman Polanski, François-Marie Banier in the Bettencourt case, Gérard Depardieu, Alain Afflelou, Jacques Servier, Laura Smet, or even Jean-Noël Guérini.
“Brightest”
His colleague from the Lille bar Franck Berton praised “a monument of a lawyer”. “It’s too early and unfair”, he regretted on Twitter. A few weeks ago, Hervé Temime delivered the eulogy for Pierre Haïk, another tenor of the bar who died in February at the age of 72, recalls on Twitter Ariel Goldmann, lawyer from the Paris Bar.
Yaël Braun-Pivet, President of the National Assembly, also paid tribute to Herve Temimegreeting “the most skilful, the most brilliant of lawyers”. “He had guided my first steps at the bar, and inspired so many of us.” ATA former criminal lawyer, she had practiced for seven years in her firm.
“What is marvelous in our job is that we are at a permanent school of humanity. To defend someone well, you have to put yourself in everyone’s shoes, the one you are defending, your opponent, judges and jurors”said Hervé Temime in 2014, in the franceinfo program “Everything and its opposite”. He founded the association of criminal lawyers in 1991 and sat on the council of the Paris bar between 1999 and 2002, according to the website of his firm located rue de Rivoli, a stone’s throw from the Louvre.