TO-WIT: FAKING IT
My secretary came running into my office, yet again ignoring the imaginary “Do Not Disturb” sign I always mentally affix to my door as I walk in each morning. “You’ve got to read this,” she jabbered, waving around the morning newspaper. She laid it on my desk and smoothed it out with one hand while pointing emphatically to an article with the other. I hadn’t seen her this enthusiastically animated since the last time she successfully re-alphabetized her Rolodex.
What she showed me was an article about a colleague from a neighboring county who had, after twenty years of successful practice, been outed as a fake. Apparently he had never taken the bar exam, had never gone to law school and had forged all the documents necessary to become licensed to practice. This disclosure had produced the most vituperative comments from his colleagues; the masquerade had been incendiary enough but that he was currently serving as president of his bar association must clearly have been acting as an accelerant.
“I knew it, I just knew it,” one of his ex-colleagues was quoted as saying, “he was just too damned articulate.” “Oh my God,” said another, “and to think I plagiarized one of his briefs.” “How come he made so much money,” decried yet another.
I get the dismay. No lawyer wants to be confronted with the realization that the absence of the profession’s educational prerequisites may not hinder one’s ability to be good at it.
Perhaps there might be less beating of breast, less renting of garment, if my colleagues knew how relatively common this is, how much of our professional history is wreathed by such charades. I therefore offer the following as an analgesic;
LUCILLE “THE I WON’T IRON LADY” GEHRIG – Not content to falsely claim mere lawyerhood, Lucille further self-embellished by holding herself out as a family law expert, a specialty in which her total ignorance would not be readily apparent. After many successful years, her ruse was discovered when a family law colleague became suspicious of her habit of charging fees that were way too fair.
HON. ROCCO “ROCKY” PATELLA – The only known imposter to ever get elected to the bench, his penchant for never ruling on anything so sufficiently passed for contemplative erudition that his artifice wasn’t detected until he sentenced a civil litigant to death. “Hey,” he said in response to the uproar, “it was a condemnation case.”
BESSIE MAE MUCHO – After having served many years as a devoted legal secretary, Bessie Mae came to work one day and found her boss lifeless on the floor. Figuring this was her best opportunity for a raise, she donned his suits and his briefs, glued on a fake moustache, stuffed large pillows around her midsection and passed as his dead ringer for eleven years. It wasn’t until the boss’s wife complained that her husband hadn’t touched her in way too many a moon that her ruse was discovered. For her impersonation of a lawyer she was convicted of unlawful deviant behavior. “Could have been worse,” she muttered as she was led away, “I could have been disbarred.”
Those are just a few of many known instances of what has come to be known in sociolegical circles as “idiopathic hysterical lawyeropathy.” The academics estimate, and my experiences suggest, that at any bar association meeting you can look to your left, then you can look to your right, and one of you is probably faking it.
© 2015, S. Sponte, Esq.