Those Western lawyers must be shocked that they can't no longer get away with everything.
I find that the Western lawyers and judges exist either as staunchly pro-establishment or basically planted by Western intelligence services.
The pro-establishment are law purists. The media keeps saying China "violated" the Sino-British agreement, bla, bla, bla, but as we have pointed out in this thread many times, it is a lie. HK LegCo never passed it's own National Security Law on its own, it is in the Basic Law for them to do so. Since they refused to fulfill this part of the constitution, the central government took its own initiative within the same constitution to enact the law as they saw fit. As such, legally speaking, the national security law was not some kind of "communist plot to seize HK", those judges/lawyers know this. Furthermore, the legal procedural framework is still the same, so people are still getting their "due process", evidentiary disclosure, etc. These are not show-trials or anything like that.
On the other side, we know for a fact that NED monies and other shady sources of "crowdfunding" have been created and essentially funnel money into these "human rights law firms" to defend the criminals. When they fail, they proceed to leave and/or claim that "this is not the same Hong Kong" or similar popular chorus. They do this because it actually weakens the rule of law that they claim to uphold. They know that legally speaking, there is nothing particularly untoward with the NSL, so they have to create an imaginary crisis of confidence and hope for continued intervention by the central government so they can try to spark unrest, or as the article mentions, economic harm. If they were legit lawyers only involved in legal affairs, you can continue to engage in the legal fight because it is still an open avenue to do so. What is the risk of jail really? You say its a fight, but you are afraid of the consequences? Plus this is HK jail, the most humane of prisons in all of Asia, basically the only place where the criminals aren't seen as animals.