Finding the perfect pair is hard to do, and with the vast resources available on the internet, many hope to meet that person who “completes” them through digital magic.  And, if one is truly fortunate, at the right price. 

Some entrepreneurial types have come up with peculiar ideas of matching lawyers with clients, from the putative bidding for the bottom wars of Shpoonkle to the hot bed law office concept of LawyerUp.  A number of lawyers use a free method, Craigs List, to advertise their wares, while others enjoy the online but low cost option of the PennySaver, particularly Wall Street lawyer types.

What’s unusual, however, is for someone to use a method like Craigs List to seek the perfect lawyer to stand by his side in court.  After all, if the claim has merit, lawyers will flock to a litigant for a piece of the vast wealth coming down the road.  If no lawyer wants to be anywhere near the client, there’s a message to be heard.

Via George Wallace at Declarations and Exclusions, just such an offering was made on Craigs List.

Attorney of Record in NY (Trial Lawyer…MUST READ BELOW)

In your reply, please acknowledge the points listed below. ($200 a month plus $150 per Court Appearance.)

1) This is a Defamation case that was filed only a couple of months ago; it is brand new.  If the case survives the motions to dismiss, I assume it will be 2 or 3 years before it is over. There are many, many defendants and once they learn who the lawyer is who I will hire as the Attorney of Record, they will almost certainly engage in character assassination of that person and attempt to ruin that lawyer’s reputation on the Internet.  I do not know for a fact that this will happen, but I believe that it is a possibility.

2) The lawyer should be EXTREMELY aggressive in the Court room. It is helpful if you have experience in Defamation. Obviously, trial lawyers who intimately know the CPLR will be the strongest candidates.

3) Please, no resumes.  Just briefly tell me about your experience.

4) While I will be responsible for most of the drafting, I will have legal and procedural questions that I could need you to answer.  You will also need to proof read our documents.

5) You must become an expert in my case.  You must know all of the defendants, all of their arguments, etc.  Thank you.

As enticing as this offer might seem at first blush, it reflects a problem.  Could it be possible that the reason that the litigant who found it necessary to solicit a lawyer blind on the internet can’t find a lawyer otherwise?  Lawyers are a dime a dozen, taking on dubious causes all the time if there is even the slightest hint of making a buck somewhere down the road.  Why, then, does the person who has carefully crafted his requirements for his lawyer found it necessary to go to the virtual street and solicit for anyone, anyone at all, willing to take him on?

What if the ad-placer went from lawyer to lawyer, knowing a few who could be asked to fill the shoes he feels are so vital to his cause, and was told that despite their hunger and desperation, their willingness to take on pretty much any case that held any potential to make a buck, they would not take his?  This would seem to be as clear a message that his cause was not just, not right, a horrible loser. 

And so, the individual so needy for counsel offered to pay, and still they turned him down flat.  No reliance on promises of future wealth, but cash on demand, and still no takes?  The message became clearer. 

Yet the person who wrote this add persists.

Another match made in heaven, David Dunning met Justin Kruger at Cornell University.  Together, they developed the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;


2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;


3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;


4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

It appears that the person who posted the advertisement for a lawyer on Craigs List may suffer from these problems, incapable of learning the lessons taught by a match gone right in trying to find a match destined to go wrong.

When lawyers bid on the opportunity to represent someone, itself an ugly concept but one that at least supports the notion that someone wants the job, or believes that the case has merit,  This may be a message that the client is cheap, or cares little about the quality of his representation, but at least the fact that lawyers desire the work is encouraging.

On the flip side, when no one wants the job, a relatively normal, reasonable person, with intelligence slightly above that of a brick, would recognize a problem.  Not so the person suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect, whose belief in his own virtue and brilliance so clouds his mind that he is incapable of learning any lesson from rejection.

I suspect that whoever place this Craigs List advertisement for counsel suffers from such a malignancy.  I can only hope it’s not terminal, as it seems clear that he will not find love on the internet.