I could have bet money that the foreward would be written by one of two people. As it turns out, one wrote it while the other wrote the introduction, thus allowing both of the big names in whose reflected glory he hopes to bask to serve as his endorsers. Without them, who would care what he has to say?
Norm Pattis has been working on his book for a while, and now it’s here. It’s called Taking Back the Courts, and the foreward, introduction and first chapter are available online for free. I read them. It was sufficient. A few years ago, Norm might have asked me to review his book. That was when we were good friends, sometimes confidants. Norm doesn’t like me anymore.
The old Norm Pattis
As business died, and the money it brought in with it, Norm had to adapt to a changing world. A tough, nasty, lawyer gave way to a melodramatic marketing, whose every word was carefully crafted to wrench the heart. Provided the reader wasn’t bound up in critical thinking, it was a moving experience. Tears flowed. Emotions swirled. Feelings oozed. That was the way the “leading American trial lawyer” rolled, at least as far as his marketing and branding company, Platform Strategy, thought it best done.
I have followed the new, carefully packaged Norm’s efforts from afar, reading his blog posts from time to time, as he once wrote strong stuff, interesting stuff, thoughtful stuff. It’s now like watching a car wreck, his strained, pedantic prose ranging from the overly simplistic to the unbearably disingenuous. He’s been caught a couple of times for some horrifically bad judgment, whether impugning his client with improvident twits or flagrant hypocrisy. He fights to deny it, but persuades no thinking person.
For the most part, I’ve laid off commenting about Norm’s efforts. As an old friend, I saw no purpose in undermining his marketing efforts. If he wanted to blather about misery, whether his or others, what did I care? Some were laughable. Some were offensive. Some were just dumber than dirt.
They had an audience, whether nutjobs or young lawyers filled with more zeal than comprehension. Whether that audience included potential clients with the money to retain a lawyer is another matter. But Norm built up a following among those who still enjoy a soap opera.
But just the other day, Norm crossed the line again, with a post grounded in the world he’s manufactured to promote his fiction of Norm as the poor, lone David facing a world of Goliaths. It’s a continuing theme for Norm, to set himself up as the lone fighter for truth and justice, and castigating all others as the evil self-righteous mob in a conspiracy to subjugate poor Norm to their will.
There’s truth that others, myself included, have been critical of Norm. It’s a lie that it’s because some conspiracy exists to bend Norm to our will. Whether grandiose delusion or marketing ploy, I can’t say, but the criticism comes because it’s well deserved. We are all subject to the criticism of our peers from time to time. Most of us take it in stride. Norm whines about it, fabricates grand conspiracies and uses it to his marketing advantage.
There have been a few posts that were so shockingly wrong that I was nearly moved to write about them. But I exercised self-restraint, realizing that those who had any depth of knowledge would immediately see that Norm was shooting blanks, and those who couldn’t see it wouldn’t grasp the problem anyway. Still, I admired in a perverse way Norm’s sheer, unadulterated gall, his facility to denigrate others to promote himself.
He does it well, admitting his strawman faults, but then using them to show that he’s only human and in his effort to be the only honest person in law, the only lawyer who truly cares about the downtrodden, the only lawyer who would give his flawed life for others, he blames everyone else for being evil. It’s a great shtick, provided you don’t think too hard or pay attention to the last few times he played that card.
The last time he did this, in his turnaround post on Joseph Rakofsky, Norm needlessly attacked a broad swath of blawgers in order to justify his newfound grasp of the obvious, that Rakofsky wasn’t another downtrodden David, like Saint Norm, against whom all the evil blawgers piled on. Norm discovered that Rakofsky was wrong.
He had previously written about Rakofsky, in a mind-numbingly stupid post, designed to serve his contrarian marketing purposes. Since Norm wouldn’t get any marketing value out of agreeing with others, he decided to go down a different path. Only later did he realize how ridiculous his post was. Nowhere does Norm mention in the second post, which pretends that he only later saw the evidence of Rakofsky’s incompetence, that if this were so, his first post reflected his willingness to opine in the total absence of knowledge. Ignorance isn’t a good marketing tool, so he needed to come up with a better excuse. Of course, the evidence was everywhere, and there’s no rational way he can claim that when he wrote his first post he had no clue what he was talking about. Nor, of course, is being clueless a good reason to write about something, but that’s too obvious for words.
Norm’s willingness to harm others, including some who thought he was their friend, for no purpose beyond self-aggrandizement, is more than I can stomach. Whereas I wouldn’t undermine Norm’s marketing efforts before, and I silently tolerated the fictional world Norm created where he was the hero and everyone else the villain, old friendship was stretched too thin when his self-promotion came at the expense of the few who still tolerated Norm despite his self-serving manipulations. It made clear that Norm cared about no one and nothing but Norm. There was no going back.
The foreword to Norm’s book is written by F. Lee Bailey, a disbarred lawyer of great talent and even greater hubris. The introduction is written by Gerry Spence, the master of self-promotion and emotional angst. This is the company Norm hopes to keep. He will send love notes to foolish young lawyers who think that they can bask in the reflected glory of greatness, just like Norm, but only so that he has adoring fans. Maybe they will buy his book and gush about how sensitive he is. The book will likely be a big hit with the tin foil hat crowd, who love simplistic vilification.
I won’t buy the book. I already know Norm’s message, and it holds no interest for me. That Norm chose to harm others in the process of promoting himself is the last straw. Norm can wallow in his guilty verdicts by himself. I have no sympathy left for him. He’s chosen to be despicable, and his pathetic attempt to pretend he’s forced to do so because of the vast conspiracy against him no longer suffices.
At the end of Norm’s second Rakofsky post, he complains (after writing that he has no cause to complain, which naturally doesn’t stop him from doing so) of being attacked:
But today. Well, today, I illustrated the point I attacked in this piece: the Internet to rageaholics what bars are to drinkers: places where it’s too easy to go on a toot without regard for the consequences. So much though I don’t regret the flame war — it felt good; I regret the descent into simian rage. Mea culpa.
Every hockey team has its enforcers, guys who go out to draw penalties and try to distract opponents from the game at hand. Better players know to ignore then enforcers. I failed today, and hence draw some time in the penalty box. Live and learn, over and over and over again.
The conspiracy against poor Norm continues. But you can help quell the evil bullies and support the flawed but valiant David by buying his book or referring him a paying client. That’s all this is about.
If this post comes off bitter, it is. Norm betrayed a lot of old friends, myself included, who were there to help Norm and never, despite being used as the foil in Norm’s marketing campaign, tried to hurt Norm. Yet Norm went out of his way to hurt others to promote the greater glory of Norm Pattis.
Update: Not surprisingly, Norm has responded, raising the same tired conspiracy theory. But curiously Norm writes:
I first heard his name when he called me years ago. He was launching SImple Justice and called around to other bloggers to introduce himself and get tips on what works and doesn’t. The call amazed me. This was a guy who was going online with a design. I turned down the offer to co-author his page.What makes this particularly fascinating is that it’s a wholesale fantasy. It never happened. Except maybe in Norm’s wildest imagination. I had no clue who Norm was when I started SJ, nor for quite a long time after that. I never called around to other bloggers, Norm inclusive, to introduce myself, gets tips, or for any other purpose under the sun. Complete nonsense.
Nor did I ask Norm to co-author my “page”, whatever he means by that, though I did tell him when he left Crime & Federalism that he was welcome to post here if he wanted. Aside from that, his claim is totally, completely, entirely nuts; a complete fabrication. His attempt to smear me by suggesting this was my covert marketing design is just off the wall.
But it is nice to see that he has enough shame left in him to try to spin his way out of his hole.
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Norm Pattis is an excellent trial lawyer and a gifted writer of prose. Although his book is anecdotal and written primarily for non-lawyers, I have no doubt many will buy and read it.
Are you saying that Pattis just lied about your calling him before your started this blog?
I don’t know whether Norm is a liar, completely insane or has just been spinning bullshit so long that he no longer has the capacity of distinguishing reality from the fictional world he’s created around himself, but it never happened. Not even close. I didn’t have a clue that Norm Pattis existed when I started SJ, and never called anyone before starting this blawg.
All of which raises an interesting question: What will Norm’s dear friends have to say about this wholesale fabrication? They’ve now been confronted with a few instances where Norm’s been called out, and in the past have just stuck their head in the sand and pretended it never happened. Will they do so again? Or will they demonstrate that they give a damn about integrity?
The problem is clear: If integrity matters, as so many claim it does, then you have to live it, not just pay it lip service. The integrity of the blawgosphere depends on calling out the incompetent, the liars, the deceptive and disingenuous. Time to man up and stop excusing it because you want to be part of the Happysphere. What’s it going to be?
It’s always disturbing to see many folks who’s writing I admire turn sore towards each other.
Since I wasn’t around for the “old Norm” (that comic cracks me up), I’m not in a position to judge the accuracy of Scott’s tale of faux personality. Nor am I in a position to know whether or not Norm was telling the truth in with his “et tu, Scotty” post.
Honestly, I was leaning towards Norm’s side based on the tone of pieces. I thought calling him out in a post which would become attached to his book was a little rough, as was the Brian came at him on twitter.
Now, however, I’m a deeply skeptical since Norm took down the above mentioned post, after Scott denied it.
What a mess.
To the casual reader, your assessment of my calling Norm out would be quite reasonable. To those with some greater depth of knowledge, it would look differently. Norm plays a game where he doesn’t name names, doesn’t link to sources, doesn’t quote anything. Instead, he characterizes people and claims in his own unsourced way, and to the casual reader, it may be somewhat unclear who or what he’s talking about. Even to people who know better, they occasionally adopt Norm’s characterization with thinking too hard that there’s no basis for it.
But what Norm has done is to deliberately harm a wide bunch of people in this passive aggressive manner. That’s posts nonsense is his own business. That he hurts people is another. The casual reader might not be aware of the implications of some of what Norm writes, but I am and others are.
Take a look at the blawgers who wrote about the Rakofsky case. Tell me which of them is part of Norm’s “self-righteous mob,” and was coerced by peer pressure into writing something they didn’t want or didn’t believe? Or did 100 lawyers (or whatever number it is now) decide that this was something they, personally and individually, decided to write about, and that their conclusions are their own.
Which of these blawgers is part of this ignorant, lemmings mob?
Then ask why Norm would take the position that these blawgers who chose to write, some of whom thought that Norm was their dear friend, and some of whom had been friends with Norm for a very long time, should be attacked by him while still defendants in this bizarre suit, and why Norm would support Rakofsky against these dear friends of his, and why Norm would profess ignorance about the case (Itself a ridiculous proposition) yet find it imperative to write about it and attack his friends?
Norm has been doing some nasty name calling for quite a while, and still is. He doesn’t include the name of his target (except for me this time), but he shows no reluctance at using ad hominems like “jeerocrat” and “keyboard cowboys” to describe his unnamed enemies. While you may not know who or what he’s talking about, others do. And make no mistake, Norm knows who he’s talking about.
I’ve allowed Norm to play his passive aggressive game for a long time without saying anything, but he’s gone to far when he goes out of his way to harm people. Because the casual reader doesn’t see the harm doesn’t mean that others don’t. Enough is enough, and I’m not going to stand by silently as Norm Pattis tries to elevate himself by harming others.
I see that Norm has deleted his post and now says you have a small penis. Care to prove him wrong?
So I hear. Deleting the evidence is another of Norm’s M.O.’s. In the blog before this current iteration, people started calling Norm out in the comments for playing fast and loose with the facts, as well as disclosing client confidences while telling the stories of his triumphs. So one day, he deleted all the comments, saing comments were just a distraction.
Did people forget about this?
And I fail to see what my penis size has to do with Norm’s having abused the trust of his readers or hurt others in the name of self-aggrandizement.
As a casual reader of both blogs, I don’t have any info on NP’s purported villany. But having read the sample chapter of the book online, it’s clear . . .
[Ed. Note: Balance deleted. Here’s the deal, just because you wrote something unflattering toward Norm doesn’t mean you get to do so anonymously and use “notagenuineemail @ noemail.com” to conceal your identify. If I complain about it from others, I surely won’t accept it here, even when it supports my position. If you have something to say, man up and take ownership of it. Otherwise, it will never see the light of day here.]
I do not personally know Mr. Pattis or Mr. Greenfield.
My familiarity with both is based upon reading their blog posts. After awhile I quit reading Mr. Pattis’ posts as I found them to be grandiose and self-serving. I am still a “bleeding heart liberal”, passionate criminal defense lawyer who is constantly learning and growing. After 33 years of practicing criminal law I still find myself being idealistic, optimistic, and hopeful that eventually we will all work consistently to achieve a better system.
Mr. Greenfield has consistently forced me to examine myself, my beliefs and my way of practicing law. It is not always an easy process but he, along with many others who generously share their insights through blogging, have forced me to continually strive to be better at everything I do.
I have no illusion I know either of these gentlemen by their blog; true integrity can be observed over a period of time without the necessity of knowing one personally, although that would be the best of all possible worlds. I would have a very hard time questioning Mr. Greenfield’s integrity.
Calling out hypocrisy, dishonesty, misguided behavior, ignorance or sheer stupidity is a dangerous action. I choose to applaud those who have the guts to do so. It makes our world better as it forces us to see our world without rose-colored glasses. A clear true knowledge of who we are, what we do and how our actions affect others is the only path to making this world, and our small part of it, a better place for all.
Thank you, Mr. Greenfield, your willingness to show yourself to your readers as a person who cares about truth. One who is willing to write about it inspires. (But not too much, as you don’t see me blogging as I just do not have the strength to constantly field the dangerous mind fields that crop up )
pam