Lawyerland: What Lawyers Talk About When They Talk About Law - Hardcover

Lawyer, law professor, and published poet Lawrence Joseph has an uncanny ear for dialogue, and in Lawyerland he reproduces conversations he's had with attorneys practicing in New York City. His unorthodox technique involves extensive and lively quotation that reads at times like a Mamet play, and Joseph readily admits, quoting the late New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, that the book is "truthful rather than factual, but solidly based on facts." Names and some factual details have been changed, but the interview subjects relate their stories and do provide the gritty texture of how these lawyers view themselves and their insular world. In eight separate chapters, each devoted to a practitioner of a specific legal specialty, Joseph presents the people who keep the system working in all their profane, cynical, and exuberant glory.

Downtown New York attorneys muse, dish, and kvetch about practicing law in the '90s, in this dead-serious, mordantly funny collection of interviews. Joseph (Law/St. John's Univ.; Common Sense, 1993) converses with 15 lawyers of various stripes, including a female federal judge, a medical malpractice solo practitioner, a criminal defense lawyer, a black partner in a municipal bond firm, a female labor lawyer, and several disaffected associates. The paychecks vary, but the lawyers share a deep disillusionment with the law: Says the criminal lawyer, ``Every lawyer [should] tell his or her client that becoming involved with the legal system is like three years of experimental chemotherapy, 100% guaranteed not to work.'' The lawyers concur that justice is just what money can buy; that the work is maddeningly complex, too specialized to delegate to associates; that the role of attorneys as counsel has deteriorated, as clients now feel free to ``tell you--in no uncertain terms--what they want''; and that the highest rewards, such as partnerships and judgeships, ``aren't worth shit.'' The depressing tales of mental and physical breakdowns, firings and demotions, are leavened by gabby, self-aggrandizing anecdotes with deferred punchlines and plenty of cusswords. (Despite the frequent vulgarities, only a confrontation between two labor lawyers actually gets ugly.) Joseph has altered the ``names, circumstances, and characteristics of persons and places portrayed,'' but it's fun to try to pierce the veil. (For example, tabloid readers will recognize the partner ``murdered up in the Bronx by a male prostitute at one of those fifteen-dollar motels'' as a leading partner at white-shoe Cravath, Swaine & Moore.) Oliver Wendell Holmes meets David Mamet in this collective portrait of lawyers' love-hate relationship with their profession. (b&w illustrations) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.