GeekLawyer’s Blog

Jeremy Blachman emailed Geeklawyer’s co-blogger Ruthie to ask her if she’d care to review his new book ‘Anonymous Lawyer - a novel‘. Geeklawyer was a tad peeved - it’s his fucking blog he thought, why the hell ask the hired help if they want to get the perks: the free lunches, the gift boxes, the sexual advances from readers - you know, the usual stuff.

Geeklawyer was tempted to accept the offer and utterly pan the book in revenge for this unintended and slight slight. The fact that Jeremy probably acted out of reasonable fear of me and my reputation for bad temper petty vindictiveness and random violence would not have saved him. Nor would the appreciation that he was probably merely hoping to get off with Ruthie, she of pink motorcycle leathers, by currying favour (tip Jeremy, all that’s needed is to give her a Snickers bar and a small compliment; ‘have you had a bath this month? you don’t smell as bad as usual‘. Then take a ticket and sit in the waiting area until you are called).

Get on with it? OK, sorry, haven’t taken my Ritalin this morning. Jeremy Blachman is a recent graduate of Harvard School and so probably well able to document the shenanigans of large US law firms. He is not as far a I can tell actually working as a lawyer but you’d never guess from the novel.

The novel is written in the form of a collection of blog postings, which sounds a little odd but it really works well. In it the hiring partner of a large firm is introduced to blogging and uses it to document and relieve the boredoms and frustrations of his insular world under the moniker ‘Anonymous Lawyer’. So, a bit like me really. However unlike me, Anonymous Lawyer is the most repellent character one can imagine: egotistical snobbish unsympathetic petty immoral and with a chip on his shoulder.

Anonymous Lawyer seems to be the tale of a greedy ambitious sociopath: On contemplating at the hospital bedside whether The Chairman should live or die he says;

… if in fact The Jerk is his choice for future, then I need him to die … Of course I want him to be OK. I’m just saying that if he is going to die … then I’d rather he die before taking my career into the grave with him. His death would be traumatic enough for the firm. They shouldn’t have to lose me too … If he’s not going to die, then I need to be there with flowers before The Jerk gets there.

This is a man driven by work:

I showed a clip from Brokeback Mountain which I think was done a tremendous disservice when they pitched it as a gay cowboy movie. I didn’t see it (GL: he regards going to the cinema is a waste of potential billable hours), but it was fairly clear from the trailer that the point of the movie was that it’s great to have a job that consumes most of your day … There are far too few movies that illustrate the fallacy of the work-life balance quite so well.

It’s hard not to warm to such a cold man.

But in part the plot is a subtler message about how corporate structures at US law firms are designed, deliberately, to seek out and corrupt those who might otherwise go on to better and more productive lives. It’s about how his firm interjects itself into the life of the employee in substitution for family and parents. It becomes a surrogate evil family. Anonymous lawyer lives and yearns for the Chairman’s position and the blog posts are alternately filled with his machinations on getting there and his despair and hatred of the Summer Associates, the gifted desirable law school students who are flirted with seduced and all summer long deceived about the nature of the firm, with the eventual aim of throwing them as grist into the billable hours mill.

Kids waste too much time in law school thinking about justice and fairness, and not enough time learning what’s important. They come here clueless about how to structure transactions in order to minimize tax liability, and how to appreciate $15 pieces of fatty tuna. That’s where we come in.

Hear, hear! Justice and fairness? tish pish.

These students are just billable hours machines to be chewed up, burnt out at the age of 35 and discarded into the wastelands of pro bono law. Or something else that’s pointless. And replaced by the next batch of Summer Associates.

While working as a fee earner at a non-MC City firm Geeklawyer occasionally wondered if anything could be more repellent than the firm, its partners and associates. If anonymous lawyer is anything more than a grotesque caricature, not within the remotest reach of reality, then Geeklawyer has his answer: yes! - US law firms. Hopefully an American reader will speak.

Mr Blachman has written what is a truly hilarious and compellingly funny book. I don’t want to get all gushy for fear of sounding like an obsequious Summer Associate, but really, it is a very funny book indeed. I fancied, without giving out a spoiler, that the ending left more than enough wriggle room for a sequel, perhaps even a franchise. The flaws are minor: the verisimilitude of the office is politics is dubious but doesn’t detract from the humour. Buy it here, it’s only £4 so it’s a no-brainer: I spend more than that on cappuccino’s in the morning break.

Anonymous lawyer may not be real but Mr Blachman maintains a real blog called Anonymous Lawyer which on a brief perusal is every bit as entertaining as the book: it goes in my links!

[on a side note: on page 72 of the book one of the comments on an Anonymous Lawyer post was by a ‘J. Daniel Hull’ Where he says, of ways of being brutal to associates, “Torture? make them read your blog jackass” That couldn’t be Dan Hull of WAC? fame, and occasional Geeklawyer commentator?]