Why do we say Not a Substitute for an Attorney
Well first, we prefer honesty. Its just a simpler easier way to operate.
Second, the precise phrase is provided in the Texas Unauthorized Practice of Law Statute and including it meets the state statutory standard to keep the Unauthorized practice of Law Committee (UPL Committee) off our backs. Not that they haven't tried to intimidate us into stopping what we are doing.
Some years back they paid a private attorney to send us a threatening letter on their behalf basically demanding that we justify our businees to them.
We promptly filed a petition with the federal district court suing that attorney for one million dollars personally, suing the UPL Committee for violating our civil rights, and suing to have the Texas Unauthorized Practice of Law statute declared to be an unconstitutional content-based prior restraint on protected speech, which it clearly is.
Now, had we had more time and resources in that moment, we would have held back on the suit and let them get much deeper into their bullying tactics before filing suit. However, we needed to shut them down quickly so we filed immediately.
When we got to court, the attorneys on the other side were falling all overthemselves like clowns trying to convince the magistrate that the UPL Committee had NO intention of going after us or bothering us at all. They claimed that their letter was essentially a NothingBurger.
Keep in mind that few if any attorneys or judges want to see any UPL statute overturned because that takes power away from them that they should't have but that they like to have anyway.
When you sue like this, and ask for a preliminary injunction, one part of the preliminary injunction test is whether you are likely to prevail in the final trial given the weight of evidence and precedent you pleaded.
Our magistrate chose to dismiss the suit without prejudice as being unripe or premature. I feel certain that I could have defeated her mootness holding, if I had cared to, but we didn't need the distraction of an appeal just then. The "without prejudice" part is important because it means we could refile the suit if the UPL committee gave us further cause.
When announcing her dismissal on mootness, our magistrate conveyed what I believe to be a clear message to the other sides attorneys about our claims stating that if this came back to her, she considers that we would likely succeed in our suit meaning we met the most important part of the preliminary injunction test permitting her to issue preliminary injunctive relief declaring the Texas statute to be unconstitutional as an insufficiently justified prior restraint.
That was quite some years ago and we haven't heard another peep out of the Texas UPL Committee. We even did some posts and audios mocking the UPL Committee but they didn't take the bait. Since their statute remains unconstitutional, it is unlikely that they will seek to poke the bear a second time.
I believe the statement defined by Texas law "Not a Substitute for an Attorney" is reasonable compelled speech that might survive against a corporate speech challenge but wouldn't likely survive a challenge against our small two person business. Nevertheless, I think it is a well crafted statement that sufficiently informs people that we are NOT attorneys, do NOT want to be attorneys, and are unwilling to waive our First Amendment rights the way attorneys are forced to in order to become attorneys. We certainly want to clearly and unmistakeably distinguish ourselves from the label of attorney.
Just to be clear though, I have taken the LSAT in Texas, the entrance exam test taken to get into law school. I did NOT study for even a single hour. There was an entire twisted logic section of the exam that I didn't know how to complete at all, because I hadn't studied at all, so I flunked that entire section. Still, I easily passed the LSAT with a very respectable score, sufficient to get into a great many law schools, even without passing that section. I would like to get a Ph.d. in law at some point, if they ever get past the utter stupidity of requiring all students to pursue the "practice of law" rather than actual legal scholarship.
We have worked in many states and will happily work in any state. I routinely review the UPL statutes in many of the states where we do work and I have NOT seen a single one yet that is worth the paper its written on. Anyone who allows themselves to be intimidated by those statutes probably shouldn't be giving anyone any legal advice even though the giving of legal advice is absolutely protected speech under the First Amendment's terms.
We do NOT exercise "the privilege of practicing law without benefit of a license." We exercise our fundamental First Amendment protected rights to speak, associate, assemble, and petititon state courts for redress of grievances in the form of thier active conspiracy to administer, regulate, and enforce the state's political policy interests against litigants before the court. It is beyond question that attorneys are either openly conspiring in this criminal action or they are so poorly educated that they are simply incapable of seeing or protecting the rights of their clients. Court regulation of the practice of law violates the Separation of Powers Doctrine resulting in the irreparable injury of children. We have every right natural and constitutionally protected to defend ourselves and our associates from this judicial tyranny because attorneys have openly rejected that duty.
Attorneys and judges in every state in which we have worked are clearly irreparably injuring children for personal, political, and financial gain for themselves and for all three branches of state government in a manner that is laughably easy to prove in an actual court that follows the acutal law of the land of the state.* They have all leveraged the state bar and the state monopoly over the practice of law to further this vile practice of irreparably injuring children for money.
If you represent one of these judicial enforcement arms of government and are reading this to decide whether or not you should attempt to intimidate us with your pathetically unconstitutional statutes, I assure you that I now have the time and the desire to take your money and your statute from you so that you can NO longer use that vile tool to hurt children. Yes, I am saying that you are actively irreparably injuring children when you go after parents who are simply sharing legal knowledge or providing legal advice to other parents. If you aren't sufficiently competent as an attorney to know how this is, then you would be foolish indeed to attack us.
If you think immunity will protect you, I suggest you review 28 U.S.C. 455 very closely and consider with every bit of skill an intellect at your disposal how this simple short federal statute can and does strip you of your immunity as a state official even though it doesn't directly target You. If you need hints, you can look up our personal civil rights suit that is currently ongoing and currently destroying immunity as it is known today.
If you come after us, you better have your ducks in a row, or you should come with your checkbook in hand.
Your intimidation tactics will NOT work here.
If you are dumb enough to give me a federal court forum, the issue of your personal, professional, political, and pecuniary interests in attacking my speech will become very relevant to the outcome of the trial. You will be putting your state's family code before a neutral and impartial federal judge who has NO interest in litigating the interests of a nonparty nonlitigant child, of issuing judicial relief in that nonlitigant's interests, or of continuing the flow of Title IV-D money to the state's treasury, to the state's attorney general, and to keep far more judges on staff than the state actually needs when the family code is overturned.
I have spent the last 15 years studying every existing precedent and studying every devious dirtly little trick family law judges use to violate children. I've studied it over multiple state jurisdictions which is something attorneys simply cannot do and one of the things that distinguishes what we do from the practice of law. All I need is a federal forum in which to bring these federal question claims. Are you beginning to see the seeds of your destruction?
Protected monopolies breed arrogance on equal measure with systemic incompetence. I learned my skills out in the real world at the bleeding edge of business systems consulting under tremendous international competition. The more you seek to unlawfully regulate businesses, the more we educate ourselves on how to bring you down.
I'm NOT a helpless scared parent with minor children. My children are grown. I kept my rights through the worst the Texas Family Courts had to offer. I set precedent at our appellate court that took money out of the pockets of every family law attorney in our state. I am eager to repeat on a national stage.
I want to make one thing crystal clear. At 17-years of age, I swore an oath to support and defend the United States Constitution. That was a life-long oath that I take as seriously as anything in my life. The corrupt family courts are making a mockery of that document, they hurt me, they hurt my family, they hurt my country and by God, I will bring them down if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.
If you are among the tiny fraction of good attorneys who are able to think for themselves and add 2 + 2 and get 4, then we are very happy to work with you to protect your client's rights, which is after all, the fiduciary duty you signed up for.
We have broken through all the impediments states have placed before parents and we have one child custody case before a federal district court as this is written with two more soon to follow. Your state's family law statutes are absolutely vulnerable to a direct constitutional challenge in a competent court because they grant judicial officiers "broad discretion" justified by a merely "substantial" state goal to issue viewpoint-based prior restraints on the times, the places, and the manner in which parent and child may speak with one another, may associate with one another, may worship together as a family with one another, and may share family privacy with one another as punishment for making First Amendment protected privacy choices regarding marriage that the state disfavors.
Griswold, as well as many cases before and since, clearly establish that broad discretion can NEVER be legitimately applied to limit fundamental rights under any circumstances.
The Bastardy Cases of the mid 1970's proved that parent and child rights are "individual" rights that do NOT come from a marriage between the child's parents and which cannot be the cause for violating those rights. Your state can no more legitimately punish children for thier parent's divorce than it can punish illegitimate children for their parent's liasons under the Nineteenth Century's Bastardy Codes.
Your family code is a Bastardy Code. It is predicated on the lie that states can regulate close family speech and association because parents made close family privacy choices that the state disfavors. If you don't see it, that is direct irreparable injury to children as punishment for their parent's exercise of fundamental rights.
Your state's family code fails to provide legitimate state court jurisdiction to regulate the rights of parent or child. Regulating the rights of parents and children is a political action appropriate only for one of the two political branches of government. It is never legitimate for a state court judge, holding sole jurisdiction to litigate challenges to the state's regulation of a particular family unit, to be the sole state official with political authority to regulate that family's rights.
Your state's family code fails to provide necessary fundamental fairness. It fails to provide necessary substantive guarantees. It creates unequal classes of civil litigants and unequal classes of children without adequate equal protection guarantees. It violates the Supremacy Clause and it violates the Separation of Powers Doctrine. We can and will teach, encourage, and advise parents on their rights and how to defend those rights against corrupt state actors.
Something, something about people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones!
Your state's family codes are substantially vulnerable in multiple ways to every major type of constitutional challenge, jurisdictional, procedural due process, substantive due process, equal protection, Supremacy Clause, and Separation of Powers Doctrine just to name the big ones. The family code survives today only because state court judges refuse to perform their judicial duties and because federal courts, many filled with former state judges, assert the legal fiction of Ex Parte Young to try to assist those state judges commit their crimes against children.
Because your family code has operated in a protected legal market behind cooerced monopoly protection for more than 70 years, your family code has become so completely rotten to thier core that a single challenge before an honest court would bring the entire codes crashing down around your ears.
The day is quickly approaching where state officials will be paying out massive amounts to the parents and children they have illegally injured, when the fiction of immunity dissapears. Attorneys and their clients will be sued in federal courts for conspiracy to violate civil rights as state actors under the State Action Doctrine. We published a book on that one, Oath Breakers: Lies Family Courts Tell.
If you are one of those good attorneys, we implore you to open your eyes and stop digging a deeper hole for yourself. The truth is so blatantly clear that a blind child could see it. But the axiom that a person will never see what is not in their financial interest to see is also at play here. Attorneys are supposed to be hyper focued on risk. I suggest you evaluate your family law exposure very closely and ask yourself the simple question, what if he is correct? What would be the worst case scenario for your financial future?
You can ask the old wise attorney who has been digging his hole deeper for the last 30 years what he or she thinks and they will tell you to ignore the risk, that the risk isn't real. They are in so deep that they dare NOT even glance at their actual risk exposure for fear of the terror that would ensue. Their only hope is to die peacefully in their beds before it all comes crashing down around them. That strategy might have made sense before scholar.google.com and before AI began to analyze mountains of legal opinions for inherent biases. It is NOT a good strategy in the Twenty-First Century.
* The term "law of the land of [the state]" is a term used by the United States Supreme Court to describe state law codes as containing the entirety of federal law within its body, including every single federal constitutional guarantee as if written into the very text of each state statute. The Court goes on to explain how every single state judge is bound to the law of the land by their judicial oath to vacate any state statute that conflicts with federal law or federal constitutional guarantees.
Your state's best interests of the child statutes undeniably directly conflict with state and federal constitutional guarantees. Only pure judicial corruption protected by the evil of judicial immunity prevents best interest from being vacated.
