From the Mailbag: Rachel Kugel

 Posted on August 05, 2011 in Uncategorized

Yesterday:

Mark,As I mentioned Monday, I am hosting a free teleseminar on August 10, 2011 entitled:"How to Double Your Criminal Defense Practice Income Without Spending One Extra Hour In The Office" What I will reveal in this call will enable you to design and implement a strategy to boost your practice revenues and boost them quickly! These are proven techniques.I am not a marketing coach. I am a practicing criminal defense attorney who understands what it really takes to run a law practice and the high ethical standards we hold ourselves to as attorneys. I practice in THE most competitive market in the nation and have built a million dollar practice on strategies that I have developed over the last 5 years. Every one of the strategies I suggest to you has been tested and is working to make me money in my practice every day and can work for you. And every one of the strategies and systems I recommend actually increases income while decreasing the amount of time working on the tasks that are hardly enjoyable.I want you to have the time to actually be a lawyer and not a business manager. You will double the income your law practice is making today, increase your retainer rates and fees, cut your overhead and spend more time doing what matters most. I know because I've done it and I've helped lawyers just like you do it too.Lines are limited so make sure you sign up today. Register today at: http://.doubleyourdefensepractice.comTo your success, Rachel Kugel, Esq. 1838 Second Avenue Suite #234 New York, N.Y. 10128

Mercifully, my spam filters seem to have caught Rachel's email from Monday.

Today:

Mark, Wow! The response I have had to the emails I've sent about the my free call entitled: "How to Double Your Criminal Defense Practice Income Without Spending One Extra Hour In The Office" I am hosting Wednesday, August 10, 2011 has been beyond anything I could have imagined.The 100 lines I had reserved for the call are completely filled up. I am thrilled that so many lawyers are ready for a major income and lifestyle boost.I have been scrambling to get more lines available so you can take advantage of this opportunity and am happy to announce that I have been able to secure a few more so make sure to go and register now to reserve a spot on this call.I am going to reveal the strategies I used to take my criminal defense practice from zero to thriving in just a few years while slashing my overhead. If this is something you would like to accomplish for yourself then register today at:

etc.

What Rachel Kugel (, Esq.) selling? She's giving away A FREE 60 minute call (not fond of hyphens, is our Rachel) on which (ah, New York, where lawyers are on trial and defendants are in it, while everyone else stands on line) you'll discover:

1. How to turn 97% of your prospects into clients. (what would it mean to your criminal defense practice to have even one more paying client a week, every week?)

2. How to always win the "race" to be first in contacting new leads. (Being first to contact new leads can make the difference between getting the new client and losing him to another lawyer you CAN be first regardless of your crazy court schedule and without adding another minute to your time in the office)

3. How to use inexpensive technology to work from anywhere in the world.

4. My easy 3-step system for getting new criminal defense clients (this system has allowed me to close $20,000 worth of new business while on a week long European vacation.)

5. How to finally escape the "dog and pony show" to get new clients and have prospects begging to work with you.

6. The secret to increasing your fees without any price resistance from clients.

7. The exact system I used in my practice to spend half the time in the office while doubling my income.

Anyone who talks about "leads" for criminal-defense lawyers should be disbarred, then exsanguinated, decapitated, and defenestrated. For a start. But for those who might be interested in always winning the race to contact new leads, good news: Rachel is finally ready to reveal her secret.

Hurrah!

But wait... Rachel was finally ready to reveal her secret in November 2009. (Except back then that European vacation was of indeterminate length, and her system only allowed her to close $10,000 worth of new business. Also, see the disclaimer; it's a hoot. It's also here on an Alexis Neely website.)

In fact, even before that, back in May 2009 Rachel Kugel was "holding a free teleseminar": "How to Close More Prospects, Increase Fees, and Go into the Office Less."

You see what I'm getting at, don't you?

Yep. It's lies. Falsus in unum...

What is Rachel Kugel really selling with her lies? You can listen to the FREE 60-minute call, and try to find out. Please do, and report back. Or we can draw some reasonable inferences.

First, a premise: that successful criminal-defense lawyers do not spam people to sell them (the FREE 60-minute call is just a teaser) a "system" for getting new clients. Instead, successful criminal-defense lawyers defend people; if they want to spend more time working, they spend it defending more people. (If you don't accept that premise, you're a lost cause. Send me your bar card, email Rachel Kugel your bank account information, and be done with it.)

Since Rachel Kugel is spamming people to sell them a "system" for getting new clients, and despite her protestations to the contrary ("it's no wonder that when the media needs an expert they call her"), she is not successful as a criminal-defense lawyer. If she's not successful, she can't be selling criminal-defense success. (Successful lawyers give away what they know to those who ask; they don't buy mailing lists to spam people to sell it.)

What, then?

The May 2009 bit, above, pimping Rachel's first known teleseminar, was written by a dude named Ben Glass. Glass, Alexis Martin Neely, RJon Robins, and Rachel Kugel were listed as "speakers" in October 2010 at the "Business Love and Money Summit for Lawyers," a "virtual event":

Alexis Neely and the lawyers she is interviewing as part of the Business, Love and Money Summit for Lawyers have discovered how to fix the broken law business model in their own practices and have more business, love and money as a result. And now they are sharing how you can get the new law business model in place in your own law firm and love being a lawyer again.

(Neely, "an elite Affiliate Wealth Partners, Affiliate," wants you to be "a Money Map to Freedom affiliate"-I read this crap so you don't have to. "Affiliate" in this context signals multilevel-marketing-pyramid-scheme horseshit.)

Two weeks before that October 2010 virtual event, the same cast of characters were listed on a nearly identical website as "speakers" at "Virtual Event Awareness Day":

Planning a teleseminar or telesummit takes time and patience. Do it right and you'll make money. Do it wrong and you'll lose your shirt. The Virtual Event Awareness Day, taking place on October 13, 2010 will teach you how to produce a profitable virtual event or telesummit.

The domain for Virtual Event Awareness Day belongs to Leesa Barnes, who describes herself as "President of the InternationalAssociation of Virtual Event Managers (IAVEM) and author of Multiple Streams of Virtual Event Income," and writes, "I'm passionate about connecting those who want to produce profitable virtual events with the people and tools that can help them do so."

So: Barnes sells people on making money with virtual events, including the multilevel marketing of virtual events. Kugel talks for Barnes about how to produce a profitable virtual event. Two weeks later Kugel talks for Neely, who is a big fan of pyramid schemes, about a "new law business model." Three guesses how Kugel is trying to turn a buck.

Do you wonder why, when Rachel Kugel has been selling her "model" for at least two years, there are no testimonials from lawyers who have gained the success she promises? Because "double your income" is bullshit (a marketer says so, and if anyone knows bullshit, it's a marketer). But the model that Rachel is talking about does not, for Kugel to make a buck, have to be worth anything; it just has to sound convincing enough to get people to pay for a teleseminar, and then pass muster and avoid a fraud lawsuit. My bet is that Kugel is, at the end of the day, talking about a model using scripts, systems, and outsourcing to take all of the yucky lawyering out of lawyering-worthless to criminal-defense lawyers.

Kugel's "free call" will (like this letter, from lawyer marketer Dave Ward) not provide lawyers with her system; it will be designed to convince them that there is something to the system worth paying to learn about. There doesn't have to be anything to the system because the money is not in selling the model, but in selling the event, and in selling them the selling of the event and the selling of the selling of the event...it's turtles all the way down.

As Josh King comments, "One ‘guru' sells others the concept of this marketing path to riches. The trick is that the path isn't really growing one's practice; it's re-selling the marketing concept to other attorneys." It's a pyramid scheme; Kugel, at the top of the pyramid, (assuming that she is at the top, and not acting as an "affiliate" for someone else) gets all of the money for nothing. (Why does it seem so much more pathetic when the people in the pyramid scheme have graduate degrees than when they are high-school dropouts?)

I twitted a link to one of Rachel Kugel's two free-call-advertising pages; Melbourne, Australia criminal-defense lawyer Bill Doogue responded, "Surely if there are criminal lawyers who fall for this then they deserve it?"

I don't know about what they deserve, but any criminal-defense lawyer foolish enough to fall for a pyramid scheme like Kugel's can't be trusted with his own future, much less anyone else's.