When your world consists of unicorns prancing on rainbows, where nobody ever questions or challenges anything, it’s ripe for the pickin’s. And Derek Bluford picked and picked. And picked. You will think ill of him when you read the details of his crimes as set forth by Bob Ambrogi, but before you over-react, consider this.

For a man who is still a year shy of his 30^th birthday, Bluford has found success as an entrepreneur, first starting California Legal Pros (CLP), a company that markets various legal services to both consumers and lawyers. then QuickLegal, a service that provides on-demand legal advice to consumers, and then most recently QuickLegal Practice Management, a cloud practice management platform for lawyers.

In 2014, Bluford was named a Techweek Los Angeles LAUNCH competition champion and was  recently selected to appear on the popular ABC television show Shark Tank. (As far as I can tell, he never actually appeared on any segment that was aired.)

Not too shabby, eh?  There are tons of adherents of the Future of Law gods who would give their left testicle, if they had one, to be in Bluford’s trendy square-toed shoes.

In a recent podcast interview, Bluford said that he sold California Legal Pros in 2014 for $425,000,  that he valued QuickLegal at $12 million, and that he recently turned down a purchase offer of roughly $14 million. He said that he had about 130 paying customers but believed he would quickly surpass Clio, the largest player in the practice-management space. He also said that he was scheduled to be on the cover of the ABA Journal in the first quarter of 2016 (he was not) and that he had entered into strategic partnerships with both RocketLawyer and LegalZoom. (I did not contact either company to confirm this, but LegalZoom reached out to me to say that it is not doing business with Bluford “and certainly has no strategic partnership with him.”)

And on June 14 at Legaltech, Bluford will be featured alongside two other legal startups in a Legal Innovation Lightning Round produced by The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics (CodeX) and the Center for Legal Innovation at Vermont Law School and judged by CodeX fellows Monica Bay and Nicole Shanahan.

From Stanford University’s CodeX to ALM’s LegalTech, Bluford was one of the players, the heroes, the success stories that the wannabe lawtrepreneurs would mindlessly gush about. Even when they don’t actually think an idea will work, they still sing each other’s praises, if for no other reason than in exchange for the other person praising their idiotic idea in return. A rising tide of gush lifts all boats.

But in the course of effusive stupidity, it appears that everybody overlooked one salient detail about Bluford. Remember, nobody runs a background check when sizing a guy up for his statue. If they had, they would have found out that he wasn’t a lawyer and his empire was running a huge fraud on unwitting “clients.”

Among the plaintiffs’ allegations against Bluford:

• He falsely represented that the tenant had filed a claim for personal injury against the plaintiffs and then took $130,000 from the plaintiffs to settle the non-existent claim.
• He falsely represented that the county had fined plaintiffs $10,500 for a mold problem and took that money from them supposedly to pay the non-existent fine.
• He took $25,000 from the plaintiffs to remediate the supposed mold damage to their property and then took another $26,000 for the mold repair, saying the initial $25,000 was not enough.
• He took $244,000 from the plaintiffs plus $27,642 in “attorney fees” by forging court papers to make it look as though they owed fines to the city and county governments with regard to the mold in their property.
• He told plaintiffs that they needed to pay him $5,000 for time he spent at a nonexistent trial, and he then informed the plaintiffs that they had lost the trial and that the court had ordered them to pay $51,750. He later told them CLP had paid the judgment and would accept just $30,000 from the plaintiffs.
• He received another $7,200 from plaintiffs to cover the costs of filing a non-existent motion relating to insurance coverage and then another $3,237.50 for the same motion.
• He received another $30,000 from plaintiffs for a supposed “trial deposit” paid to a court.
• Throughout, he forged court papers and legal papers and repeatedly lied to plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs finally became suspicious when they researched the judge who had supposedly issued several of the orders against them. When they found out no such judge existed, Bluford’s scheme quickly unraveled, according to the complaint.

But, as you quickly mutter, it’s not like lawyers don’t cheat clients, lie, scheme and do harm too. Of course, much to our profession’s disgrace. The character and fitness committees need to work a little harder, and the Multi-State Professional Responsibility part of the bar exam can only test knowledge of ethics, not whether an individual is ethical.

Yet, that lawyers are hardly pristine is not a reason to make things worse by sliding down the legal and ethical slope of letting any thief create a fake legal biz to enable him to defraud clients and steal.  Remember all those future of law folks crying about how we need to eliminate the rules that constrain lawyers from lying and cheating, because nobody would ever do such a thing?  These were the same folks in the audience listening to a mutt like Bluford telling them how to get rich in legal tech.

And what do the heroes of legal tech learn from this?

Update 5/26/16, 6:25 p.m.: I just received this update from ALM: “ALM recently learned of the developments regarding QuickLegal and can confirm that QuickLegal won’t be participating in Legaltech West Coast. ALM works with CodeX, our partner, to provide a showcase for the next generation of legal technology start-ups, without putting clients at risk.”

Nothing.  Bluford got nabbed, but everybody else is still riding unicorns on rainbows. Don’t look too closely. Don’t think too hard. Don’t let the obvious lesson from eliminating the rules that prevent defrauding clients get in the way of the future.  So what if it’s the lies they tell themselves that paved the way for a guy like Bluford to perpetrate frauds? Every other lie is still awesome.