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(Photo Illustration by Joseph Sutton)
The last thing Chris Roberts expected was to find himself blowing up on a social media app aimed at high school and college kids.
TikTok, a video-sharing platform, is probably best known as a place for teens and twenty-somethings to film themselves participating in fun cultural and social trends, like participating in viral dance challenges. But there are plenty of other genres of TikTok videos that can garner attention, as Roberts would soon find out.
Roberts, a 36-year-old attorney from St. Louis, made an account on TikTok back in February with the intention of sharing legal advice on things like how to deal with telemarketers — common sources of frustration for pretty much anyone with a phone number, but perhaps not a topic many people would describe as exciting.
So Roberts wasn’t really sure what to think when he woke the morning after posting a video to find his phone buzzing with notifications.
“When I woke up, it said I had 99-plus (messages) in my inbox, and I would literally swipe my finger to refresh it, and it would go back to 99 again. It was unbelievable,” Roberts said. “People I knew who were on TikTok around the country were saying, ‘hey, I saw you on there.’”
Roberts didn’t think he had what it takes to get popular on TikTok, but the app’s algorithm — the complex, secretive system by which the app selects videos to show users on their “for you” homepage — evidently considers his videos pretty interesting.
And they are certainly helpful for everyday consumers. Roberts, now perhaps better known by his TikTok handle @classactionlawyer, films himself offering legal advice on things like how to deal with robocallers, some of them including cameo appearances from his young daughters, and many of them garnering thousands of views.The attorney said he started his account after some encouragement from a cousin who had just graduated from college and his wife’s younger sister, who had been suggesting the idea to him for some time.
Roberts hadn’t previously been interested in using TikTok, he said, but he recently took a class about outreach that gave him some ideas.
“I took a class, not related to TikTok, about the importance of getting your message out there in the media,” Roberts said. “That gave me a lot of confidence to do that, to understand your story and communicate it.”
It didn’t take long for him to learn the digital ropes and get going.
“I just played with it a lot,” he said. “I watched a lot of what other people put out there. I studied what the popular videos are, ‘what do I like about this video, what do I like about that video?’ If I didn’t know how to do something, I would Google it.”
Of course, he also learns a lot from his kids. His young daughter has shown him some TikTok tricks, Roberts said.
“Kate actually teaches me how to do some things on TikTok,” Roberts said. “Which is kind of scary that someone who is as young as her knows more than I do.”
Most of his videos focus on providing his viewers with some insights and even advice regarding his areas of legal expertise — the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and other areas of consumer law.
In Roberts’ very first video, he starts off with a fun hook.
“Today, a middle aged lawyer is going to give you beauty hacks to show you how to (get) a complete makeover with some unexpected tips,” he says.
Except the tips are just to place your number on the national Do Not Call list, wait for telemarketers to contact you without permission (which is illegal after 31 days on the list), then sue them and reap the rewards, to the tune of a minimum $500 per violation — and then, of course, use that money to buy as much makeup as you want.
Roberts repeats this formula several times, giving his viewers “spring cleaning hacks,” “investment hacks,” and “healthy cooking hacks.”
In his other videos, Roberts also gives advice on things like what kinds of robocallers are worth pursuing a lawsuit against, when debt collectors can and cannot contact you, answers questions from viewers, and even explains a Supreme Court ruling.
His wife, Kelly Roberts, said it was “pretty incredible” to see her husband’s TikTok account take off in popularity so quickly.
Kelly said it’s a bit surreal to see her husband getting so much attention, but at the same time, she’s not surprised — he’s always been pretty creative, she said.
“He’s always, since the first time I met him, he’s always been really clever, and he’s really good at coming up with plays on words, but I always said he’d be good at creating commercials or jingles, so I definitely could see him doing this when we first met,” she said.
Roberts said he’s been a consumer lawyer for about eight years. In that time, he and his firm have worked on many local consumer lawsuits and class actions, and even some larger ones, like the national class action against Life Time Fitness over accusations of TCPA violations. Before that, the University of Kansas and University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law graduate was on the other side of the courtroom — he was a debt collection lawyer.
That experience did help him get where he is now, he said. But it wasn’t particularly enjoyable or fulfilling.
“I learned a lot about that area, I learned a lot about trying cases, I learned a lot about court procedure,” Roberts said, “and it was a very rewarding experience in terms of learning about the law. But it wasn’t personally rewarding or intellectually challenging or stimulating at the time.”
He said he changed sides and moved over to consumer law after being approached by an opposing attorney.
“It’s a lot more rewarding to help people turn a disadvantage” — like harassing calls from a telemarketer — “into an advantage,” Roberts said.
That opposing lawyer who first approached Roberts was David Butsch, now his partner at their law firm, Butsch Roberts & Associates.
Butsch said he thought Roberts was a well-prepared and meticulous attorney, so he asked Roberts to interview for a job.
“I was actually involved in a couple cases where he represented the opposing party,” Butsch said of Roberts, “and he was doing at that time primarily insurance defense and stuff for various insurance companies, and I thought he was a very diligent guy so one day I saw him outside the court where we had a joint appearance and I said will you consider looking at our firm?”
After years of working with him, Butsch said Roberts remains a hardworking and diligent lawyer who always has his clients’ best interests at heart — though he was surprised to learn of his newfound TikTok attention.
“I don’t know anything about TikTok,” Roberts’ law partner Butsch explained, but his wife and kids use it and noticed Roberts’ videos getting traction.
“They were the ones who brought Chris’s TikTok activities to my attention,” Butsch said.
Still, Butsch said Roberts’ TikTok videos are a great way to reach out and communicate with everyday consumers, and he’s glad to see them getting attention.
Roberts said he’s happy to be able to educate people on the laws that are meant to protect them as consumers.
“The biggest things are that there are these laws out there that are designed to protect consumers that people underutilized and underappreciated and sometimes just don’t know about,” Roberts said, “and so TikTok has been a really great way to communicate with people.”
He said he’ll probably be on TikTok for a long time to come — there will always be new things to help educate the general public about as everyday consumers of many kinds of foods, services, technologies. and more.
“I feel like there’s limitless possibilities with it,” Roberts said. “Consumers are protecting their rights under statutes and laws that congress has given them to protect themselves, and I think this is going to be a message that continues to resonate and continues to be very important so I don’t see myself stopping in the near future.”
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