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?]