The notices themselves contain a lot of boilerplate language. Writing a disclosure notice from the ground up would waste time. Plus, things like diagrams of the scene and maps of the area aren’t normally the first thing a lawyer thinks about when mounting a defense, and it’s good to put the state on notice of those potential discovery items early to avoid an irritating objections later on in the process.

There are a few different approaches to drafting what’s usually entitled “Defendant’s Rule 15.2 Disclosure Notice.” One is to print a completely boilerplate pleading, check the applicable defenses, and file it. The better way is to look over the standard pleading and, with a good understanding of the case, supplement it with language that will encompass every conceivable thing that needs to be disclosed at that point in that particular case. It doesn’t take very long, but it’s really worth it for that one-in-a-million time when the prosecutor skims the notice and later objects to something it contains on grounds involving lack of disclosure. It makes the prosecutor look spectacularly stupid.

Prosecutors almost never read their own disclosure notices either. It’s something their paralegals prepare and that they only think about when it becomes an issue. Some defense attorneys do the same thing. The parties can get away with generalized, sloppy notices, and they often do. Carefully composing a notice can set a defense lawyer apart. Sometimes, out-lazying the lazy prosecutor can set a defense lawyer apart too.

There’s one defense lawyer who had some company print up triplicate carbon copy disclosure notices. It’s amazing. He rolls into court, late, of course, and picks up the calendar. He pulls out his stack of notices and fills in the names and case numbers of his clients, checks the defenses on the spot, and calls the cases. The judges ask him if he’s filed his “15.2,” and he says he has it with him. He dramatically pulls off the top sheet and asks to approach and deliver it to the court before handing the second copy to the state. He keeps the third for himself.

The if-you-can’t-beat-em-then-join-em mentality is remarkable. It’s also funny. If you aren’t a client. And if you don’t really care about the quality of representation people are getting. The McJustice feel of the system in general is bad enough, but it’s that much worse when a one-man firm uses a choose-your-own-adventure approach to criminal defense. How many clients does someone need before the printing expense of carbon copies becomes economically sensible? Probably a lot.

His approach serves as a litmus test for other defense lawyers. The ones who think “hmm, that’s a good idea” should probably reduce their caseload. The ones who think “man do I need to reduce my caseload; I can’t believe I think that would be helpful” will hopefully follow through with it. Follow through with reducing their caseload, I mean. The ones who think “holy shit, this place is going to hell in a handbag” are the ones to whom I refer cases.

In all fairness, most first-pretrial minute entries say “Defendant has not complied with Rule 15.2. Defendant’s Notice shall be filed by such-and-such-a-date.” I guess the carbon copy guy may be ahead of the curve. Sadly, most pretrial minute entries also reflect that no substantive motions are planned and no interviews have been conducted.

A justice system where defenses are kept warm under heat lamps isn’t so just, but I suppose it’s better than starving. What a depressing thought.

Events bring out the young lawyers with no jobs, wandering around like zombies clutching stacks of business cards with “Esq.” after their names but no firm name or physical address anywhere to be found. Some only list a cell phone with an Illinois area code and a Gmail or Yahoo email address consisting of a cutesy name followed by a few odd digits. As smart as some of them seem, I can’t bring myself to refer a potential client to Jim from Joliet who goes by “puppylover69″ and practices out of a post office box. I try to buy them drinks instead; they deserve a cold one.

The events also bring out the newly-minted small firm associates. Some of them are models for success, but more of them are there because they aren’t yet earning their keep. Their bosses send them out hoping they’ll make connections and snare a few small referrals here and there. They usually aren’t quite sure about what type of law they practice. They try to feel out what the solos are making and figure out how much vacation time other young associates get. It isn’t encouraging.

Perhaps the most fascinating lawyer of all at these functions is the big firm associate. Like any type of lawyer, there are amazingly talented ones as well as those who make me concerned about the future of the profession. The latter are far more interesting. Some of them are still fixated on law school. Despite all their money (I assume) and support staff (I assume) and mahogany-scented homes filled with leather-bound books (I assume), they seem to have peaked before they ever met a client. They talk about their law school grades like Al Bundy talks about the touchdowns he scored during the glory days of high school football.

In high school, I remember the people who were at their peak. I remember the pretty girls who never got any prettier, and the athletic guys whose dreams of a professional sports career turned out to be nothing more than dreams. I’m confident that the ones who made it big don’t think about high school anymore, and so it goes with the top of any law school class. There are ones who have gone on to great things. There are ones who still tell you about their grades.

Law school isn’t trade school. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t. It also isn’t a vacuum. I’m happy about that. The important parts of the professional life of a lawyer, a life centered around representing people or people’s ideas or institutions comprised of people, are the parts that occur after the lawyer starts lawyering. That much may seem obvious, but like many obvious things, it’s only that way when you have a certain perspective. Epic tales about all-night cram sessions to ascend into the elite top 7.6% of a school ranked in the top 37.5% just aren’t that interesting to me. They are to some. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

What I take from many networking events, and from grade-obsessed people in general, are a reinvigorated outlook and a little bit of resolve. It’s the idea that what I’m doing now should be the most important thing I’ve done. It’s resolving that I won’t define myself based on something I did or didn’t do in training school or at any other point in my past, but that I’m defining myself by the work I’m doing right now.

I’m not hanging around with ex-presidents. I’m mostly meeting people my age or younger. If they’re already coming down from the peak, it tells me they haven’t climbed much of a mountain. People who are eating free hors d’oeuvres and hobnobbing with the likes of me should be people whose best is yet to come. Constantly reminding myself that’s what should ring true for me as well is the best thing I can do to ensure my clients now are as well-served as the ones I’ve done right in the past.

People hate lawyers because they think lawyers are greedy. They think we’re all a bunch of privileged little brats who’ve lived our entire lives in a world of endless opportunity. They think we went to private schools and had tutors. They think we entered a mysterious old money system at an early age and got fed straight from prep school into colleges adorned in ivy. They think that, after we finished our useless undergraduate degrees, we weren’t equipped to do anything capable of supporting our lavish lifestyle, the only one we knew, so mommy and daddy funneled us right into another ivy-covered institution for law school.

In short, people think lawyers have never had to sit in a shitty apartment with a bunch of other poor kids wondering how the hell they were going to scrape together rent. They think we’re all a bunch of rich, entitled punks who are out of touch with the rest of the country. Publicly whining about bonuses in a recession isn’t doing much to dispel that notion.

I have nothing against bonuses. People who do good work and earn money should be rewarded. Bonuses for lawyers, however, don’t seem quite the same as bonuses for most other people. The nature of our job, specifically the fact that we earn our keep by representing clients, separates us from many other fields. We are paid by people and entities to do work for them. When we celebrate big bonuses and lament those that seem inadequate, we are in essence celebrating the money we’ve taken from people who trust us. Those people are probably struggling or at least price-conscious in this economy, and they’re paying our rate because we told them it’s our rate. Nobody is so stupid to believe that you can’t practice law without a marble foyer on the top floor and a library of leather bound books. Some people like to know they’re hiring an overpriced lawyer, but more people want to know they aren’t being overcharged.

If I owned an investment firm and made a fortune investing wisely for my clients, I doubt any of my clients would hold a big bonus against me. I get rich to my client’s benefit. It’s similar if I own a company that makes a product. In that case, I get rich because lots of people decide my product is worth buying. They want my product, I want their money. There’s nothing strange about celebrating the money people have given to me because I used it to make more money for them or because I made the best version of something they wanted and were going to buy anyway. There is something different about celebrating profit with huge bonuses to associates whose primary contribution is padding the bill with a bunch of 0.2-hour emails and useless memos about obscure bullshit. Lawyers and clients may get rich together, but not always. When they don’t, the lawyer is the one who still ends up with a payout.

My beef with bonuses really comes from the lack of any real value I see in a lot of what these big firms do. If I’m wrong, let me know, but what I see from Biglaw is a lot of nickle-and-diming institutional clients. They employ armies of people vetted in the hallowed halls of a select few institutions and use those automatons to squeeze every little penny out of the companies that hire them. If I owned a company that was struggling through a recession and paying Biglaw to help me out in a lawsuit, I’d be pretty pissed seeing my money used to give a bunch of twenty-something associates several thousand dollar bonuses that they’ll probably blow on coke and hookers and iPhones. I’d wonder about the value I’m getting from that firm. I’d wonder if they couldn’t have knocked down the hourly rate a little. I’d start looking elsewhere if I saw their young associates publicly bitching that they didn’t get a big enough chunk of my hard-earned money for their essentially worthless contribution to something I didn’t want to pay for in the first place.

The bonus obsession doesn’t just reinforce the negative stereotypes most people have about lawyers. It also highlights the fact Biglaw is probably a broken business model. People in general aren’t so stupid that they’ll never figure out Biglaw as it is right now just isn’t worth it, are they? If it does happen and all the fees dry up, it’ll be interesting to see where the associates who used to whine about bonuses go to complain about unemployment. I wonder how all this bonus talk will look to them then.

I got a little bit of rejection recently. It’s nothing special, really. I fought hard for a client, and despite the results I achieved, they ended up switching lawyers before the real battle started. Although it’s nothing new, it still stung. I thought I had built a relationship. I cared about the client and his family, and I still do. I hope everything works out for them. I’m worried about them, though I think they are in very capable hands.

It’s one thing when someone hires a con-artist who promised them the moon. It’s another when they hire a well-regarded attorney who will probably do a great job. It’s happened, just as it will continue to happen so long as I continue to be honest about myself to each and every person who walks in the door, and there will always be a bad feeling somewhere deep down. Will the new lawyer, with his army of associates and staff, be there to fight for bail at 5:00 a.m. jail court? Will he do the work himself, or will he farm it out and pad the bill to justify partnership? Will it matter? Is that what they want?

Occasionally, I see how troubling it is that my office is on the first story. Some people get upset about how I don’t make the receptionist answer the phone if I’m in the office. Normally, the receptionist and the paralegal don’t even figure into the equation, as every client has my cell number. That’s the kiss of death for many prospective clients. There’s no mystique, and plenty of people love mystique.

The toughest thing may be that there are some people who don’t care about that. There are some people who look for things that are probably excellent indicators of legal acumen. They look for thing like decades of past success or huge, favorable verdicts. With those people, I may never win. Ten years from now, they’ll be looking for the guy with a quarter-century of experience. I’ll lose. In twenty years, they’ll be looking for the guy with fifty years. I’ll lose again. If I’ve just won a kidnapping trial, they want the guy who just won a murder trial. Some people want to play games I’ll never win. It may just end up a longevity competition.

The truth is that some people need someone other than me. It isn’t that I wouldn’t do a better job than the person they chose, but rather that they’d feel happier with the person they chose. Pretending that every client who doesn’t want me isn’t the kind client I’d want is just sour grapes. That approach leads to a career-long dead end. Truth be told, sometimes rejection is a good sign.

Although it may feel better in the short term to shrug off rejection knowing that some scumbag lawyer lied and cheated his way onto a case, in the long term, seeing the ones who got away competently represented is a sign of one of the best things that could happen to me.

It means that people are referring me good clients. It means I’m not getting people who show up because my website says I’m aggressive or caring or because I claim to offer payment plans. It means I’m in good company.

Contentment as a criminal defense lawyer means being a big fish in a big pond competing fairly to fight my heart out for people who trust me. If rejection is part of the equation, it’s worth it a million times over.

After arriving, I was supposed to meet some people at a mysterious location. They refused to give me any details in advance. I knew the purpose of the meeting and who set it up, and I didn’t want to end up on the other side of town scrambling to reach some secret location in time for my appointment. I consulted Google, entering the name of the government agency involved. I went to the location I found, the first hit nonetheless, and I sat there drinking a cup of terrible coffee.

Shortly before my scheduled meeting, I got a call from the organizer. He told me to meet everybody else at a certain location. It probably had way better coffee than the place I chose. It was a few blocks away, so I walked over and made small talk. Some impressive law-enforcement types pulled up a few minutes later, and we got into a little convoy. I felt like the president. For about sixty seconds.

Where’d we go? A few blocks away, to the exact place where I was happily drinking that awful cup of coffee ten minutes earlier. I wish they’d at least given me some kind of warning about the coffee. The kicker is that they wouldn’t confirm where we were going the next day. Hint: it was the same place.

Thinking about that makes me think about another situation.

I recently went to visit my parents in rural Western Kentucky. I met an old friend at a bar one night, and I saw they had Sam Adams Octoberfest on tap. In my opinion, it’s the best beer that company brews, so I ordered a pitcher. As I carefully poured two pints, I noticed it was cloudy and the carbonation was off. The smell wasn’t right either. My friend and I knew there was something wrong with the keg before the end of the first sip.

I started to write this paragraph beginning with the words “I don’t want to brag,” but that seemed ridiculous. I probably should brag; I have a great palate when it comes to beer. I can taste any beer and consistently identify the style, the varieties of malts and hops used, the IBUs, the yeast strain, and much more. I’ve spent years testing myself too. I can make a homebrew clone of pretty much anything I can taste. I drank a Sam Adams Octoberfest from a good keg less than a week prior, and Oktoberfest styles are among my favorites. Unless the Boston Beer Company has started making a special edition Brettanomyces or Lactobacillus Festbier, there was something wrong.

Confident there was a problem, I brought my glass to the bartender and told him there was something wrong with the beer. His comment? “That shit is fucking delicious. It’s a fresh keg.” There was a blond girl with curly pigtails sitting next to him. She looked exactly like Daisy Duke’s beat-up evil twin, with super-short cutoff jeans and a red and white plaid shirt that exposed her stomach. Apparently she was a beer connossieur, so she chimed in. “Yeah, that’s good shit. Totally fucking delicious.”

I asked the bartender to try some, a request that didn’t require much convincing. He poured a quick shot from the tap and without looking or smelling tipped the glass back and drank it in one gulp. He should have looked at it, as certain beers are supposed to have a certain appearance, and he should have smelled it, as you can get at least as much sensory input from smelling a beer as you can from tasting it. It took him a second, but after an awkward pause in which he seemed to have forgotten why he just took a shot of beer, he confirmed his initial reaction. “Fucking delicious.”

In situations like those two, I often think about a comment my mom made made a year or two ago. She was talking about retirement and mentioned how it would be interesting to see how it feels, as the men and women of her generation identify themselves by their work. The job defines them, apparently. I’ve thought about that statement often. I can’t say if she’s right, but I can say that a negative implication of her statement is definitely true. The men and women of my generation generally do not identify themselves by what they do for a living.

I frequently see blog posts about job-hunting for law students and new lawyers. Getting a job is obviously a big concern for a lot of people, and there are plenty of others willing to provide advice. Advisors suggest things like hanging around with practicing lawyers and broadening the search to include non-lawyer jobs. They say to embrace social media and to think outside the box. Those are the tools to get a job, the explicit goal of people in my generation. Rarely do people mention being qualified for the desired job as an important part of the equation. The advice all seems geared toward staying just as you are while altering superficial things that make you more appealing to employers.

My generation wants work, but they don’t want to define themselves by their work. A job is a way to live in a nice house, drive a late model car, and have enough stability to relax on evenings and weekends and during several weeks of vacation each year. A job will provide an office with a window and a big desk under which they can grab a quick nap after taking a long lunch break at a trendy restaurant with their work friends. Jobs are means to an end. They want a job not because it’s the job they want to do or even that they can do exceptionally well, but because it will help them do the non-job-related things that make them happy. They don’t care if their work time is well spent as long as it pays the bills.

Every time someone who’s done nothing to build a foundation of knowledge and skill in a given area of law complains about how employers in that area want someone with three to five years of experience, I worry about the future. Just like when I’m confronted with government agents needlessly shuffling me around to make work and bartenders with no knowledge of the beer they’re serving, it confirms that far too many people my age believe a job is just a way to stay busy and get paid. It isn’t the kind of thing that you strive to do well or efficiently to make the world a safer or more enjoyable place, but rather a set of motions you go through to draw a paycheck.

My experiences have left me hoping that my generation isn’t actually different. I hope that previous generations were just like us but that they changed. I hope that they’ve just forgotten, and that they now they criticize us because their memories are bad. I suspect the only way the world is going to function in the future is if we change, and knowing it’s happened before will make me far more optimistic. If my hopes are misplaced, though, I suppose I’m going to have to get used to wasting time over bad coffee and paying for unintentionally sour beer.

Later on, I was in another courtroom when a settlement conference was about to start. The back door opened and elementary school kids began filling all of the seats in the back. The bailiff gave a spectacularly exasperated look. It had been a long morning already, and he realized the judge would probably need to speak with the kids first and have them leave before discussing the facts of the settlement case. It involved charges of sexual conduct with a minor, an offense alleged to be a dangerous crime against children.

The bailiff then relayed to me a story about something that happened just a week earlier. He was working for a judge who had just been transferred from the juvenile bench. The court administration immediately began giving her adult criminal cases after she transferred to a criminal assignment. One forgetful clerk made an error and sent an in custody adult to her old courtroom, which was still being used for juvenile cases. The guy was charged with molestation, and they didn’t catch the mistake until they brought him into juvenile court and were about to seat him in the jury box with the in-custody kids.

Even knowing that, nine times out of ten, people charged with scary sounding things like “dangerous crimes against children” or “molestation of a child” are not dangerous at all and probably haven’t done anything have as bad as the name of the crime makes it sound (think about a high school senior and his freshman girlfriend), there’s still something awfully funny about that kind of slip-up.

Yesterday morning, the tables were turned when another lawyer asked me to cover two hearings for him. I told him I could do it; I was there anyway. I didn’t charge him, as I view coverage as a professional courtesy to a colleague and not a source of income. He sent me an email with fairly detailed notes about what was happening in each case.

One hearing went fine, but the other was an absolute disaster. What I knew walking into that disastrous hearing was that he’d filed a motion to continue, which he had attached to his email. He had a trial conflict, as did the prosecutor, and he had already bought plane tickets to go on his holiday vacation after the conflicting trial. He wanted some extra time, and nobody objected to his motion. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? What I walked into was anything but the easy continuance I was expecting.

It turned out the trial conflict he cited in his motion had gone away. I doubt he lied in the motion and expect it had been continued between filing and the hearing I attended, but I wish he would’ve told me. The last day for speedy trial purposes was also very close, and the prosecutor told the judge he could find another prosecutor to try the case for him. According to the judge, the Arizona Supreme Court’s policy is that a previously purchased vacation plane ticket isn’t sufficient cause to continue a trial. The icing on the cake was the client, who claimed his lawyer told him the case “was too hard.” I can’t remember when I’ve been so blind-sided walking into a hearing.

Nevermind, I can. When I first started out, other attorneys would regularly take advantage of my willingness to help out. I was eager to meet lawyers and get into court. Other lawyers were eager to avoid work. Lawyers who had the same tribal indigent defense contract I did would ask me to cover hearings and tell me the hearings were just simple continuances. The clients were pissed no one visited them, judges were mad the defense had blown deadlines, and prosecutors were frustrated that the defense hadn’t returned their calls. One lawyer asked me to cover what she said was “a dismissal.” I appeared and it was a bench trial. She thought the victim wouldn’t show and it would just get dismissed. She thought wrong, and I was like a deer in headlights.

I learned quickly that there are some really horrendous lawyers out there. There are also some ungrateful, entitled ones. Adrian once covered a hearing for one lawyer as a favor. I think they had hearings on the same docket and the other lawyer had to leave. Adrian did the hearing for him. Our email inbox was bombarded every day for weeks with messages from his secretary asking Adrian to cover various hearings for him. No pay, just requested coverage. I think he even gave Adrian’s name to his friends suggesting they have Adrian do all of their hearings as well. Adrian assures me he only said he’d do that one hearing.

You can probably see the coverage dilemma pretty clearly now. I want to help out other lawyers when they need it, and I want to make sure good attorneys are willing to help me out in case I need it. I also want to avoid ambush situations like yesterday. What do I do?

I can’t just refuse to help out other lawyers when they really need it. If I know they’re incompetent or unethical or there’s something else wrong with them, the case, or the situation in general, I say no. I have no problem disappointing people when it’s necessary. What happens when the lawyer asking me for a favor is an unknown though? Do I only help lawyers when I’m familiar with their work? How familiar? Or do I help anyone unless I have reason to believe they suck? Should I help anyone regardless of my opinion of their lawyering so long as they haven’t thrown me into a crappy situation in the past?

Admittedly, I haven’t given this an awful lot of thought. After yesterday, I think I probably should.

Of the three judges, two of us practice criminal law. The third, a transactional lawyer, deferred to us to instruct the competitor about what to do about that dilemma.

I answered by telling the competitor it wasn’t really a single dilemma with a clear answer I could give him right there, but more of a daily reality of practicing law in a field where you represent people. To know what to ask and what not to ask, you need intimate knowledge of the area of law in general and of the issues that come up in that type of case in particular. You must understand the ethics rules. You want to get as much as you can to avoid any nasty surprises, but at the same time, you can get yourself in a legal or ethical mess if you don’t know what you’re doing.

The competitor’s question was almost like asking a civil litigator how to win a lawsuit. What type of lawsuit? What court? At what stage? What are the facts? Who is the client? Who is the opponent? The competitor’s was too broad a question to get any sort of helpful answer in such a setting.

The competitor didn’t seemed thrilled with my answer. He looked like he wanted a simple sound byte he could take with him and never think about it again. The transactional lawyer also seemed dissatisfied with my response. He explained to the competitor, “all of the hot-shots downtown always want to know very little so they can keep their options open.”

I’m not surprised that I don’t count as a “hot-shot.” I already knew I wasn’t a “street lawyer,” as many of my appointed clients used to threaten that they’d hire one if I failed to comply with their demands. A “hot-shot” is probably one step above that. I guess I’m not a “downtown” lawyer either. That must be because of my suburban office and the fact I have to drive several miles to Phoenix on each of the three or four days each week I practice in downtown Phoenix courts. Not being a hot-shot, downtown lawyer, I suppose I couldn’t have known there was a simple, bright-line rule to a highly complex aspect of being a criminal defense lawyer.

Luckily, there are a few simple rules I do know. In the law, simple answers tend to be wrong. Sentences that contain the words “never” or “always” tend to be inaccurate. No single piece of knowledge can ever serve as a substitute for experience. I’d like to think that most people know those things, but most people are comforted by the simple and the absolute. They let it slide.

I like my rules better, but then again, I’m not a hot-shot, downtown lawyer.

Yesterday, I noticed she put up the following with a link: “Adam Gee teaches you How To Market To Bikers in his newest class.” Intrigued, I clicked the link. I couldn’t find anything about the content of the course though, so I went to Adam Gee’s page at SPU. There, I saw the following under his syllabus:

Marketing to Bikers: Developing a Motorcycle Practice
* Indirect Marketing Techniques
* Direct Marketing Techniques
* Blogs, social media and books

I think SPU is a great idea, and Adam Gee may be a hell of a lawyer. For all I know, he may even have some serious biker cred. However, what Susan Carter Liebel wrote, along with that little portion of the syllabus on Adam Gee’s page, worried me a little bit.

I’m a biker. I ride ten to twenty thousand miles each year, and I’m very active in a variety of bikers’ groups. I volunteered for MROs and went to swap meets before I started law school. Brown & Little, P.L.C., wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye. My friends are bikers, so I often get to see lawyer advertising not from the perspective of another lawyer, but from the perspective of the target demographic. It isn’t pretty.

Lawyers saturate the biker market. Most lawyer advertising aimed at bikers is not well done. I cringe every time I see a pamphlet showing a couple of guys with neatly-trimmed goatees wearing neatly-pressed leathers as they lean on their spotless, stock Softails. Do they really think they can just add some flames and an angry eagle to their ad and they’ll be ready to take the motorcycle community by storm? Never mind, I know the answer.

Lawyers also start special wings of their firms claiming to offer bikers free breakdown assistance or legal advice regarding discrimination. They give out special cards for bikers to carry in their wallets in case something happens. When there’s discrimination or a stranded biker, you can usually hear the crickets chirping on the phone line. When a biker gets seriously injured by another motorist, however, the lawyers pounce. Good thing the biker joined their card-club; those pesky ethics rules about solicitation are normally a drag. Do lawyers actually think bikers can’t tell the difference between a gimmick and someone who genuinely wants to help? Never mind, I know the answer.

Attorneys finagle their way into every event bikers attend and every product bikers buy. They’re like vultures. They see the promise of riches and throw money at bikers, but most bikers see through their crappy advertising. Bikers know who the outsiders are, and they generally aren’t swayed by a back page ad. Weekend warriors and people who aren’t in a club or an MRO may not notice the lack of authenticity, so the poser biker’s lawyer will probably find himself sitting across a desk from a poser biker in an initial consultation, each pretending they’re the genuine article. I guess that’s okay, but it’s too bad lawyers have to insult the intelligence of a group of good people with ridiculous advertising in order to find a playmate for a session of biker make-believe.

Whether you believe me or not, I’m not complaining about this because bikers are my market. Sure, my firm does market to bikers, but it’s mostly just to the extent necessary to help good causes that need sponsors. We also do get clients from our involvement, but there’s one big difference between that and the way most lawyers market to groups like bikers.

I get biker clients the way I get clients from my family and friends. It isn’t based on some slick ad or some sham club I’ve convinced people to join. When a friend who happens to be a biker knows someone in need of a criminal defense lawyer, they refer that person to me because they know and trust me. Lawyer advertising in the biker market doesn’t take away my slice of the biker pie any more than another lawyer advertising in my mom’s Christmas letter would convince my brother to send a DUI referral elsewhere.

Lawyers study their markets as if the people who compose them are animals. They infiltrate organizations to take their targets’ hard-earned money. Their goal, because of the very nature what they’re doing, is to take more than they give. They aren’t in it to make friends or help a cause at all. And we wonder why we’re hated?

I understand that’s how marketing in general may work for a lot of lawyers, but I wish we had a little more self-respect. This is supposed to be a profession, isn’t it? Lawyers can get some of the low-hanging fruit by exploiting a group of people, but that doesn’t mean they should. It’s embarrassing. Are attorneys so greedy, stupid, and helpless that they need to pay someone else to study insular groups of people and teach them how to make friends with and influence those people? Never mind, I know the answer.

I hope SPU isn’t wasting its time sending freshly-minted solos into meetings to peddle their new biker helpline or hand out pamphlets with lots of flames and skulls, but I honestly have no idea what SPU intends to teach about bikers. If it’s something to make lawyers more effective at handling motorcycle-related cases, more power to SPU. If it’s a superficial study of what most bikers like (hint: a good time, and boobs) and don’t like (hint: authority) intended to show money-grubbing lawyers how to make friends and persuade bikers to hire them, I’ll be disappointed. Please, SPU. Do it right. The biker world doesn’t need any more law firms with mascots.

The only consolation for me in all of this is the fact that attorneys, probably far more so than bikers, are studied as a group and targeted by marketers. What I view as exploitation by us may be more likely to end up being exploitation of us. Most biker marketing isn’t going to send a single biker to a shady lawyer hoping to score a quick buck from a new group of suckers, but the same doesn’t seem to be true of marketing to lawyers. Lawyers looking to exploit bikers are probably going to find themselves getting a dose of their own medicine, medicine that actually seems to work on them. Attorneys will buy anything. That must be why many lawyers think they can get clients with half-baked ideas.

Let’s say you have an officer who’s saying something highly incriminating, something that he didn’t put in his police report. You want to impeach him with that omission. Using the 3 Cs technique the teacher recommended, you’d first commit the officer to his current statement. Make sure the judge or jury understands exactly what he’s saying. Second, you’d credit his police report. Make sure the judge or jury realizes that, if what he’s saying had actually happened, it would’ve ended up in the report. Third, you’d confront the officer with the fact he omitted that essential information from his report.

The last C is the “gotcha” moment. Hand the officer the report and ask him to find the part where he says what he’s now saying. He won’t find it because it isn’t there, and he’ll look bad in the process. Gotcha!

I recently saw the 3 Cs in action. The officer testified that he was the one who found contraband in the car, and the defense lawyer immediately (and very obviously) committed the officer to that statement. “So your testimony today is that you were the person who found the contraband in my client’s car?” “Yes,” the officer replied.

Committed! One C down, two to go. Everyone in the room knew what the defense lawyer was going to do.

The defense lawyer then proceeded to do a great job of crediting the officer’s report. He established that the officer had training on how to write a good report. He’d written hundreds. He was detail-oriented. He prided himself on being thorough. The officer knew the prosecutor relied on the report for charging. He knew the defense lawyer relied on the report in preparing his case. The crediting went on and on.

By the end, the defense lawyer had credited the report as being the be-all, end-all of relevant information in the case. Crediting is always the longest part of impeaching with the 3 Cs, and this time it took forever. I couldn’t wait to see that “gotcha” moment.

The defense lawyer strutted up to the stand, gave the officer the report, and asked him, “can you please show me where in your report you mention that that you were the person who found the contraband in my client’s car?” The room was filled with tension as the officer carefully looked through his report. Everyone waited on the edge of the seat for that moment where the impeachment finally came together, then…

“Page 4, paragraph 2, second sentence,” the officer explained.

The defense lawyer, promptly and with great authority, proceeded to end his cross-examination with flair, proudly declaring “I have no further questions your honor!” as if he’d not just had his ass handed to him.

It was a spectacular facepalm moment. It was riotously funny (except for the defense lawyer and his client, of course) and probably the best “gotcha” moment I’ve ever seen in court. It was just reversed.

Turns out the 3 Cs aren’t so helpful when you haven’t read the police report.