Joseph Rakofsky: Both an Idiot and a Symptom

This entry was corrected for possible minor errors due to possible discrepancies I learned of during the week of May 16. A summary of the minor changes can be seen here.

Others have already commented on the Joseph Rakofsky story, but in reading commentary on the issue, I'm a bit bothered by how many people want to call him a moron and move on as if that's the end of the inquiry.

To refresh everyone's memory, Rakofsky, a 2009 Touro grad with very little actual experience, and a law license in New Jersey, decided to try a murder case in Washington, D.C. As one might expect, it did not go well, and multiple people, including the judge and the Washington Post courthouse reporter, found Rakofsky's performance a sign of "incompetence." I trust their judgment.

Is Joseph Rakofsky an idiot? Absolutely. Let us count the ways.

But he's also a symptom of one of the fundamental problems of attorney oversupply. Back in December, I pointed out that having a large mass of desperate unemployed attorneys can put ethical obligations into jeopardy in the context of foreclosure mills. There, attorneys looking for a job - any job - would have an incentive to sacrifice morals to bring in a paycheck.

Rakofsky is the Horatio Alger, "pull himself up by his bootstraps," side of that same coin.

Rokofsky's website is now down, but here is his "About Me" paragraph that I rescued from google cache:

Mr. Rakofsky has worked on cases involving Murder, Embezzlement, Tax Evasion, Civil RICO, Securities Fraud, Bank Fraud, Insurance Fraud, Wire Fraud, Conspiracy, Money Laundering, Drug Trafficking, Grand Larceny, Identity Theft, Counterfeit Credit Card Enterprise and Aggravated Harassment. Following graduation from law school, he worked for one of the biggest civil litigation firms on the east coast and has worked for boutique white-collar criminal defense firms in Manhattan. During law school, Mr. Rakofsky interned at the Legal Aid Society (in Suffolk County). Prior to studying law, Mr. Rakofsky studied Economics and interviewed at a well-respected investment bank with branches all over the world. Prior to law school, Mr. Rakofsky earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology, concentrating his attention on DNA.

Hey, my attention was concentrated on DNA too, specifically the kind at Tri-Delt. But I digress again.

It's clear that Rakofsky's bio is milking every minor experience he's ever had especially since he just graduated in 2009. Filed a service return for a credit card collection? Sounds like identity theft experience to me! But this is the monster we've created. The options for attorneys who can't find real jobs out of law schools are either to try something else, settle for doc review-type jobs, or set out on their own. Commentators often promote the idea of setting up shop as a viable alternative to getting a job, and many law school deans (Thomas Mengler, as one example) justify purposefully flooding the market by claiming that more solos and firms means lower prices and better lawyering (a really stupid conclusion, but that's for another day).

Well, here we have a kid who clearly wanted to do criminal law. He set up a slick website (financialcrimelaw.com; great url!) to make him look like the smooth legal hucksters on TV. He set up four offices. To account for his relative virginity, he listed every conceivable experience he could. Such is necessary to compete with the 40+ crowd who market their prematurely-gray hair like a badge of honor rather than a sign of stress.

Isn't this exactly what the Menglers of the world want him to do? Even if it isn't, is this not the natural result when you saddle kids with $100k+ in debt and pigeonhole them into an overcrowded field? Aren't they going to set up sleek websites and offer discounts and hope and pray that they make it through their first cases without looking like a doofus? After all ,can't have a gap on the resume. Must be working, getting out there, networking with other solos, gaining experience. Prior to last week, most industry apologists would have likely held up Rakofsky as an example of what unemployed law graduates should be doing, that they should be entrepreneurial.

But entrepreneurship is not good when the product being peddled is an inferior quality and public welfare is placed at risk. Rakofsky may not have even been aware that he was peddling an inferior product; he probably honestly believed he was competent, and such is part of the problem with a "Wild West" view of licensing, accrediting, and more or less forcing some graduates to solo it.

Everybody lost except the people at Touro who cashed his tuition checks. Everybody.

In medicine, graduates of medical school are not allowed to just "hang a shingle" and set up their own practices. They must go through a 3-5 year period called residency where they learn to actually practice medicine on real people in real hospitals. You are not allowed to become board certified and practice medicine without supervision until you have completed a residency program. All graduates of medical school programs are more or less guaranteed a space in a residency program because the medical profession actually cares about integrity and welfare and limits the output of medical schools. They made a sound policy decision to be cautious and prevent unprepared doctors from being unleashed on the public.

I hold no illusion that law is as important as medicine, but I completely fail to see how anyone in their right mind can continue to license attorneys to do things that they are entirely unqualified to do. Why is there not a residency requirement, or the equivalent? Changing law school to be two years of study and two-three years of low-paid study under a practicing attorney doesn't seem to be too big of a burden. Neither does requiring specialization or making the bar exam more practical to the actual day-to-day practice of law in a specific jurisdiction.

The system is completely broken. It cannot filter out people like Rakofsky; instead it allows them to flow through by the thousands and onto an unsuspecting marketplace. It has no training safeguards to ensure that people handling murder cases can actually handle murder cases. The more hubris-filled unemployed attorneys will do exactly what Rakofsky did; his story made the rounds, others' do not. But he is by no means unique. He is exactly what happens when you license type A personalities to do things before they've actually shown they can do it.

We do not license people to drive classes of vehicles they have never touched before. We do not license surgeons who have never held a scalpel. Yet in many cases attorneys can handle matters they know little about merely because they've duped some poor client into believing they're "the guy."

A real profession doesn't let that situation develop, and it stops the nonsense once it becomes apparent.