Lawyer stays sharp, fills the freezer and has fun with multi-species action

When the first tournament of each year arrives, Jeremy Lawyer often hears competitors complaining about feeling rusty, noting that they haven’t picked up a rod in four or five months. He can’t relate. 

Like many of his peers, Lawyer loves to hunt during the tournament offseason. The Mercury pro also welcomes a bit of a reprieve from chasing bass after doing so consumes eight months of his life. But he’s found a unique way to stay sharp while enjoying his time off. 

For Lawyer, each fall and winter marks his chance to target species other than bass. The waters near his southwest Missouri home offer no shortage of options — catfish, crappie, walleye, hybrid striped/white bass, even redhorse suckers — and Lawyer enjoys chasing all of them. 

Doing so offers a fun change of pace, gives him a chance to fish with some of the friends he doesn’t get to spend much time with on the water during the tournament season and allows him to supply a fish fry or two plus fill his freezer with filets. But it also keeps his skillset sharp. 

“It’s fun, and a lot of it is the same skills that I use in tournaments,” Lawyer said. “It keeps my fishing muscles oiled up.” 

Lawyer listed several competitive benefits of angling for other species. It allows him to keep a rod in his hands (he typically uses bass tackle for his multi-species exploits) and practice fighting fish – often far more than he would get in a day of bass fishing. Depending on the species, it can sharpen his skills with his electronics. He also said he’s learned some valuable lessons about different types of line, knots and hooks and the best applications for each. In fact, he’s working to develop his own prototype jighead that will sit just right when he wants to use two crappie jigs on the same line. 

“It’s a good chance to experiment with different knots and things like that,” the Bass Pro Tour angler said. “And then just fighting fish – I typically get to do a lot more of that than if I went out bass fishing and got 12 or 15 bites in a day.” 

No matter the conditions during the offseason, Lawyer has options. Catfish and crappie represent his most common quarry, but if it gets too windy for crappie fishing, he’ll target walleye, and if it’s too cold to be on a boat, he’ll hit a creek for suckers. He dished on his methods for targeting each. 

The catfish master

Fishing for catfish might call to mind an image of someone chunking out a hunk of meat above a big weight and sitting around waiting for something to bite. That’s not how Lawyer goes about it. 

Rather than waiting for them to come to him, Lawyer hunts down schools of blue cats. Fishing from a pontoon boat that’s been “stripped down to nothing,” he uses both the SideVü and ClearVü down imaging on his Garmin units to graph the middle of creek channels, looking for schools of shad with catfish positioned underneath.  

Anchoring above the school from both ends, he will rig up anywhere from 10 to 13 7-foot-6 Denali Kovert flipping sticks with Carolina rigs — 50-pound Sunline braided main line, 25-pound fluorocarbon leader, 3/8-ounce egg sinkers and 7/0 Gamakatsu circle hooks baited with cut shad he caught with a cast net earlier that day. Typically, if it’s an active school, Lawyer can’t even get all the rods deployed before one gets bit. 

“Sometimes we’ll only end up fishing five or six rods, because they’re biting so fast, that’s all we can handle,” he said. 

While some days are better than others, Lawyer said he’s had 100-fish outings using this method. Nowadays, though, he’s found another option that is in some ways even more efficient. Fishing from his Ranger, he’ll pinpoint a school of catfish on Garmin LiveScope and use a jighead minnow on a spinning rod to catch them one after another. While that’s harder to do with a big group of people in the boat, he noted that it can be a lot less work than anchoring in the right spot and dealing with cut bait. 

“Some people might not think of that as a way to catch catfish, but if you watched some of our events early last year, like at Toledo Bend, guys were catching a bunch of catfish,” Lawyer said. “Sometimes they’re 12-inchers, but sometimes you’ll get a 15- or 20-pounder.” 

Sharpening sonar skills on crappie

Lawyer has been planting crappie piles for as long as he can remember, so much of his crappie fishing consists of running those piles in search of a school that’s willing to bite. He typically employs traditional crappie methods paired with LiveScope to make his presentations more efficient. 

As winter progresses, forward-facing sonar will become a bigger part of his crappie fishing. Starting around mid-January, he said the fish typically leave the piles and suspend 5 to 10 feet deep, often over 30-plus feet of water. In the past, catching crappie that time of year proved difficult. But using LiveScope, he can find the schools of fish, “reel something through them” and fill up his cooler. 

Jerking up walleye

A few of the reservoirs near Lawyer’s home offer solid populations of walleye. While trolling is always an option to target those fish, during the colder months, Lawyer takes a more active approach. 

Lawyer looks for schools of walleye along long points or gravel bars, particularly those getting hit by the wind. He targets them with jerkbaits, opting for a SPRO McStick on the same tackle he’d use when jerkbaiting for bass. The only difference is the retrieve; he works the bait with hard, rapid jerks rather than letting it pause. 

“We catch plenty of bass doing it, too,” Lawyer said. “We’re not actually targeting them; they just get in the way.” 

Redhorse suckers from small water

Catfish, crappie and walleye are all pretty mainstream, even for a professional bass angler. But Lawyer might be the only touring pro who has a system for targeting redhorse suckers. 

The bottom-feeders are plentiful in the small, clear Ozark rivers near Lawyer’s home. During the winter, they tend to group up in deep, slower-moving holes beneath riffles. He targets them with a finesse version of his catfish Carolina rig setup. Using spinning tackle with something in the neighborhood of 15-pound braid, he ties on a 1/4-ounce bullet weight above a leader of 6- to 8-pound fluorocarbon. Noting that suckers are line- and hook-shy, he threads a live nightcrawler onto a Gamakatsu carp hook so that it’s completely covered, then casts it into the hole and sets his rod in a rod-holder. While that last step might not seem necessary, he’s found that he gets more bites when he’s not holding his rod. 

“Even if you feel like you’re holding it still, I don’t know if it doesn’t move as natural with the current or what, but I’ve found you’re a lot better off just sticking it in a pole-holder,” Lawyer said. 

That method catches him not only suckers — which typically weigh 1 to 4 pounds but can get up to about 8 — but plenty of buffalo, carp and drum, as well; a 15- to 20-pound carp making for a fun surprise on spinning tackle. Lawyer has found fishing a small river to be a fun way to spend an especially cold winter day — the moving water won’t freeze, spinning tackle handles better than casting in icy conditions and he can sit in his truck or somewhere warm and wait for a rod to double over. 

So, even if it’s been a little while since he last spent time targeting largemouth, you can bet Lawyer won’t be rusty when the Bass Pro Tour kicks off its 2025 season on Lake Conroe in late January.