Highly paid ‘trapped’ lawyers gravitate to blog

The Houston Chronicle published an entertaining story about Anonymous Lawyer blog. The Chronicle calls it “[H]ilarious, 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.”

Thousands of lawyers across the country are now regular readers of Anonymous Lawyer which chronicles “…[T]he 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.”

I am not sharing this with you to help you learn about marketing blogs – this is not an example of a marketing blog. Shows us a couple things though. One, the money and status of being a lawyer in a large law firm may not be worth all the sacrifices and two, blogs can quickly attract thousands of readers.

Turns out, The Chronicle reports “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 and three months as a summer associate at a large Manhattan firm. While Anonymous Lawyer has been gloating over his view of the Pacific, Blachman has never even been. to Los Angeles.”

Blachman writes some entertaining stuff.

• 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.

Turns out the stuff he writes is true per The Chronicle.

• “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.
• Readers have written 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 Big Law partners do think that way.”

Blachman, who had dreams of writing fiction while an undergrad at Princeton, was inspired to write the blog from his internship experience. Though he found nice people, many of them struck him as deeply unhappy. One associate told him: “Savor this summer; it’s all downhill from here.”

Looks like Blachman is passing on the law and turning to writing as a career. He wrote in his own blog “I’ve turned down the opportunity to make having gone to law school make sense,” when he announced that he had passed on a $125,000-a-year job offer from the Manhattan firm.