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Former Law Student Charged for Falsely Claiming to Be Lawyer

By George Khoury, Esq. on December 14, 2017 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

Sometimes there's a fake lawyer, and sometimes there's a fake lawyer, and sometimes there's a fake lawyer. And sometimes that fake lawyer is someone who has a history of trying to put one over on the entire system.

A recently arrested former law student probably didn't think he'd be caught this time, and probably thought the consequences wouldn't be so bad if he was. Obviously, he was wrong. While on parole for one of the most unbelievable, unfathomable, attempted hoodwinking of a court, he sent a resume to a recruiter claiming to be a patent attorney and to hold a JD. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that he had only been out on parole for seven days.

Can't Fake It If You Didn't Make It

David Scher may have just been trying to fake it until he made it, but unfortunately for the crafty convict, it doesn't actually work like that. In order to actually exercise that mantra of young lawyers, you actually have to get licensed as a lawyer.

Scher was at one point a law student at Suffolk University Law School, until he was caught stealing a laptop from the university in 2014. Then, apparently the disgraced legal scholar tampered with a court document in his case, notably the verdict form. He actually tried changing the word "guilty" to "not guilty." Doing so resulted in him pleading guilty to perjury, forgery, and getting some time in custody.

The Fake Lawyer Problem

It's surprisingly common to hear about non-lawyers getting arrested for pretending to be lawyers, and it usually doesn't end well. It's like the fake lawyers don't know the law well enough to know that pretending to be a fake lawyer is really illegal. That's like fake lawyering 101.

Unfortunately, the fake lawyer problem has recently gotten more attention as a result of fake lawyers going digital and getting a little bit smarter about how they operate. Rather than using their own identities, some fake lawyers are pretending to be real life lawyers, setting up websites, and defrauding real potential legal consumers and ruining reputations of real life lawyers.

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