According to a Dec. 26, 2004, report in The New York Times, members of the legal profession are flocking to AnonymousLawyer.blogspot.com, a website where a hiring partner at an unnamed firm dishes the dirt about his profit-driven, soul-deadening operation. Though the posts are entirely fictitious – writer Jeremy Blachman is a law student whose experience in the field is limited to a summer associateship at a Manhattan practice – the real lawyers who leave messages at the site say that it eerily mirrors the resoundingly negative behaviors they encounter on the job.
Dear Anonymous:
Wow! I've now read every post on your blog, and your setup sounds nearly as bad as ours! I'm an associate at a sleazy Boston firm, where we all have to share a stupid unisex bathroom and not even the messengers can keep their hands off each other. The female associate who works in the office next to mine is a total head case: She weighs about 87 pounds, and I keep thinking that the next time I have to use that awful communal john, I'm going to walk into a stall and find her kneeling in front of the throne with her entire fist down her throat. The further she wastes away, the more she tries to show off her skeletal bod in these ridiculously unprofessional micro-miniskirts that the partners keep letting her wear around the office (and into court!) for some godforsaken reason. Between changing light bulbs and retrieving files from bottom shelves, I think I've seen her hoo-hah more often than I've seen my own face in a shaving mirror.
Plus, you can hear the woman's biological clock ticking halfway down the hall. Last week, I had to go into her office to ask her a question about a client, and I found her doing the funky chicken on top of her desk and pointing into the corner of the room. "Look at the dancing baby!" she was demanding. "My baby must be acknowledged!" I tell you, A.L., I think the dotty little broad is getting ready to snap like a twig.
Posted by Rfish, 2:15 a.m.
Oh, so you think you've got it bad, Rfish? Ha! Try living down here in southern Alabama, where the only firm you can work for is run by this sanctimonious old poop whose entire reputation rests on having tried one big case – a case he didn't even win, mind you. As far as I can tell, it was some racially charged sex-assault thingie, and the defendant was black, so of course he was convicted. And then the poor sap got himself killed. So my boss caved in to public and family pressure and hired some help, so he could maybe win a trial or two for a change. But he's such a know-it-all that he won't let us do anything our way: He just wastes our time by pulling us aside to deliver these painfully unhelpful life lessons, cleaning his eyeglasses in front of us while he drones on and on about the importance of pro-bono work and how we should all be nice to mockingbirds. WTF????
Then, every day when school lets out, we have to put up with visits from his detestable kid, who wears these dirty Osh Kosh B'gosh overalls and is named Scamp or Scout or Muskrat or something. Every once in a while, she shows up in the company of this scary guy who doesn't say anything but just stands around looking like a younger version of the Great Santini. And they all have this ridiculous tradition going, where we have to stand up every time Mr. Zero-Win Record enters or leaves a room. If we don't, we get mercilessly chastised by another old coot who does absolutely nothing at the firm but hangs around day and night anyway. "Stand up, Mizz Feinberg," he intones. "Your employer is passin'." Thanks, but I'll sit. It's easier on the Manolo Blahniks.
Posted by MyBoo, 2:53 a.m.
Yeppers, MyBoo, the American South is indeed the armpit of the universe. But how'd you like to work for a mouthy greaseball who remembers it as the site of his greatest triumph? That's what I'm facing here in a crummy little office in Brooklyn, where one Vincent Gambini is so nostalgic for the handful of weeks he spent in your fair Alabama that he serves us grits every morning. Grits, I'm tellin' ya! Do you have any idea how monumentally bland those things are, even when you wash them down with a chai latte from the Starbucks down the block?
Every 9 a.m. like clockwork, we have to suck back the Grits of Doom and let our founder wax rhapsodic about how his Italian-American resourcefulness saved his cousin from a bogus murder rap in some hick town. Then he quizzes us about the rear-end construction of the 1964 Buick Skylark. Which is one hell of a productive way to burn up the billable hours, I can tell you.
Meanwhile, it's all we can do to keep from guffawing at the sight of the cheap-ass wig the guy obviously wears; I swear I've seen him go into the bathroom and come out with the thing turned 90 degrees around on his head. Life's just a big acting opportunity to our Mr. Gambini, and that's for certain when you hear him talk about his ex-wife, a certain Mona Lisa Vito, who I guess used to help him out on cases. He says her "performance" in the courtroom down in Alabammy was just a fluke, and that the award she won for it was really supposed to go to somebody else. I think he's referring to some minor American Bar Association award for first-time trial lawyers, but who honestly can tell what he's talking about at any given moment? Oh, he's way past it.
Posted by UBlend, 3:28 a.m.
Sorry, but I've got all you fellows (and ladies) beat. I'm stuck here in Orlando, Fla. – which would be pathetic enough on its own, but let me tell you about the bottom- drawer firm I'm doing time with. It's a real ambulance-chasing outfit, with ads running on TV morning, noon and night encouraging the local inbreds to fight acts of nature with nuisance litigation. I swear, if you slipped getting into the bathtub and fractured your femur, these vultures would be on their way to your house with the relevant papers for a suit against Mr. Bubble.
I'm sure all three partners are just as shady, but the one we see the most of, John, takes the cake for chutzpah. He does our commercials wearing this thick eye makeup, and nobody can make him stop – but now he's taken to keeping the stuff on when he's just working around the office. Appropriate Conduct is not the man's middle name. Once again this year at the company Christmas party, he leaned a little too far into the punchbowl, and he spent the rest of the night trying to cajole the female associates into accompanying him to a topless bar he's a big cheese at. When every one of them refused, he turned belligerent, roaring "I'm for the people, goddammit!" until he was hoarse. Then he sobbed uncontrollably for 20 minutes and passed out inside a file cabinet.
If I don't get out of here, I think I'll go insane.
Posted by CollingDrLove, 3:45 a.m.
