In my armchair view, his narcissism is a cover for a deeper, unconscious self-awareness of his failures both personally and professionally, and at some point this nagging awareness has morphed into a perverse, sometimes erotic variety of voyeurism where he enjoys waving his insufficiency in the face of people who believe he can or expect him to do better. Hence you get all the word games, the nonsensical double-standards like where he both 'expects privacy' and publicly hints at his degeneracy, it's all a dance around the real facts of his life, like a child who shits their pants but tries acting like nothing's wrong. I have no doubt he extracts a pleasurable feeling of vengeance from manipulating peoples' sense of care and interest in him, knowing it's all for nought since he's both incapable of and unwilling to change, as this is the only sense of power he can maintain absent actual achievements. Where the wheels have come off for him recently is that the legal system can't be treated the same way as a person whose opinions are largely immaterial; the judgements of a court have real impact on his life and are treated as truth by most others, far above any narrative he can spin. Combine that with the collapse of his Lawtube standing and failure as a lawyer and what you have is the narc mask slipping and the vulnerable side surfacing, and it's going to be nasty, people in his life are going to miss when he was riding high on the white stallion. I think he's only reached the beginning of the dark place a person like that can go, and sometimes there's no bottom.
