Be underrated
What the blowback against the hottest legal AI startup tells us about "reputational Karens" and the perceived fairness of success
It is much better to be underrated than overrated. Yes, I’m writing this in part because of social media reactions to that Harvey Reddit thread this week. An alleged former employee claimed that the darling of legal AI is full of empty hype and is in fact struggling more than people think. Disgruntled former employees slinging mud isn’t a new thing—but I was caught off guard by the piling on that took place afterwards. On LinkedIn of all places!
But a bigger part of the reason I’m writing on this theme of being underrated today, is because of an unrelated spot-on comment from Lulu Cheng Meservey on Jack Altman’s podcast that popped up on my feed:
So today I’m going to share a few thoughts on how to manage your PR by being underrated and share my own personal experiences being viewed as underrated and as overrated. I’ll then end with some takeaways for individuals and organizations.
What exactly does being overrated mean
To me, being overrated is when you appear to collect all the rewards up front before you’ve earned them. It sets you up for backlash when a setback happens. In fact, you sometimes the setback doesn’t even need to take place. Even when you rack up wins, the haters lurk in the background.
When you’re underrated, the opposite dynamic plays out. When I joined Logikcull, my first legal tech startup, I was obviously overqualified for the job. I was a 33 year old lawyer with an elite resume, starting over as an entry level salesperson.
Despite my job title, colleagues sensed that I was extremely competent. So when I eventually became the fastest-promoted SDR in company history, I didn’t experience backlash; instead I became “the people’s champion” where everyone up and down the org chart celebrated my success.
How exactly do you become underrated?
There is no formula. But generally speaking you need to do two things:
Work in the shadows for a long time
Eventually gain recognition through some type of public success
It’s not enough to work in the shadows. For example, plenty of people work with no recognition. However, many of them (probably?) deserve the lack of recognition because they are average. So the fact that they do not gain public attention for their achievements is generally a fair result.1 It’s deserved.
Obscurity on its own does not make you underrated.
The challenge is that many people on the field are reputational Karens. This is exactly what we are seeing with Harvey and how things are playing out. There is a ton of noise out there, but from the comments it seems that many people—some of whom have toiled in obscurity for years with zero attention—gleefully piling on.
The best defense to haters is to ignore them. The second best defense though, is to maintain a reputation for being underrated.
The key to that? You’ve got to pair “work in the shadows” with real, concrete progress. That’s the only way to compound your own capabilities to the point where when public recognition hits, you have grown sufficiently to appear to deserve the success.
That will keep the haters at bay.
My personal experiences
I experienced both sides of the coin when I was in law school.
Being underrated: During 1L year I worked in the shadows because I was insecure. On the basis of a strong LSAT score, I ended up at one of the top law schools in the country. Yet I didn’t possess the strong work ethic and academic prowess of my classmates, all of whom had top GPAs on top of their similarly strong LSAT scores. So I was super low key, never really speaking up in class or talking about my ambitions, while spending all of my time in the library. The summer after 1L year, I ended up writing on to law review, it surprised a lot of people. However they all celebrated my success; many of them saw how hard I worked and so they saw my win as very fair.
Being overrated: However, at the beginning of 2L year, something changed. By then my persona went from “humble 1L” to “law review editor.” Then, I landed a summer associate job at Sullivan & Cromwell, which was a very public win. Right around then I began to realize that some of my closest friends perceived my ascent as fundamentally unfair; that my success was an undeserved aberration because I gamed the system. They weren’t entirely wrong. I did prepare intensely for OCI interviews & networked aggressively (unlike many of my peers) which was a big part of the reason why I punched above my weight. But that experience made me realize that when you land public wins faster than others’ expectations, it’ll lead to them wanting to tear you down.
These were not lone instances; I had in fact throughout my life had been experiencing backlash to what people perceived as undeserved success. As someone who probably cares too much about what other people think, it was all very painful.
History repeats itself
The same “being overrated” experience happened again a few years ago when I achieved social media notoriety in legal tech circles. At the time I was a salesperson who made funny video skits during the pandemic, and going massively viral and building a large niche audience was incredible for my job performance. But as my name spread across the Internet, I began coming across haters.
Turns out a lot of legal tech commentators had been working in the shadows in the space for a long time with almost no attention. And yet here I was, a young sales guy who exploded on the scene by making dumb jokes and comments, commanding far more attention than them.
I was tempted to dismiss the haters. But after reflecting on it some more, I took a different approach. I decided to slow down my own audience growth and made strategic pivots to something more substantive. Examples:
I stopped trying to grow views and followers, and instead tried to be more thoughtful with my posts instead of just dropping hot takes.
I launched this newsletter and started to write on substantive topics ranging from sales/marketing to legal ecosystem trends.
I declined to pursue sponsored posts/influencer marketing deals, even though they paid generously.
I instead focused on biz dev related consulting/advisor engagements, even though they drew no attention and sometimes paid less
The goal was to do more work in the shadows and make real, concrete progress. Over time I began to see my own follower/view count metrics plateau. I witnessed other creators with smaller audiences or who started later than me grow quickly and at times surge past me. Part of me felt like I was falling behind. But another part of me realized that their goals and mine were likely very different.
I was on a different path.
My unsolicited advice
There are a lot of implications for individuals and companies. I’m by no means an expert. And I recognize the irony of a “social media guy” writing an entire article sent to thousands of readers about why you should avoid the limelight. If you can set all that aside, here’s what I’d (humbly) recommend.
