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LONG, ROB
BarNone A Funny, If Pointless, Look at Lawyers By Rob Long Years ago, a local Los Angeles television station hit upon a brilliant sweeps-week promotion for its news broadcast. While the other...
...There's a term I heard the other day—a 'cancer misdiagnosis case.' 'Please, Lord, won't you send me a cancer misdiag-nosis case!'" Or this: "In the eighties, there'd be guys who'd bill whole days when they were out [with] call girls . . . everybody knew it, no one cared, there was so much money flying around...
...Lawyerland, occupies a similar market niche...
...The book is "truthful rather than factual," Joseph declares in a note to the reader...
...Joseph picked the right city—New York—and the right lawyers...
...But he didn't put it down...
...It will take him three bill-able hours to read, and the price of the book is probably deductible...
...Apparently, according to Joseph, they have a few more things they'd like to share...
...The ratings were, of course, phenomenal...
...he finally asked...
...It's hard to imagine anything juicy coming from, for example, an intellectual-property attorney, an environmental-rights lawyer, a former congressman, and a guy from the Natural Fibers Council...
...While the other stations were airing lurid five-part series on child pornography and satanic cults, it broadcast a weeklong feature titled, simply, "Meet the Nielsen Families...
...Can you imagine your livelihood depending on how brain-dead a brain-dead baby is...
...And the cast of char-acters—a bitter black barrister, a sardonic female judge, a huckster corporate lawyer, a foul-mouthed criminal defense attorney— are good choices for this sort of thing, much better than the slim pickings available in, say, Washington, D.C...
...or to your lawyer dad for Father's Day, or, if you're really unlucky, to the Alan Dershowitz in your life...
...Mind if I borrow this...
...The anonymous quality, though, is what keeps the book moving along...
...He picked up the book and scoffed...
...It's a book about lawyers— how they talk, how they complain, how they eat—and at $22 a throw, it's the kind of book you give to a recent law-school graduate (surely the late-spring publication date is no accident...
...It's not really about "what lawyers talk about when they talk about law...
...Take documents for example...
...That Lawyerland would have been a very different book...
...Lawrence Joseph's new book, Rob Long, a contributing editor of National Review, is a writer-producer for television whose new series, "George and Leo," premieres on CBS this fall...
...Maybe I shouldn't say worse...
...Joseph has gathered a collection of characters—composites, he tells us, of real New York lawyers—who talk about their careers and the law in pretty much non-stop monologues, punctuated here and there by a bit of description or an interjection by the author...
...Or this: "What's a 'zoid...
...Memo to self: Review next attorney's bill very carefully...
...Lawyers, when speaking for attribution, are remarkably pompous...
...Law, and Alan Dershowitz, we aren't getting an accurate picture of what lawyers talk about when they talk about law...
...Even the personal-injury 'zoids who make a hell of a lot more than we do hate our asses...
...Freely riffing, as they do here, on the law, justice, billing, and society in general, they sound a lot like the rest of us: profane, cynical, funny, incoherent...
...There are clients who want their lawyers to commit fraud, so the lawyers are in it with them...
...The book is subtitled, with remarkable chutzpah, "What Lawyers Talk About When They Talk About Law," which suggests that somehow, despite the Simpson trial, Greta Van Susteren, Court TV, John Grisham, Jones v. Clinton, Anita Hill, the Menendez defense, L.A...
...You've got lawyers telling clients to destroy docu-ments—they implicate their clients in the fraud...
...Looks boring," he said...
...Billing...
...Lend Lawyerland to the Dersh in your life...
...He flipped through it for a few minutes, trying to keep up his end of our conversation, but getting distracted...
...Joseph is a snappy writer, and his sense of pace is terrific— when a character gets boring or too intense he's hustled off stage and a new one is trotted on...
...It's worse than ever...
...Go ahead," I said, knowing that "borrow," in the lawyer's lexicon, means "keep forever...
...it's about "what colorful New Yorkers talk about when they're trying to be colorful...
...The names, circumstances, and characteristics of the persons and places portrayed have been changed," he writes, adding that "those readers who are also lawyers will especially appreciate why...
...As if it takes three years of law school to "especially appreciate" why you wouldn't want your actual name associated with this: "I don't remember having to watch myself all the time, the way I have to now...
...We at least have clients who actually pay us...
...Short for sleazoids...
...The book was sitting on my coffee table when a lawyer friend of mine dropped by...
...But Lawyerland, for all its Mamet-style rat-a-tat dialogue and "tough guy" diction, is pretty pointless...
Vol. 2 • July 1997 • No. 44
