For Donald Trump, his associates, and White House staffers, Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel means mounting legal bills amid a deluge of subpoenas. For Washington’s white-collar legal industry, it means opportunity.

As Capitol Hill braces itself for what could be a years-long affair—if the Iran-Contra affair, 1992 George H. W. Bush passport scandal, and Whitewater investigation are any indication—a new class of defense lawyers are hoping to ride the Trump-Russia investigation to prominence. “If you’re doing it right, it’s a career maker. This is the material that great books are made of,” Harlan Loeb, a crisis management expert who worked for Enron and now works at Edelman, told Politico. Chris Lehane, a former Clinton White House staffer, echoed the sentiment. “There’s a real potential,”he said, “to have a career-making—or breaking—moment.”

As William Jeffress, a white-collar defense attorney who represented I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in the Valerie Plame affair, told me in an interview, the real danger facing Trump associates and White House staffers is being accused of committing perjury or obstruction of justice. “You see it time and again in these political investigations, that they wind up, whatever happened wasn’t a crime. It may have been a political scandal—but it wasn’t a crime—but they charged somebody with perjury or obstruction. So that is the risk for everybody,” Jeffress explained.

To avoid this fate—the one that ultimately befell Libby—even low-level and mid-level West Wing staffers will need a good lawyer. “[Trump] may well be bringing back white-collar defense jobs in Washington,” Kathleen Clark, an ethics and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told Politico. “Those are probably not the jobs he intended to create.”

The panic in the West Wing may be bad for staffers’ health, but it’s certainly a small boon to the long-suffering legal industry, which has seen a modest jobs decline in recent years amid a slump in demand. With Washington riveted by the Russian melodrama hanging over Capitol Hill, white-collar lawyers are suddenly cool again.

At the end of last month, Trump retained Marc Kasowitz to represent him in all things Russia, following in the footsteps of a number of his allies ensnared in the D.O.J. investigation. __Paul Manafort,__Trump’s former campaign manager; Roger Stone, a longtime political operative and ally of the president; White House senior adviser Jared Kushner; and former national-security adviser and Trump campaign surrogate Mike Flynn have all already obtained legal representation. And, with multiple congressional committees now issuing a flurry of subpoenas to figures in Trumpworld and the F.B.I. investigation expanding under Mueller, that list is only going to grow.

For D.C., that means a payday. According to Jeffress, the most experienced and in-demand white-collar lawyers in Washington typically charge corporate clients and people indemnified by corporations over $1,000 per hour—though it’s not uncommon for them to cut their rates to somewhere between $750 and $900 per hour for clients who are footing their own legal bills. But even if an individual is just called for a single F.B.I. interview, their lawyer will still probably spend 40 to 60 hours on their case. And if that individual faces grand jury subpoenas or faces multiple testimonies across the concurrent congressional and F.B.I. investigations, they could see their legal fees increase by a factor of five. “Most lawyers don’t look at red or blue,” Lehane said. “They look at green.”