I could fake being an life-type insurance agent. This is only because I worked in their customer support for seven years, corresponded with state departments of insurance, and had to pass some of the same then-NASD certifications. I was just never an agent, technically speaking. This is especially true if I keep focused on retirement products and de-emphasize the life insurance.
That being said, my experience comes perilously close to actually fulfilling the requirements of the job at a point in my professional career, so its validity here is questionable.
I actually am a paralegal, and have been for over a decade. I’m guessing that if I tried really hard and only posted about my “lawyer” experiences related to the white collar criminal cases I’ve actually worked on, people might buy it.
If, on the other hand, I tried to dispense advice or talk intelligently about case law, I’d look like a fake pretty quickly. Or like a real — but really, really bad — lawyer.
I actually did some of that once upon a time, when the world and I were much younger. Mostly I thawed fish and programming computers (it was a dolphin research project). But I read up on the literature, attended the conferences, and rubbed shoulders with some of the big names in dolphin research and training. Okay, that was 30 years ago.
This. Not to mention, it just wouldn’t be worth the effort to me, and that’s where it would really break down. Pretending to be someone you’re not is WORK, and I’m allergic to unnecessary work.
But if I were the sort for whom that would be fun rather than work, I could obviously fake being stuff I’ve already been (mathematician, math professor), and I expect I could fake being a lawyer: my mother, stepfather, and one grandfather were lawyers, and I was a paralegal for a few years, so it’s not like I’d be starting from zero.
I could fake being someone with OCD or depression, or a hoarder, since I’ve got close familial connections to persons wrestling (or not bothering to wrestle, in the case of the hoarder) with all of those problems. I could fake being a guy who recently ruptured his Achilles tendon…(looks down at foot)…no, wait, that’s real, dammit. But faking quadriplegia, quadrophenia, or anything like that is right out.
I like to think I know something about the law. But I’d never get away with pretending to be an actual lawyer. My interest has been stuff like legal history and legal theory. My knowledge of the practical details of being a working lawyer is no better than anyone who watches TV and movies. Any real lawyer would easily spot me as a fake.
Shhh! You’re giving away the secret! Which is that pretty much the entire law is written in more or less plain English (heh) and any reasonably well-educated, intelligent person can understand it. The rest is just experience and being extremely para… cautious.
I work closely with employment lawyers and might be able to get away with pretending to be one on a message board for a little while, until a real one showed up. Especially if I was careful with my posts and researched some case law.
…for a given value of “plain”. There is something in the way lawyers use English that serves as a Shibboleth for those in the trade to recognise each other. It’s not deliberately exclusionary, but it’s effective nonetheless. People who try to fake it always sound like those sovereign citizen loons.
And lawyers use seemingly ordinary words in a technical way. The best example is “consideration”.
I’m sure all professions are much the same. The mass of technical understanding lying behind what they say tends to shine through pretty efficiently.
It’s difficult enough to contribute information based on what I used to do, let alone try to fake something I’ve never done. For instance, I can still troubleshoot electrical problems, but I’m almost completely out of touch with trade craft at this point. And like others here, I fail to see the point behind such sham.
Although once I did try to pass my self off as a tennis pro, but I got no love.
Obviously you could be a fake lawyer easily if you stick to Buffy threads. But where’s the fun in that? The point of claiming to be a lawyer is to use your fake credentials to browbeat and impress the people you’re arguing with, right?
That’s the whole paradox of being a fake lawyer. The only reason to be a fake lawyer is to shut people down with “I’m a lawyer and you’re not, so I know what I’m talking about and you don’t”. Except that only works in arguments where being a lawyer is relevant. And that’s when the real lawyers are going to point out that you’re an idiot.
Even then, it requires reaching a fairly high bar. In the Beryl Mooncalf episode, my conviction that we were dealing with a fake lawyer was the genesis of starting the thread, but it took Jodi a few pages to become convinced enough to say outright, “Bullshit!” I think the kicker was his failure to recognize the US Reporter citation as a Supreme Court case.
But faking quadriplegia, quadrophenia, or anything like that is right out.
