I’m not talking about practicing law.
Say I want a debtor to think I have turned his case over to a lawyer.
Can I make up stationery with a random alias, with the word Esq at the end, and a lawyerly “company line” in the title?
John Jacob Doe, Esq.
Higgens, Figgens, & Wiggens, Partners
re: Debt owed to ThMadMax …
I have such letters, collected in my callow youth, so I know what to say.
Anything illegal about that?
Do I have to pass the bar to call myself Esq?
It’s illegal to practice law without a license in all US states. If what you are doing makes people think you are practicing law, and they respond to you, pay you or otherwise do business with you based on this representation you are breaking the law.
In your particular scenario, you are also committing mail fraud and violating the Fair Credit Collections Act (or whatever it’s name is).
As a matter of language usage, a lawyer is a person familiar with and studies law. An attorney is an agent for another. People who have gone to law school but not passed the bar are “lawyers” if they so style themselves. But without the license, the cannot represent others as “attorneys at law”. Using a power of attorney form, people can act as agents for others, but not before the courts.
Obviously, don’t do this.
Not to mention that many state bars have online search-able member databases. For the ones that don’t, a simple phone call can verify whether a given person is licensed within a state. In addition, signing and sending such a letter may constitute forgery, depending on the given state statute.
Just as a point of information, I raised this same point a bit less than a month ago, and was gently corrected. While the distinction was historically relevant, and in pedantic usage still is, common usage has blurred it to the point that they are considered full synonyms. I should regard Gfactor, with whom I have never established an attorney-client relationship, as an attorney, just not my attorney.
Under California law, at a minimum, you would be guilty of a misdemeanor under Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code section 6126(a): “Any person advertising or holding himself or herself out as practicing or entitled to practice law or otherwise practicing law who is not an active member of the State Bar, or otherwise authorized pursuant to statute or court rule to practice law in this state at the time of doing so, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in a county jail or by a fine of up to one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that fine and imprisonment.”
You’d probably also be guilty of fraud (criminal), as well as various other civil torts.
Same in Ohio. Don’t do it! A layperson may represent herself in any kind of case at all (even when you’d be stoopid to do so), but pretending to be a lawyer when you’re not, even out of court, is always a bad idea.
An agent for a local collections company around here used to be notorious for allowing uneducated, scared, poor debtors to think he was a lawyer by dressing well, carrying a briefcase, throwing around a lot of legal jargon and talking about filing this or that, but he was always careful, when asked point-blank, to admit that he wasn’t, in fact, a lawyer.
I’ve had several people appear before me in court who identified themselves as lawyers, which I doubted because of their obvious incompetence or just an odd vibe I got from them, so I checked with the Supreme Court of Ohio’s attorney registration office. Wouldn’t you know it, they all were lawyers!
As always, answers to this type of legal question depend on the jurisdiction. In the jurisdiction in which I practise, calling yourself a “lawyer” without being a member of the Law Society would be contrary to The Law Society Act.
YMMV, depending on where you live and what the local law is.
Ditto. I have a law degree, but I’m not a “lawyer”. If I held myself out as one, I’d be in breach of the Legal Profession Act 2004 (NSW).
No. There is no actual legal significance to that honorific in America.
Except, of course, when one uses it to hold oneself out as a lawyer. Then one is breaking the law in most states.
So Ohio doesn’t have small claims court? Or is it only for “stoopid” people? 
In addition to subjecting you to penalties for the unauthorized practice of law (by fraudulently holding yourself out as a lawyer), you would also in particular violate § 807(3) of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (codified at 15 U.S.C. § 1692e) which states:
Now, you might think that because FDCPA § 803(6) (codified at 15 U.S.C. § 1692a(6)) generally defines a “debt collector” as “any person who uses any instrumentality of interstate commerce or the mails in any business the principal purpose of which is the collection of any debts, or who regularly collects or attempts to collect, directly or indirectly, debts owed or due or asserted to be owed or due another,” you would be exempt from this restriction. However, that section continues and states “the term [debt collector] includes any creditor who, in the process of collecting his own debts, uses any name other than his own which would indicate that a third person is collecting or attempting to collect such debts.”
By using a fictitious name, you needlessly transform yourself from a creditor collecting a debt into a plain old debt collector and thereby take on much greater burdens under the FDCPA. Including, as mentioned, a ban on misrepresenting the nature of the legal personnel working on the account.
In other words: Don’t do it.
My letterhead would read- From the law offices of Dewey,Cheatem and Howe…
In Virginia, it’s a misdemeanor to hold yourself out to another person as qualified or authorized to practice law in the Commonwealth of Virginia. This would almost certainly include the implications offered in the OP.
By “even when” I meant if you had a particularly complex civil case or a felony criminal case but insisted, as a layman, on representing yourself. Those are not the typical small claims case.
He said ‘even when’, not ‘even though’. I saw no implication that representing yourself is always ‘stoopid’. I think anyone would agree that it’s at least sometimes ‘stoopid’; the points of disagreement on this are usually whether the range of ‘sometimes’ is more like ‘nearly always’, or ‘in rare instances’.
[Edit–too slow, EH already defended himself! But maybe he’d like to pay me to represent him in this thread. 
]
That’s a great point.
Here’s my state’s unauthorized practice statute:
What about the case of a fake cc? We did this once with a Japanese publisher which was waffling on payment for an article we had done. After a few gentle reminders to pay, we sent one last one with the cc: of a non-existant, but official looking, law office in the email header, along with a firm demand for payment and threat of legal action. They called us the next day and wired us all our money.
Sometimes, incompetence is no bar. 
Previous thread on the issue of “Esquire” - Use of ‘esquire’ illegal?