The law is concrete. Deals etched with binding ink; rules laid out in black and white, written and followed by the most public of figures.
“Ghostwriting,” by its name, seems much more ephemeral. And in a way, ghostwriter Tim Cooke – known as “Cooke the Book” – is bit of a mythical figure. He will spend six months with a lawyer, a CEO, a surgeon, learning about their lives and getting inside their heads. He takes on a new reality and a new voice for a time, like a kind of shapeshifter. He helps his clients find their story and brings it to the page. Task completed, he disappears like Mary Poppins when the wind changes.
But in reality, his work is just as concrete as even the most cut-and-dry business deal.
Cooke, a member of the Lawdragon 100 Global Leaders in Legal Strategy & Consulting, has worked with leading business minds; he knows what they value, what they need, and what their goals are. His role is to help a client share their ideas in a way that cements them as a leader in their practice area. And he knows the way to do it.
“They're not paying me to be a yes man. I'm here to say, ‘You're paying me for my expertise, and this is what I think,’” Cooke says. “They can overrule me, but they're paying me to push back.”
That expertise is hard-earned. Before stepping into the world of ghostwriting, Cooke spent more than 30 years in the publishing industry. Fifteen of those were in the school and library market, helping convince reluctant readers to learn history, the arts, and even the hard sciences through the power of storytelling. In all, he’s written more than 350 books in his career.
That power has translated well to the business world. “As an author of six business books, I can say Tim is easily the best writer I’ve ever worked with,” says Cameron Herold, known as “the CEO Whisperer.”
In the legal industry, UK-based Cooke understands the system on both sides of the pond. He’s worked on books for a UK solicitor and for two Texas lawyers, including one of the leading plaintiffs' lawyers in the country. He’s flown to small towns in the U.S. to meet with clients or see their hometowns, to talk face-to-face and understand where they come from. That’s something, he emphasizes, AI can’t do.
The ROI here is perhaps less tangible than a standard business expense. But, Cooke says, telling a story is an investment all the same. He says of one legal client: “He’s likely not going to get a $60M case from writing his book, but he is going to make sure that if anyone is talking about complex financial litigation, they’re going to mention his name.”
Lawdragon: What do you enjoy about working with lawyers?
Tim Cooke: They think a lot about what they do; they think about the nature of the law. One plaintiffs’ lawyer I worked with said that if you're in a position where the government isn't going to go after these wrongdoers – the people who steal millions, corporate criminals – then it falls to the lawyers. Being a defender of the social fabric interests me.
A lot of lawyers, of course, are exceptional storytellers. They have to be to put their cases together. They tend to be good communicators, and they spend a lot of time with people who are at a very low ebb in their lives. And that gives a lot of lawyers a psychological edge; they understand people very, very well. This all comes together in a fantastic way with my skill, which is sustaining a narrative across the full length of a book. A book gives a lawyer a chance to say, "I've done remarkable things, met remarkable people, and this is what I think about my area of law, or this is what I think the younger me should have known.”
LD: Why else should lawyers write a book – both in terms of ROI, but also the less tangible benefits?
TC: I think the ROI is very simple. You establish yourself as a name in the space, a name that's somewhat above and beyond day-to-day practice. There are so many areas of law where a book would give people a chance to make their name better known and get a higher profile, more invitations to appear on podcasts or on radio, more occasions to speak to students or professionals. A book gives a lawyer an angle. It’s a calling card, a springboard, a celebration, all in one.
Another reason I think lawyers might like to write books is that people love to read about the law, especially while the law is changing so quickly. Pioneering female and diverse lawyers might want to tell their stories to help those who are coming behind them; we're still only a couple of generations into diversity being completely accepted. Some lawyers might want their practice areas to be better known, or might want to lead the conversation about legal training, the impact of AI, Big Law, lawyer mental health. These are things that lawyers can get ahead of and set themselves up as a spokesperson, if they want to help steer the debate.
A book gives a lawyer an angle. It’s a calling card, a springboard, a celebration, all in one.
There's always a chance that a book will be a bestseller … but that’s typically a long shot. This is not Harry Potter. So the ROI comes from reputation, profile and opportunity. It comes from leaving a legacy for your family or your partner or your law firm that says, "Look, I've had this fantastic life. I've done some great things. Here’s what I learned, or here are some of my cases that really mattered." In my experience, everyone has won cases that no one thought they would win.
LD: You mentioned that lawyers are good storytellers. But how does that translate to sharing about their own stories? What is that process like, and what can they learn from working with you to bring into the courtroom?
TC: The classic thing with lawyers is they don't know what they know. The things they say seem perfectly reasonable to them because they live in a world where everybody talks the same way. And it's me who has to say, "Well, no, whoa, whoa, hold on. What did you just say?"
A lot of what I do is playing the useful idiot. I listen to stories that don’t seem important and ask, "Oh, okay, so what?” But every now and then I say, "Jeez, why didn't you start with that? That's the story.”
An awful lot of people, not just lawyers, come to me thinking they know what their story is but the story often looks completely different from the outside. What they think is a story of overcoming adversity, say, is actually a love story because they founded a practice with their partner. When I worked with a plaintiffs' lawyer, I recognized that many of the stories he had revolved around his hatred of corporate bullies, so that was a way in to his book.
As for what they might learn to bring into the courtroom, I guess that might be around looking for stories behind the main story and recognizing patterns that can carry a reader across a whole narrative arc. These are skills many lawyers already have, just on a deeper or more extended level.
There’s a difference in scale. In court, you're convincing a judge or a jury, but if you can write a book and convince three, four, five thousand people that what you think about this aspect of divorce law is right, then maybe you can get a bit of momentum and help change things.
LD: That's beautiful. You mentioned AI, so let's talk about it. Tell me what you say to a lawyer, or any client who says, "Well, I don't need you to write a book. I can do it myself with ChatGPT."
TC: I would tell them exactly what I told the client who said that to me. "Okay, off you go. I'll believe it when I see it.”
I'm very sanguine about this. AI can write a draft for a legal matter fine. If you want a car manual, it can do that. It can write a recipe or a guidebook. But it cannot capture nuance, and particularly not human feeling. It reads like it was written by a machine. A smart machine, but a machine all the same. If I was a lawyer, part of my reason for wanting to write a book would be to step out from behind the legal process and speak in my own voice, so I would want my book to sound like me and not like a machine. In addition, AI can only scrape content from existing material. So if a lawyer has done anything that's novel or unique, they have to write that themselves.
If you can write a book and convince three, four, five thousand people that what you think about this aspect of divorce law is right, then maybe you can get a bit of momentum and help change things.
Of course, when I say they have to write it themselves, they're not going to have to write it themselves. I can write it. I take the legwork out of the process.
At the start of a project I ask them, "What do you want to get out of this book? What have you got to say?" I have them imagine a reader, a specific person who we give a name. That way, when we talk I can say, "Listen, this is all very interesting. The environmental law has changed in the state of Kansas. I get that. But let’s go back to Fiona, our 35-year-hotshot rising through the court system. Why does she give two hoots about what's going on with this? Tell me the lesson here." Again, I don't think AI can do that. I don't think it can push back. I don’t think it can do humor. I don't think it can do personality.
Once a book is rolling, I can talk to an author anywhere. They can be in the gym, they can be in their car, they can be going for a walk or sitting in an airport lounge. They don't need to find the time to write or even to prep for the call. I show up with questions ready to get them talking.
After that, I get into the writing. Writing is what I do; it’s my USP. I can write them any book they want in any style they want. I can write it for them in blank verse if they want it. I'm not as cheap as AI, but I'm easier to use than AI and the outcome sounds more like the author. Ghostwriters joke that we make you sound like you, only better.
LD: Tell me more about that process of finding out the story. How do you find a story people don't know they want to be telling?
TC: That’s really a question of listening very carefully, thinking very hard, and having gone through this process nearly 40 times, which makes me highly sensitive to picking up on nuance. Sometimes when people get radial with their thinking, you get to things that are a bit more interesting and that loop back to something else. It's amazing the number of times that there are these hidden stories, or just a different angle on something.
LD: That the author does not think of as being significant.
TC: Precisely. Then, once you have the story, you have to figure out how best to tell it so that people will read it. If no one reads your book, you might as well not have written it. This is a big difference between a lawyer’s day job and writing a book. Most people who read a legal draft are reading it because they have to read it. It’s their job. If it's 20 pages long, they have to read 20 pages. A 150-page book, no one in the world has to read that. So you cannot write a 150-page book the same way you would write a brief that someone is being paid to read. You need to be a lot more aware, not only of the overall narrative arc, but of the smaller story structures inside it that will keep people moving from one page to the next page to the next.
LD: Tell me about the process of taking on a client’s voice – how do you get inside someone's head to be able to speak like them and tell a story like them?
TC: Well, number one, again, listening. Number two, you must be very good at letting go of your ego. You soon learn who uses what words and what their mannerisms are and whether they're a one-syllable person or a two-syllable person, whether they use longer sentences, whether they're more concrete, whether they're more abstract, and so on. You have to take on the personality of the person that you're talking to. A ghostwriter is an actor playing the role of their author.
AI can write a draft for a legal matter fine. ... But it cannot capture nuance, and particularly not human feeling.
LD: Is there a story from someone in the legal profession that you want to tell?
TC: I particularly love stories about people who fight against injustice. I like stories of little people winning against the big people, or stories of smart people who manage to make the legal system work despite itself.
I also love stories of people who “shouldn't” be lawyers, who came from places or families where everything was against them. There are so many stories of people not quite fitting in, but either carrying on or setting up on their own practice – a lot of stories of people who have been told they can't do it, they can't do it, they can't do it. And then they do it.
LD: Absolutely. You know, you said on LinkedIn, “Don't hire a ghostwriter who finds writing easy; hire one who finds writing hard.” What does working through that “hard” look like, and what does it yield?
TC: Anyone can write something that's okay. Writing something that's very good is quite difficult. I'm not a great believer in sitting around waiting for the right word to come. Get something down on paper. A first draft is just a draft. It’s meant to be crap, so you’ll have to revise it. But if there’s still something wrong with what you’ve written, the biggest crime that I think a writer can commit is to think, "Oh, well, it’s fine. No one will notice." Someone will notice, so you've got to change it.
If you can see how to make it better, you keep changing it until you think it’s good enough. You can't achieve perfection, but someone is paying you and trusting you with their story. If the words are wrong, then next day you go back and write it better. You carry on like that until the book's done.
That's where the experience comes in. It's very easy when you've written as many books as I've written to get very blasé about it. I remember when I first had my first piece of writing printed in a professional book, which was in a Time Life book from a big 20-volume history of the world, I got in my car and I drove down the motorway 200 miles to show my mother. These days, I barely even bother to look at a copy. But being blasé about the books is one thing – you must never get blasé about the writing.
Some authors come back and write a second book or a third book together, and they also refer me, so I want them to tell people that I'm really good. I'm lucky I'm a good writer, but I’m good because I’ve worked hard for decades to be this good. I take it deadly seriously. You've got to sweat the small stuff because the words matter. They are the only thing I've got to sell. Does that make me sound very mercenary?
LD: No, but it's true. Words are what you have. To that end, what do lawyers, or any clients, tend to misunderstand about ghostwriting – whether that's what you do, the process, the time?
TC: Well, they can get frustrated by the timeline. But the timeline isn't just me; the whole publishing industry is much slower than outsiders usually realize. I probably take about six months to write a book with somebody, which includes gathering the material, then writing the book and revising it together. If the author wants to self-publish, that can happen quite quickly. If they want to use a hybrid publisher, which is where you pay for the services of a professional publishing company, that could be another six to 12 months. That’s the route most of my authors take. If they want to go to a traditional publisher and try so get a contract, they could be looking at two years. So producing the manuscript takes about six months, but the manuscript is just the start of the publishing process, not the end of it.
I also think some people still have this feeling that using a ghostwriter is somehow “cheating,” that they should write their book themselves. I think that’s a very outdated view now. Books are such a staple for lawyers, doctors, CEOs, all sorts of professionals who don’t have the time to learn how to write them. More than half of all nonfiction bestsellers are now ghostwritten. Think about it. You don't do your own car mechanics. You pay an expert to do it. You pay a shrink. You pay a trainer in the gym. You pay a business coach. So you pay an expert to write your book.
Most of my clients are happy to acknowledge my role, and those who aren’t don’t have to. They are the author while I’m just the writer. Ultimately, I'm just writing their ideas down using the professional skill I’ve honed over decades. The content is theirs, so the book is theirs...and the credit is theirs.
LD: Right, it’s their story.
TC: Yes. And when it’s all done, I disappear as if I was never there. I’m like the shoemaker's elf. I'm not there in the morning when you wake up.
