René Floriot

René Edmond Floriot (20 October 1902, Paris – 22 December 1975, Neuilly-sur-Seine) was a French lawyer.

Son of a Paris municipal clerk, Floriot studied law at the Sorbonne, started practicing before his 21st birthday. In the 1930s, he prospered by winning divorces for the wealthy in a week, though the cumbersome process usually takes two to three years in France. After the war, he unabashedly defended war criminals and collaborators.

Floriot drove "a research staff of six lawyers, known as "l'usine Floriot" (the Floriot factory). Gifted with prodigious memory, he can simplify the most complex case for the dullest of jurors. While other French lawyers deliver elegantly vague speeches to nodding, berobed judges, Floriot deals in facts, not forensic flourishes. In a profession heavily weighted toward lawyers with social standing, Floriot has succeeded entirely on drive and shrewdness."