Lawyer Mocking

The sky may not be blue

So you want to be a lawyer? Well, D. Robert White Esq. has some advice for you. White, 30, is the author of The Official Lawyer's Handbook, but you can bet your convertible debentures that this volume of dos and don'ts will not win an award from the American Bar Association. Lawyers, according to White, are an avaricious bunch of dull drudges who want to do you out of your life savings. One might give careful consideration to pleading guilty and going to prison before hiring one, White suggests. Is he serious? A little. The Official Lawyer's Handbook (Simon & Schuster; $5.95), published this month, is a book of cutting humor that purports to "tell all" about law schools and law firms in the same way that The Official Preppy Handbook tells all about pink and green alligators.

White, who for three years was a junior associate in the mines of Hogan & Hartson, a major Washington, D.C., firm, lampoons and lambastes everyone connected with the legal profession, from starters to partners. For students worried about the bar exam, he has a chapter subtitled "Thousands of Morons Have Passed It--So Can You." There is a section exploring the compulsion for obscurity and obfuscation. The rule is: "If a layman can read a document from beginning to end without falling asleep, it needs work." Simple, direct statements should be avoided at all costs. For example, "The sky is blue" is impossibly straightforward; any associate worth his salt will quickly convert it to "The sky generally appears to be blue." His more experienced superior will render the statement "In some parts of the world, what is generally thought of as the sky sometimes appears to be blue." At which point, a senior partner will have a base to build on.

Appearances count. Prominently displayed bound volumes of the Harvard Law Review will give clients and colleagues the impression that a young attorney was a student editor. A male associate's "wardrobe of suits can run the gamut from blue to black." Women should dress as drably as possible and avoid makeup and perfume: "You don't want to encourage the senior partner to think of you in the same vein as the women he knew in Paris during the war."

White warns that "real lawyers eat fast food"--at their desks. Associates must often put in 60-hour weeks in order to keep up with the mountain of work. But even after seven or eight years of such drudgery ("like researching U.S. postal regulations ... or comparing the Delaware nonprofit corporation law with that of the other states"), there is only a slim chance of becoming a partner. To beat the odds, one need only be "the hardest-working, least-likely-to-screw-up, most anal, puritanical grind since Cotton Mather."

Three years into this effort, White says, he began to find it all hilariously funny, and then he knew that he was in the wrong profession. (One of his maxims is "There are no funny lawyers--only funny people who made career mistakes.") He is now on a leave from his firm, which he says may well become permanent. The last of his "ten ways to end a legal career" is "Write this book." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.