My guess is that Jay Shepherd never met Joseph Rakofsky. If so, then he bears no responsibility for what happened. But the irony that Shepherd, who writes a “column” about Small Law at Above the Law, posted Six Steps to Becoming an Expert at the same time the Rakofsky fiasco went viral can’t be ignored.
It’s not that Shepherd deliberately seeks to push young lawyers into a life of deceit and misery, but that he, like so many who have nothing to offer but still feign expertise, can’t stop himself from spouting crap. The message, delivered in the obligatory list format favored by marketers trying to sell simpletons, is worse than Menckian. It’s dangerous.
1. Win a case.Would it be too obvious to inquire what happens to those cases (not people, mind you, but cases) lost before the eventual odds kick in?
I’m not going to tell you how to do that; you’ll have to figure it out on your own. But eventually, the odds are that you’ll end up on the winning side of a case. Ideally, there will be something inherently interesting about the case. If there isn’t, find a way to make it sound interesting.
2. Get some ink.
After you’ve won a case (or handled a transaction) about which something notable can be said, you then need to get in touch with a reporter. . . Then pitch the story.
Reporters just love being pitched the mundane and self-promotional. Heck, I get a dozen press releases a week about how lawyer Sammy Schmuck just won a $10,000 verdict in a wrongful death case, and he’s available for an interview. Just don’t mention the dead bodies you left along the road to your eventual win when the odds swung in your favor.
3. Do a CLE.
Bar associations and local continuing-legal-education organizations are always looking for new programs, and new speakers to put them on.
There is nothing a room full of lawyers, compelled to be there because of well-intended but worthless CLE requirements, want to hear than some undistinguished n00b talk about a subject where everyone in the room knows more about the subject than the speaker. And trust me, they can tell.
4. Write an article.
Write an interesting, plain-English article on your chosen topic. Reference your case (or transaction) if it makes sense to do so, but don’t do it in a way that makes you out to be the hero of the story. Otherwise it will come across as overtly self-promoting.This step has gotten much easier than it was ten years ago. Back then, you were pretty much limited to writing pieces for bar-association journals and legal newspapers. Now, blogging and social media make it much easier to quickly write an article and get it out there for the world to read.
Some lawyers get hung up on irrelevant stuff, like credibility or substance. Don’t sweat it. Write a blog post and lawyers around the country will immediately swoon at your feet. Can’t manage to amass that many words at one time, just craft a really good twit and you’re in like Flint.
5. Help your colleagues.
When you learn that another lawyer is handling a case similar to yours, offer to share your research or even the brief that you wrote.
Everybody appreciates unsolicited offers of help from people they don’t know.
6. Repeat.
Keep doing the previous five steps, and people will come to see you as an expert.
If it works for shampoo, why not lawyers? And really, isn’t it all about people seeing you as an expert?
These six steps will help establish you as an expert in your particular area, which will lead to more cases in that area, which will allow you to repeat the process. Pretty soon, you’ll be a bona fide guru. That’s exactly how I became known as a noncompete expert. After several years of following these steps, beginning with a single, obscure case, I was getting noncompete referrals from lawyers around the country. In time, I actually did become an expert in the area.
The last sentence is the killer. Everything up to that point, assuming Shepherd’s self-assessment that he eventually became an expert, is relatively accurate, was a lie. One big old scam to garner attention. This is the modern path to success in the law, just lie your butt off to everybody who will listen, feign expertise you don’t have and see how many fools will let you slide in along the way. Cover up the dead bodies of your incompetence and when you get lucky, promote the hell out of yourself as if you’re the real thing.
And this is what is being promoted as the route to success in the law?
In the aftermath of the Rakofsky fiasco, lawyers unfamiliar with social media were shocked that this could happen.
The conduct of this person, I cannot bring myself to call him a lawyer, is without doubt reprehensible. But I am forced to a much larger question. How did he get to this point? Measuring my professional life now in decades, I cannot comprehend his apparent lack of comprehension of his situation. To be told by a judge that you are not competent to the extent you are being dismissed from a case would be mortifying (an old dinosaur term) to me.
Is there some fundamental flaw which is afflicting our profession by which young lawyers are unable to see such clear problems, whether it is a Murder I as your first trial or representing two defendants with conflicting needs?
You bet there’s a fundamental flaw at work here. The game they are learning has only six steps, none of which include become competent. As Keith Lee explained, young lawyers aren’t playing the game, but being played by it.
Great lesson, Jay. Thanks for sharing your expertise with your colleagues.
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What fascinates me about such horrible advice (his, not yours) is how close it is to good advice on the same subject.
Let’s try a variant.
How to become an expert on [whatever] in three (not particularly easy) steps:
1. Learn all you can about [whatever].
2. Learn all you can about explaining [whatever] to people who know a lot less than you (now) do about it.
3. Go back to Step 1. Since you’re a human being, you can do other things (like living the rest of your life) at the same time.
How to become a recognized expert on [whatever] in two easy steps:
1. Go to step 1, above.
2. Share your expertise about [whatever] with others.
What’s the difference? It’s the difference between holding yourself up as an expert in something and developing expertise in it. Sizzle vs. steak.
The frightening part (if it’s true) is Shepherd’s anecdotal evidence that it works. At a time when even he acknowledges that he wasn’t “expert” he was getting “referrals from lawyers around the country” – presumably those lawyers were sending him cases that they were sure he could handle because of the expertise he only pretended to have.
And we have to assume that he took money from real clients with the same false claims of expertise and, at least some of the time, screwed up their cases because he didn’t have the skill or knowledge he pretended to.
Really, Shepherd’s piece might be useful as a statement by a party opponent when one of those folks who relied on his carefully manufactured faux expertise sues him for malpractice.
Sure. There’s lots of folks who can be misled into mistaking the sizzle for the steak, and for every one of them, there’s ten marketoons ready to shear him.
I think he went about “writing an article” the wrong way, because he viewed it as a marketing opportunity, but “writing an article” can be a great way for a young lawyer to learn more about a topic, so long as they put their energy into ensuring that the article has the depth, quality, and research one would expect from a real “expert.” Kind of like the old thing about learning something better by teaching it.
That doesn’t make them an “expert” by any stretch, but I do believe the technique has internal teaching value far greater than the external marketing value.
Had Jay stopped at writing an article, it would have been the one step to me that possessed some merit. But he didn’t. Instead, he pointedly noted how much easier it was today because of blogs and social media. It’s not the same. To get an article published on someone else’s legitimate lawyer platform, it has to pass muster. Any fool can post to his own blog or twit. (Don’t say it, please.)
I certainly view writing on topics as an opportunity to learn more about them – it’s definitely a great educational tool. However, I wouldn’t share that writing if it was on a topic that I wasn’t familiar with and I was not confident in my ability to discuss it intelligently with other people.
The ease of publishing that has arisen with the internet has pros and cons. It allows people to readily have a voice – but is also requires readers to have their BS detectors set to High as very few people actually have anything worthy to say.
That is to say, I have been informed and found (what I perceive to be)levels of expertise on blawgs. But those are far and few between.
OK, let me take a stab at this.
1. Win a case. What the heck is a “win” really? I think we’ve already talked about this as a BS term in the practice of law. But, just for the sake of argument, let’s equate this to acquittal. OK, done.
2. Get some ink. Oooh, pimping myself to reporters. That sounds like fun. I already appeared in the internationally renowned Rolla Daily News (Rolla, MO). That probably works. I’m inked.
3. Do a CLE. Is this like “doing lunch?” Perhaps not. In any case, I love sleepy, disinterested audiences. I could talk about my collection of nosehairs for an hour, and nobody would notice. Things are looking up.
4. Write an article. Does a pithy blog post count? If so, done. If not, can I outsource this task? Better yet, I’ll just cut and paste something from SJ. That seems to work for the Orlando Personal Injury Network.
5. Help your colleagues. Oh, great. I’ve got to interact with those assholes? Nobody told me I had to be collegial. All they want is to steal my wonderful ideas. What if I just photocopy my article from #4 and distribute it under office doors? There, done. Just don’t make me put my contact info on the fliers.
6. Repeat. What? You mean I have to stick with this crud? Forget it, I quit.
My father used to say an expert was a guy from out of town.
Also: wear jeans and a t-shirt.
http://lawyerist.com/lawyers-do-not-always-have-to-wear-suits/
My friends, we are living in the golden age of parody.
“And this is what is being promoted as the route to success in the law?”
This is the “route to success” in a lot of businesses. Look at all the people who give investment advice, for example. Generally, they’ve made a little money on one of their investments (“win a case”), and now they’ve got a website, a book, a DVD training series, and an infomercial. (Those last two could be steps 7 and 8.)
p.s. Writing about this topic without once referring to Adrianos Facchetti is almost certainly blawgospheric malpractice.
Since I don’t read the lawyerist, I would have never known about such an incredible marketing tip written by yet another 2009 law school graduate. Randall Ryder.
It’s funny you should say that. It was running through my head the whole time: you are what google says you are, anyone can be an expert in 6 months. But Adrianos was a kid, saying childish things. Jay Shepherd isn’t, and I felt this needed to be addressed on its own.
Hmm…I didn’t mean to smear every investment advisor, just those guys who claim to have found the magic road to riches in precious metals or real estate or foreign exchange trading or whatever.
Agreed, I’m having trouble seeing why an abridged list of: 1. Win cases, 2. Repeat, wouldn’t eventually make you at least expert-esque.
His attitude of winning a case is inevitable because you can’t lose them all is a little worrying though.
You don’t read the lawyerist? How have you survived? BTW maybe your practice is due for an upgrade….
[Edit Note: Link deleted as against rules.]
Sorry, any more lawyerist links and I will have to stick a needle through my eye.
I’d like to upgrade my practice so that I get more cases defending capitally charged billionaires.
So far I’ve never lost one of them, which puts me on the road to expertise. (I’m combining themes here.)
Any marketing tips for me?
I’ll fight you for those cases. I’ve never lost one either.
Can the 5 minute consultation be far behind? The DIY of the legal world. Law Depot 10 minute DIY consultations. The mid boggles with the possibilies.