# Paying a non-lawyer to do legal work. Bogus

If someone without a bar card offers to draft your motion, "review your case," or file anything with a court for money, you're watching a crime (the unauthorized practice of law), and you're the one funding it. The court won't care that you didn't know. You'll care, because you'll have paid twice: once for the packet, once for the lawyer who has to undo it.

The template is the tell. "Compassionate release (rare early release for extreme circumstances) packet." "Proven 2255 template." Judges have seen the template. Clerks have seen the template. It reads like a template because it is one, and it gets denied like one. And a 2255 isn't a thing you retry. You generally get one shot, and a consultant's mad-lib just spent it.

> **From the inside — The same business runs on the inside, and it takes stamps and commissary instead of a card number.**
>
> Every compound has a guy. Ours worked out of the law library on the typewriters and he was genuinely good at something. Soups and stamps up front, a printed motion a week or so later.
>
> I watched a man pay him for a compassionate release motion. Both parties swore by it. But it was the same document he'd already sold to four other people, names swapped, with one new paragraph about this guy's mother. Denied. He refiled it himself, unchanged, because he'd paid for it and paying for it made it feel like an asset. Denied again. By then it wasn't a legal problem anymore. It was a credibility problem with a judge who had now read the same template twice.
>
> What I remember most is that the man never once considered that the paper was the problem. He thought he'd been unlucky.
>
> The outside version costs three thousand dollars instead of a hundred stamps. Same product.
>
> — Eighteen months, men's low

"We'll draft your compassionate release motion." — Drafting motions for money without a license is illegal in every state. The motion is also the easy part. The grounds are the hard part, and templates don't have your grounds. The actual criteria are public: [PS 5050.50](/resources/program-statements/5050-50-compassionate-release-reduction-in-sentence).

"Our legal team reviews every case." — If the "legal team" were lawyers, they'd say lawyers. Ask for bar numbers. Watch the subject change.

"Attorneys charge $30k for what we do for $3k." — Attorneys charge $30k for legal work. These folks charge $3k for paper. Those aren't the same product at different prices.

What a non-lawyer _can_ legitimately do: explain how the BOP (the federal Bureau of Prisons) works, prep you for the inside, help you organize facts and records so your actual attorney's hours go further. That's real, and it's what I do. Anything with a case caption and a docket number needs a bar card. No exceptions, including me.

Can't afford counsel? You may qualify for a federal public defender or CJA panel attorney. That's what they exist for. Law school clinics and FAMM are also real. A consultant with a template is not.

Companion reading: [paying someone to get you to XYZ facility](/resources/facility-placement). Same industry, same product, different wrapper. The wider version, covering every claim the industry makes and the ones that are actually true: [prison consultants, myths and facts](/resources/prison-consultants).

**Need help with this? Just ask.**

These pages cover the general rules. Your situation has details they don't. Email me a question. **Answers are free** , and "you don't need to pay anyone for this" is my most common answer.

[josh@federalprisondude.com](mailto:josh@federalprisondude.com)

I answer in the order received, usually within a couple of days. I have a day job. If your situation genuinely needs more than an email, I take a limited number of consults, so say so and we'll work it out.