The chronicles of the Anonymous Lawyer on “soulless, billable-hours-obsessed partners, the overworked BlackBerry-dependent associates and the wrecked families that are the dark underside of life at his large firm in Los Angeles” is just fiction, but I’m including it in the Lawyers and Law Students section of the sidebar, if only to give me and (and hopefully, the law students reading this blog) an early warning device (against—I don’t know really).
Scheherazade points out three lessons from all this:
1) the blog as a medium has an inherent credibility. 2) Humans in general, and lawyers in particular, are amazingly susceptible to status and heirarchy — Anonymous Lawyer’s appeal was the perception of access to honesty from the upper stratus of the standard professional heirarchy, and the delicious way the author could make explicit all the power struggles and displays of status and power within a law firm. Jeremy can convey that in beautiful, elegant turns of phrase. 3) The profession really is draining talent, energy, and enthusiasm from a huge hunk of lawyers, which is a travesty. Anonymous Lawyer was fiction, but too many people recognized themselves in the mirror Jeremy held up. It makes me really sad.
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