Anonymous Lawyer is for any of you former lawyers out there, who, like me, have escaped for a much more entrepreneurial life, here’s one to help reassure you that you made the right decision! This novel is based on the Anonymous Lawyer blog that gained some notoriety a few years back, where Jeremy Blachman, posing as a hiring partner in a NY law firm, wrote a blog about life in a law firm. The fictional “hiring partner” he creates is such an amoral, antagonistic, self-promoting son of a b*tch, that you actually end up being charmed by the guy and almost root for him in his quest to be managing partner. Sort of like Survivor’s Richard Hatch without the naked dance.
It’s hard to describe what’s so funny, but there are some insights that Blachman slips in there that ring true through the satire:
- Law firms are a bit like extended adolescence, except without the popular kids and the jocks, which means that the individuals must recreate society to their liking and the result is sort of a Lord of the Flies with leather furniture, secretaries and computers. (I always felt law school was more like middle school with the mean kids and all, rather than high school or college where you could find your own group of seemingly normal friends.)
- Part-time means that you still do 100% of the work, just at 80% or less of the salary.
- It’s nearly impossible to have a life outside of the office and meet the billable hours requirements of the larger firms.
I’m afraid the book did bring back a few repressed memories for me. For example, we used to joke at my firm that the elevators talked to us more than the partners (although the elevator dialogue was limited to what number floor we were getting out on). There was also a partner who didn’t like “binder clips” and if you didn’t hand in your 50 page memo stapled, he would take off the binder clip and toss it in the air causing you to have to pick them all up. (Word to the wise, if you were nice to his secretary, she gave you this valuable information before you walked into his office.)
And, after reading Anonymous Lawyer, my first attempt at a novel doesn’t seem so strange in retrospect — a new associate working late accidentally sees a junior partner watch passively as a senior partner chokes to death on his takeout Chinese, and then spends the rest of the novel trying to convict that junior partner, who’s benefitting from taking over all of the dead partner’s cases.
“‘after all we aren’t savages really…’”
- William Golding, Lord of the Flies
The Bottom Line: Great beach read for any attorneys (former or existing!)
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
