Read My Lips - the blog

What I know 'bout shoes would fit in a shoe box

Revealing the Soul of a Soulless Lawyer

MYSTERY MAN The Anonymous Lawyer blog has struck a nerve.
By SARA RIMER
Published: December 26, 2004

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. HE lives at the law firm, blowing off his wife's dinner parties, not to mention the birth of his son. He finds no satisfaction in his work, but he is trapped by his high salary and partner title.

He disdains everyone lower in the hierarchy: the smarmy $2,400-a-week summer interns, the idealistic associates who want to help poor people on company time, the associates who have the audacity to become pregnant and his incompetent secretary who broke the crystal plaque he received from a client.

He is, in short, a petty, cynical, sexist, miserable, overpaid corporate creep. He is also fictional.

But he is apparently all too familiar to thousands of lawyers across the country who are regular readers of his Web log, Anonymous Lawyer, in which he chronicles the 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.

"What A.L. posts on a daily basis are the precise reasons I have left practice and am now in a `law-related field,' " one reader wrote.

Hilarious, poignant, maddening (even the readers chide one another for their high-priced whining), the blog, which began appearing in March, has become an anonymous, online 24-hour confessional for disaffected associates at large, elite law firms around the country. (Many comments are posted late at night when, presumably, the readers are still at the firm.)

And even though the blog (anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com) makes clear that Anonymous Lawyer's stories are fiction, readers write in to say they identify with him and especially with the associates he tyrannizes.

"I'm a real live Big Law midlevel associate," one reader wrote. "And I'm here to say that whether A.L. is real or not, yes, most (most) Big Law partners do think that way."

It is not surprising that a group of highly verbal computer-bound professionals who are paid to complain would gravitate toward the blogosphere. The elite firms are supposed to be the pinnacle, the reward at the end of Harvard, Yale or Stanford law schools. Anonymous Lawyer is a chance to admit, anonymously, an uncomfortable truth: The money and status may not be worth all the sacrifices.

"Anonymous Lawyer is a cultural phenomenon," said William Henderson, an associate professor at Indiana University School of Law, who uses the blog in class. "It strikes a nerve with the deep-seated ambivalence that lawyers in big law firms feel about big law firm life."

So who is Anonymous Lawyer, anyway?

The blog is full of the sort of real life details, like the chocolate-covered pretzels offered during recruiting interviews of Harvard law students at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge ("unusually good for hotel food," Anonymous Lawyer rates the pretzels, while dismissing the students as entitled and ignorant) that have convinced many readers that Anonymous Lawyer has to be a Big Law insider.

"I know he's come to Harvard to recruit," said John Howell, a Harvard law student, citing the chocolate-covered pretzels.

Anonymous Lawyer's comments about his view of the ocean from his 20th floor office have led to speculation that he works at Latham & Watkins outside Los Angeles.

"Very good possibility A.L. is one of the corporate partners at L.W. in Costa Mesa," one reader wrote.

Another reader countered: "Step back and ask yourself what partner making a fine six-figure salary with half a brain is going to risk being caught exposing various little secrets of this anonymous firm. My guess is A.L. is a current or former associate at an L.A. or L.A.-area firm."

As it turns out Anonymous Lawyer is Jeremy Blachman, a self-effacing 25-year-old third-year Harvard law student whose firsthand experience of Big Law comes down to a round of recruiting interviews last fall (at which he encountered the aforementioned chocolate-covered pretzels) and three months as a summer associate at a large Manhattan firm. While Anonymous Lawyer has been gloating over his view of the Pacific, Mr. Blachman has never even been to Los Angeles.

"I wanted to see if I could post as a hiring partner and be believable," he said over a recent dinner at a Thai restaurant in Harvard Square. "I thought it would last for a week." ... [more at source]