Modern litigation demands a media strategy. But there is something excessive—not to say bizarre—about the lengths to which famous litigators David Boies and Ted Olson have gone to try and assert ownership over the issue of gay marriage, which they first took on (for a $6.4 million fee) in 2008, fully 17 years after the first case was brought by three couples under the Hawaii state constitution.

The latest product of their strategy is Forcing the Spring, an “insider” account by the journalist Jo Becker based on exclusive access to the litigators as they challenged Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage in the state. The book, out Tuesday, will be joined in June by an HBO documentary called The Case Against 8, which features “exclusive” footage shot during the same period. Considering that the California case brought by the lawyers spectacularly failed to establish a right to gay marriage, this media attention reflects nothing so much as Boies and Olson’s self-promotional skills.

If all one could say about Boies and Olson’s efforts was that they are being wildly overhyped, the observation would hardly be newsworthy. “Famous Lawyers Seek Headlines” is right up there with “Dog Bites Man." But the problem runs much deeper. Other people have spent the last two decades slowly and painstakingly building the social movement for gay marriage and articulating the moral and intellectual foundation necessary for the creation of a new constitutional right. Those people have, unlike Boies and Olson, won many important cases, most recently United States v. Windsor, in which the Supreme Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act the same day it refused to strike down Prop 8.

In order to take credit for results they didn’t achieve, based on the accomplishments of a movement to which they did not and do not belong, Boies and Olson and their media proxies need to marginalize and circumvent the real activists. But even that is not all. Their aim for credit has real-world consequences. Boies and Olson are seeking out new clients and actively trying to beat the gay-marriage movement’s own legal eagles to the courthouse in a mad rush to get credit for what they have already failed to achieve. In the course of doing so, they are engaging in high-risk legal behavior that could backfire on the whole movement.

The Becker book is framed as a brief in favor of the lawyers and their client, a political operative named Chad Griffin who began his career as an activist on behalf of gay marriage in 2008. As Andrew Sullivan has written, the book vilifies or ignores the efforts of pioneers like Evan Wolfson, who joined the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1989 and headed their Marriage Project until 2001, when he spun off Freedom to Marry, still the leading coordinating organization for the gay-marriage movement.