Current ranking: #4

Signature move

The grievance post. McCarthy picks a small, specific writing crime – a double space after a full stop, “the same” used as a pronoun, a pronunciation question – and lets the comments do the rest. The top post has 345 likes and 339 comments, almost a 1:1 ratio. That is not what a normal LinkedIn post looks like. He has built a feed that runs on argument rather than approval, and the algorithm rewards it.

Topic fingerprint

• Writing crimes. Punctuation, archaic legal usage, format obsessions. The bread and butter.
• Pronunciation and usage questions. Tagged into peers’ feeds, designed to pull in regional voices. Strong comment performance.
• Everyday legal practice frustrations. The 30-page client care letter, the unnecessary cc, the kind of detail only a practising lawyer would notice.
• Community calling-out. Tagging peers, particularly other South West lawyers, to start conversations rather than perform thought leadership at them.
• Light personal asides. Sport, weekend observations, the occasional cat. Used to break up the run of opinion pieces.

Best post of the quarter

A 28 August 2025 post arguing that the second space after a full stop is a relic that needs to die. 345 likes, 339 comments. Four short paragraphs, one clean argument. The comments split half “yes, this is the hill” and half “I am a typewriter person and I refuse to die.” Both groups stayed engaged for hundreds of replies, which is exactly the point.

Firm context

Stephens Scown sits at a combined tracked power score of 579,183 across 248 individuals in the window. A high-performing firm overall. McCarthy’s 14,795 is about 2.6% of that, which is significant for someone debuting in the rankings. He is not the only Stephens Scown voice on LinkedIn — the firm is built for this — but he is the one pulling the largest comment counts.

Why follow him?

• If you want to study how grievance posts actually work without sounding mean.
• If you write about legal practice and want a steady stream of small specific observations to react to.
• If you are testing whether a lawyer can build a following on craft, voice and irritation alone.

Source: TBD Marketing LinkedInfluencer dataset, Q1 2026 Top 200. Posts sample window: 18 August 2025 – 1 April 2026.