Yes, but I'm giving the "defendant's lawyer" opinion. In reality, you can be completely tainted and still do good RE work, but proving that in a court of law will be harder.

And furthermore, the real victory is not in the courts; the real victory is staying out of the courts to begin with. If you win in court, you still lost huge sums of money. And a lot of staying out of court boils down to restricting one's conduct to things a plaintiff's lawyer would counsel against suing for. Hence why most legal opinions in the FOSS space are unusually conservative (while still, occasionally, just being completely off-base).