This NYT article looks at the person behind anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com, supposedly a highly-paid partner of an L.A. law firm.
While people in the U.S. law biz swear it reflects their reality to them, the blog is actually written by a law student who's never even been to L.A. (and is too young to have watched L.A. Law in its heyday).
An excerpt:
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."