Network Pressure: How a Fellow With No Law Degree Made Five Attorneys Soil Themselves Simultaneously

By Michael Kelman Portney

There’s a particular kind of fellow who believes that justice is a product you purchase from attorneys. These individuals have operated under this assumption for decades, mind you, acquiring legal professionals the way one might procure livestock. This one handles the estate documents. That one handles the intimidation. The third one has a “relationship with the judge,” as it were.

It was my understanding that if you wanted to challenge such an arrangement, you’d need to purchase your own attorneys. Expensive ones. Perhaps a small battalion.

I found this assumption to be somewhat flawed.

The Conventional Wisdom

The traditional methodology for fighting a captured system, I’m told, goes something like this.

You hire an attorney.

The attorney files documents.

The other side hires an attorney.

Those attorneys file different documents.

Everyone bills hourly.

Years pass.

The attorneys acquire boats.

The client acquires debt.

Eventually someone dies and the matter resolves itself through actuarial inevitability.

This is called justice. It costs approximately $500 per hour, plus expenses, plus the vague sense that you’ve been had.

I was of the opinion that there might be an alternative approach. One involving what the academics call “network pressure” and what I, a simple fellow from Oregon, call “making everybody’s phone ring at once.”

A Brief Primer on Network Topology

The thing about a criminal enterprise, and I use that term in the technical RICO sense, not pejoratively, though also pejoratively, is that it does not exist in isolation.

Your defendant has an attorney.

That attorney has a bar license.

That license is issued by a state.

That state has disciplinary counsel.

That disciplinary counsel has colleagues.

Those colleagues know prosecutors.

Those prosecutors have ambitions.

Those ambitions require not being associated with corruption scandals.

This is a network.

And networks have a peculiar property. They transmit pressure.

Apply force at one node and adjacent nodes feel it.

Apply force at multiple nodes simultaneously and suddenly everyone is looking around wondering who is going to defect first.

This is not a legal insight. This is graph theory.

Graph theory, it turns out, is more useful in litigation than they teach you in law school.

Not that I would know. I did not go to law school. I have a Bachelor of Business Administration with coursework in game theory.

Turns out that was sufficient.

The Traditional Approach and Its Limitations

The conventional method for challenging entrenched power involves attacking a single node.

You sue the defendant.

The defendant hires a lawyer.

You hire a lawyer.

Your lawyer and their lawyer exchange documents.

Both lawyers bill hourly.

You are now in a resource war with someone who has more resources.

This is called the adversarial system. It works beautifully if you have more money than your adversary. If you do not, it works beautifully for your adversary.

I found myself in the latter category.

My adversaries had spent seventy-seven years accumulating resources through what I would characterize as systematic document fraud, estate manipulation, and the occasional deployment of a family member’s dog as a fictitious person in financial databases.

The dog’s name was Rufus. He was listed as living in public records until approximately twenty-four hours before I was scheduled to collect evidence, at which point he was reclassified as deceased.

The dog had been dead for years. The database entry, however, was very much alive until it became inconvenient.

I mention this only to establish that I was not dealing with amateurs. These were professionals. Multi-generational professionals. The sort of professionals who understand that if you are going to commit fraud, you should do it slowly, over decades, in a jurisdiction where you have cultivated relationships with the relevant officials.

Challenging such an arrangement through conventional means struck me as naive. Like bringing a lawsuit to a knife fight, except the knife fight is being refereed by your opponent’s cousin.

The Alternative Methodology

The insight was simple.

I did not need to defeat everyone.

I needed to make defection more attractive than solidarity.

This is game theory. The prisoner’s dilemma, but with five defendants and an audience.

In the classic prisoner’s dilemma, two criminals are interrogated separately.

If both stay silent, both receive light sentences.

If one defects, the defector goes free and the loyal one gets hammered.

If both defect, both receive moderate sentences.

The optimal collective strategy is solidarity.

The optimal individual strategy, absent trust, is defection.

My task was to erode trust.

I sent a demand letter to the defendants. Standard practice. Wednesday deadline. Settlement negotiations and complete document production, or I file a federal RICO complaint in the District of Oregon.

But I also did the following:

• Filed bar complaints against the attorneys involved, creating professional jeopardy independent of the civil case

• Requested meetings with the county attorney, signaling that criminal referral was on the table

• Shared the complete RICO analysis with a special counsel in an adjacent jurisdiction, ensuring the network knew the information was propagating

• Offered one defendant a separate exit: pay to get out, and you are not named in the complaint

Suddenly, the defendants were not facing me.

They were facing each other.

The Network Becomes the Enforcement Mechanism

Here is what happens when you apply pressure at multiple nodes simultaneously.

The family attorney receives a bar complaint and realizes his malpractice insurance does not cover RICO conspiracy. He calls the primary defendant and suggests, in the strongest possible terms, that perhaps this matter should be settled quickly.

The special counsel in the adjacent jurisdiction reads the analysis and begins thinking about her own exposure. What emails exist between her office and the defendants? What happens if this goes to discovery? She picks up the phone.

The defendant who was offered a separate exit does the math. Legal fees to defend a federal RICO case versus writing a check now and walking away clean. His call to the primary defendant is not a call of solidarity. It is a call asking whether his legal fees will be covered, and if not, whether anyone would blame him for taking the exit.

The primary defendant’s phone is ringing.

It is not me calling.

It is everyone else.

Everyone telling her to write the check.

Make this go away.

Now.

I did not have to convince the defendants to settle. I had to convince everyone around them that settlement was in their interest.

The network became the enforcement mechanism.

On the Democratization of Legal Competence

There is a certain gatekeeping apparatus in the legal profession. I was told the barrier to entry included the following:

• A Juris Doctor degree, three years, roughly $150,000

• Access to legal research databases, approximately $400 per month

• Understanding of federal civil procedure, arcane by design

• Knowledge of local court rules, poorly documented and inconsistently applied

• The ineffable quality of “thinking like a lawyer,” acquired through ritualized hazing known as the Socratic method

Without these credentials, I was informed, a fellow could not possibly draft a federal complaint. Could not understand RICO predicate acts. Could not analyze venue under 18 U.S.C. § 1965(b).

I found this assessment overstated.

What I had instead was this:

• A large language model with access to legal research

• The ability to read

• Eighteen years of documentation

• A diagnosed autism spectrum disorder, which makes me good at pattern recognition and bad at accepting “that’s just how it works” as an explanation

The complaint I produced reads like a litigator wrote it. Fifty-three numbered paragraphs. Six causes of action. Proper citations. Venue analysis. Prayer for relief.

The person on the receiving end does not know whether I have counsel. What he knows is that the document is tight, the evidence is cited, and the deadline is Wednesday.

The “you need a lawyer” barrier turns out to be roughly forty percent legitimate complexity and sixty percent mystification of organized writing.

AI closed that gap.

This is not to say lawyers are useless. If this goes to trial, I will hire one. Trial advocacy is a performance skill, and I have never cross-examined a witness.

But I do not need to get to trial.

I need to create a situation where trial is so obviously catastrophic that settlement becomes inevitable.

For that, I need only a credible threat.

Credibility comes from the document, not the degree.

The Results Thus Far

Within twenty-four hours of sending the demand letter, I observed the following:

• Movement from defendants who had been silent for months

• Network contacts suggesting resolution might be advisable

• One defendant inquiring about the cost of an independent exit

• A general atmosphere of intestinal distress among the named parties

I have not filed yet.

The deadline is Wednesday.

My honest assessment is that they will not fully capitulate by Wednesday. They will ask for more time. They will test my resolve. They have spent eighteen years assuming I would never actually do anything.

So I will file Thursday.

Simultaneous service on all five defendants. Coordinated across three states. Ten o’clock in the morning. Doorbell rings.

“You’ve been served.”

That is when the real settlement talks begin.

The Teachable Moment

Institutions protect themselves through complexity and gatekeeping. The legal system assumes you will either pay to play or go away. If you cannot afford an attorney, you cannot access justice.

This is not a bug. It is a feature.

But networks have vulnerabilities. Coalition members have divergent incentives.

The attorney who drafted fraudulent documents has different risks than the family member who merely went along with it.

The cousin promised a cut has different tolerance than the mastermind who orchestrated the scheme.

Apply pressure at the right points and the coalition fractures.

Make defection attractive and someone defects.

Once one person defects, everyone else starts doing math.

AI has closed the competence gap that kept regular people out of the arena. You do not need a law degree to understand RICO. You need to read the statute, study the case law, and organize your facts coherently.

The mystification is over. The gatekeepers are being routed around.

In Conclusion

I am not an attorney.

I am a fellow with a business degree, a website about misinformation, and eighteen years of documentation concerning a multi-generational fraud scheme operating out of Great Falls, Montana.

I once wrote a book about applying professional wrestling psychology to business strategy. The thesis was simple: performance and positioning matter as much as substance. Narrative control is half the battle. Sometimes the heel is right.

I find myself applying those principles now.

Somewhere in Arizona, a woman’s phone is ringing again. It might be her brother asking if she is going to write the check. It might be the family attorney explaining that his malpractice carrier has questions. It might be a special counsel suggesting that a quiet resolution would be in everyone’s interest.

I would not know.

I am just sitting here in Oregon, reviewing federal civil procedure.

Wednesday is coming.

And after Wednesday, if necessary, Thursday.

You do not have to defeat everyone.

You just have to make everyone want you to win.

Michael Kelman Portney is the author of Wrestling With a Message and the proprietor of misinformationsucks.com. He is not an attorney, which, given the performance of the attorneys in this story, he considers a point in his favor.