If you deal with lawyers, know lawyers, are married to a lawyer (like me), or, God forbid, are one, visit Anonymous Lawyer for a very funny fictional look at life in a big firm. Such as …

Clients need to be impressed. That’s how we get them to pay us money and keep hiring us. So if getting some documents out the door quickly is going to impress a client, even if those documents don’t have much use outside of that purpose, it’s still worth it. We do lots of things of questionable outside value to impress clients. We yell at people during meetings to impress clients about how demanding we are and how committed to their case we feel. … We assign associates from prestigious law schools to the matter, not because they’re competent but because telling the clients there are Yale-educated lawyers working on the case impresses them. We take them on expensive lunches, which they end up being billed for somehow anyway, to prove how prestigious we are as a firm. Lots of things to impress clients.

Impressing clients is our business. Not legal work.

and …

Almost any law student is capable of looking things up and figuring out answers to the kinds of problems they’re faced with as young associates. Problems like how to make reservations online for some of the city’s top restaurants. Problems like how to program their voice mail. Ability to perform the job doesn’t really factor into it much. …

But we have to make choices, and grades are a proxy for the ability to please. Law school grades indicate how well the student was able to give the professor the answer he or she was looking for. I’m not saying that’s the same thing as legal knowledge, but it doesn’t matter. All we’re looking for at the firm is people who will please us.

With a book coming out, there is even a website for “Anonymous Law Firm,” which includes this press release:

With toner costs at an all-time high, the Firm announced today that it will be forced to lower the starting salary for first-year associates by $18, from $145,000 plus an end-of-year bonus to $144,982 plus the bonus. Said hiring partner Anonymous Lawyer, “While it’s a regrettable decision, the increased cost of toner has to fall on someone, and for obvious reasons it can’t be the partners.”

It’s a perfect send-up of generic big-firm websites (”Our lawyers provide a range of billable services to clients, and are familiar with many of the things that attorneys ought to understand.”).

—
H/t: Patterico

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 10th, 2006 at 3:00 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Weekend Edition / Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.