An Interview With Jeremy Blachman, Author of "Anonymous Lawyer"

Jeremy Blachman is funny. He is probably funnier than you are, even when you’ve got your friends rolling in the proverbial aisles. He would never say so, because unlike the title character of his new book, “Anonymous Lawyer,” he is not a self-obsessed prick.

I will say it, however. And in the apt words of one reviewer, the book is “destined to become a law school classic.” It draws on the continuing success of Blachman’s Anonymous Lawyer blog, which received attention from publishers after being featured in The New York Times, and follows the plight of the eponymous antihero in his quest to become Chairman of Anonymous Law Firm. In this New York Inquirer interview – Blachman’s first, but hopefully not his last – the first-time author tells Bryan Joiner how he created “Anonymous Lawyer,” chronicles some of the crazy e-mail he’s received and explains why the title character is not as despicable as he’s often portrayed.

Jeremy Blachman’s recently-released Anonymous Lawyer is a hilarious satire of big-time corporate law, witnessed through the weblog of a hiring partner at a fictional law firm

You started writing the "Anonymous Lawyer" blog in March 2004. How did you get the idea, and when did you realize that it had taken off?

At some point during my second year of law school, I noticed a bunch of parody weblogs popping up like a blog called How Appalling that was poking fun at the excellent legal news blog How Appealing, run by a smart appellate lawyer named Howard Bashman. I’d wished that I’d come up with the idea first so I tried to think about what else could be done. There were blogs written by associates, by solo practitioners, certainly by law students – I’d been blogging under my own name since the beginning of law school – but there weren’t any blogs being written by partners. For obvious reasons – why would a partner at a firm reveal secrets on the Internet? There’s too much risk.

I had just finished interviewing for a job and the lawyers I met through those interviews were all fresh in my mind – I think I did 20 first-round interviews and then 7 or 8 callbacks, so I’d met maybe 50 attorneys and they all seemed the same. There was definitely one character I could create from all of them. So I started the Anonymous Lawyer blog mostly on a whim, just to see what would happen if I tried to write funny entries from the perspective of a hiring partner. I expected the blog to last maybe a week. I’d run out of things to say or no one would be reading and I’d forget about it. But the readership built up fairly quickly, and I found that I did have things to say in the voice of this character, even though at the time I hadn’t worked at a firm at all and was basing it all on the interviews, things I’d heard and my imagination. But very quickly I had about 700 readers a day.

I guess the point at which I knew it had taken off was when it started getting more readers than my regular blog, under my own name, which was getting about 500-600 a day. And as the anonymous blog grew to about 1000-1200 a day as the summer continued, I knew there was really something there.

How different was writing the book from writing the blog?

The blog is episodic—there’s no ongoing story, no dramatic arc, no plot. And there's only the one main character, and he's very passive—he reacts to things around him, but isn't a protagonist. He just vents. So for the book I really had to start from scratch and create a story, and fill out the world around AL, creating new characters and a goal and a set of actions to really keep the reader interested.

It's also hard, in a blog format, to convey action. At one point I wanted AL and The Jerk to have a physical fight, but I couldn't do it in blog form . . . "I punched him and now I've retreated back to my office to write about it. Here he comes." #Posted by Anonymous at 3:44 PM "He punched me. I'm on the floor. Blogging. On the floor." #Posted by Anonymous at 3:46 PM. It just wouldn't work. So I had to really work to use the form well and make the action flow naturally.

I guess I ended up treating the blog as 60,000 words of source material that got me into his head and able to write in his voice. But the book was harder to write than the blog, just because things have to fit together and go somewhere and there really had to be a progression of emotions and a dramatic arc. When I got stuck I'd sometimes write a blog post, just to make sure I was still in that voice, and then sometimes it would be easier to continue with where I was in the book.

In the book, the Anonymous Lawyer puts an e-mail address on his blog and immediately receives dozens of emails from associate lawyers who believe they work at his firm, or are the characters described in the book. Did this happen to you? Are any of those emails in the book?

I received a lot of e-mails from people who thought AL was real, even though there's been a disclaimer at the top of the blog saying it's fiction. I definitely received e-mails from people who thought I was at their firm. One person wrote and said something like, "now that I've been fired, you can tell me, you're Jim, right?" And a lot of e-mails from people trying to guess my identity and who "knew" I had to be at a certain firm because of details I hadn't even really paid attention to when I wrote them, like the number of kids he has, or the floor he works on.

People were convinced I was at Latham & Watkins for a while, and that I was a specific guy there, because he worked on the 20th floor, had two kids and liked baseball. I'd picked the 20th floor pretty randomly. A handful of law students sent me resumes. And I got a lot of e-mails from spouses and ex-spouses of attorneys saying I was describing what life was like. Certainly the e-mails in the book are inspired by real ones. The ones that are closer than that are where I ask for suggestions about how to torture my associates -- I asked that on the real blog and got about a hundred responses.

You have said that you went to law school with the dream of becoming a writer. This sounds suspiciously like The Musician, a character in the book who is torn between a music and law career, and has talked himself into the latter. Anonymous Lawyer writes, "When we're the backup plan for someone with a creative dream, it's trouble." Are you describing yourself here? Are there a lot of law students who harbor or suppress creative dreams?

Certainly The Musician is the closest character in the book to me and embodies what I was thinking about as far as my own feelings about working at a firm. I went to law school even though I knew I wanted to be a writer, I just didn't know the path to take to get there. I figured law school would buy me—albeit at a very expensive cost—three years to figure out how to be a writer for real, time to write, a place to make connections and a pretty foolproof backup plan in case the writing didn't work out.

I'd already turned down my full-time law firm offer before I got the book deal for Anonymous Lawyer. I would have probably ended as an assistant editor at a publisher, making a hundred thousand dollars a year less than my classmates at firms. That might have been a stupid decision borne out of a fear that working at a firm would kill my creativity and make me not terribly happy with my life. Also, ignoring the very real fact that they pay a lot of money for work that may require long hours but isn't necessarily grueling and can sometimes even be fairly intellectually engaging.

I know a lot of my classmates struggled with whether to work at a firm, and ended up not seeing a better choice because firms come to campus to recruit, no one else. So they end up at a firm, saying they'll be there for a year or two and then leave. But a year becomes five years and five years becomes 10 years, and soon enough they lose those creative passions or are too invested in their law firm lives to ever take the chance. In some ways I think it's easier to never even start than to save up some money, say you'll quit, and suddenly be faced with a choice between a real chance to make partner and the uncertainty of trying to start a creative career at age 30, 35 or older.

Is your law career over, for all intents and purposes?

If I was a big firm, I probably wouldn't hire me, even if I insisted this was really what I wanted to do. And hopefully I'll be able to find enough writing opportunities that I won't need to practice law. But I expect that if I decide down the road that the writing isn't working out, I'd be able to get a job doing something law-related, even if it wasn't at a big firm. There are lots of lawyers in all sorts of setting who lead pretty rewarding lives doing interesting work. I wouldn't necessarily mind being one of them. But for now I'm hoping to find ways to write for a living.

How much of Anonymous Lawyer is taken from personal experiences, and how much is imagination?

Most of it is my imagination, and taking the things I did see and blowing them out of proportion. I'm sure some lawyers take a vacation here and there. The lawyers at Anonymous Law Firm don't. I'm sure very few paralegals actually get tripped in the hallways. A lot of it, at least at first on the blog, was me trying to flip around the reality of it—thinking about how I'd react if I was a partner forced to interview someone like me who probably didn't want to work at the firm after graduation and probably wasn't all that committed to being a big firm lawyer. For someone who'd invested his whole life in rising to the top at a big firm, interviewing a law student who's trying to fake it and who secretly thinks what you do isn't all that thrilling is probably pretty frustrating. That was the kind of emotional content I was trying to get at with the character. I saw enough in my three months at the firm to be able to imagine how bad it could get, even though, in reality, the firm I was at treated me—and all of the summers—really well. If I'd wanted to work at a firm, I absolutely would have gone back there. And, I actually think the book could have been set in pretty much any industry. It's evil workplace stuff, whether you're in a law firm or not.

Anonymous Lawyer takes on law schools, saying that they don't teach what's going to be important at a big law firm. One associate offers to do research from her BlackBerry only hours after giving birth to a child. Do you think law schools could do better to prepare students for big-time corporate law?

I think law schools have it right, in a lot of ways. I don't think it's their job to train people to work at jobs like these—they teach students about the principles of law, the theories behind them, how to think about the law, stuff that isn't necessarily critical or even valuable for a lot of what big-firm lawyers do, but awfully important if you're trying to train people to really understand the legal system and how it works. I enjoyed law school—a lot more than I would have if they'd merely taught me how to do a document review or look up cases on Lexis. A lot of what young associates do at big firms doesn't require a law degree. It's just work that has to be done and the youngest people there will end up doing it by default.

In the book, "Chicago Law Student" brags about his alma mater, but Anonymous Lawyer blows him off, saying that unless you went to Harvard or Yale, it doesn't matter. Is this true?

It's not true to that extreme, but I think it's absolutely the case that there's a small number of law schools that are known as the top schools in the country, where all the firms recruit, and where everyone's going to get a firm job if they want one. And then there's a much larger set of schools where the education is probably pretty much the same and the student bodies pretty much the same, but the competition for jobs is very stiff and not everyone graduates with one and it's much harder to come out with a lot of debt and find a way to pay it off.

Anonymous Lawyer needs constant validation to overcome his shortcomings and thinks he can only be validated by the firm, when in fact the firm’s hierarchical structure creates the shortcomings. When another character dies, his last words are, "I should have spent more time at the office." It's hilarious, perverse and convincing. Do people actually feel this way?

I hope not. But the longer I've written the blog, the more frightening it gets. Every time I wrote something more over the top—something I thought for sure would end the fiction that this could possibly be real and make all of my readers believe it was just satire—I would get e-mails and comments from people saying I was describing their lives and this is how it was at places like this. It was very scary. The worse Anonymous Lawyer got, the more people believed he was real. That's not a good indicator about life at these firms for the people actually working there.

My favorite line of the book is when Anonymous Lawyer – a notorious liar – says, "I'm terrible at politicking. I can't lie with a straight face, and I beat myself up over too many things." I laughed out loud. How much fun was writing dialogue for such a duplicitous, insecure character?

Oh, tons of fun. But not as hard as a lot of interviewers have tried to get me to admit. I don't think I'm much like AL in real life, but I think we all have those kinds of evil thoughts, and we all struggle with rationalizing our decisions and the people we've become. I feel like I've failed when someone writes a review that loves the book but calls the character one-dimensional or pure evil. I'd like to think he's a real human being, just one that's so caught up in this world that he can't see his way out and he's lost touch with reality. But a lot of his blog entries are emotionally real to at least a part of me, and hopefully a part of a lot of people.

As a first-time author, what's it like seeing your book in stores? What's the reaction been? There’s been talk of a TV show. How’s that working out?

It was very exciting to walk into a Barnes & Noble for the first time and see the copies of my book on the New Fiction table. I watched from a distance for about 15 minutes just to see if anyone would stop and pick it up. A girl, probably about 9 years old, stopped and felt the embossed lettering, but that was it. Reaction to the book so far has been great—lots of reader e-mails (and I try to respond to all of them), lots of nice blog reviews and a few very gratifying print reviews, and my friends all seem to like it, or if they don't they haven't told me yet. There was a Variety article last week—NBC bought a pilot script for the show, and I get to co-write it with a terrific television writer/producer named Jeff Rake. Hopefully it'll turn out well and the book won't be the last of Anonymous Lawyer. But it's a long process and networks buy lots of pilot scripts for only a handful of slots. Nevertheless I'm certainly excited about getting the chance to work on it.

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Comments

[disgruntled associate]

I feel like a fool. I thought AL was real (despite the disclaimer). I have seen too many lawyers who actually think and act this way to believe that AL was wholly fiction. Nice job.

[John Williams]

As a former lawyer as a major international firm I read AL for months and assumed it was real before someone showed me the spoof website. The people in power at these places use 'humour', 'irony' and 'self-awareness' to nevertheless assert their perverted values. That's why AL was, to me, indistinguishable from the real thing.