Anonymous Law Firm

June 3, 2006 7:02 AM

The New York office was opened by the founders of the Firm in 1908, the same year women competed in the modern Olympics for the first time. While the Firm moved its headquarters to Los Angeles in 1972, the New York office remains a critical branch of the Firm today, paying tribute to the firm's deeply rooted traditions by undervaluing support staff, requiring formal business attire, and excluding Jews.
posted by grumblebee (19 comments total)

So it's like The Onion, only for lawyers?
posted by aladfar at 7:08 AM on June 3, 2006

What the shit?

That place confuses me. There can be only one response. DESTROY. My monkey hindbrain demands it.
posted by loquacious at 7:16 AM on June 3, 2006

Clever ad for the book.
posted by ?! at 7:17 AM on June 3, 2006

"Clever ad for the book."
posted by ?!

So - are you just incredibly clever - or was that luck?
(Brilliant catch!)
posted by Jody Tresidder at 7:23 AM on June 3, 2006

I am guessing these people are affiliated with the advertisers over at HuhCorp.

"We have really smart people who are always thinking up totally cool shit. We have a meeting room with a big, round, expensive table. When you hire us for marketing and consulting projects, we spend lots of time sitting around the table having meetings."
posted by sindark at 7:33 AM on June 3, 2006

So - are you just incredibly clever - or was that luck?
(Brilliant catch!)

so - are you just incredibly distracted - or are you blind?
(see the rightmost navbar link on the site)

:-)
posted by quonsar at 7:34 AM on June 3, 2006

http://anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com/. Unrelated and probably better.
posted by tomharpel at 7:38 AM on June 3, 2006

...er, not unrelated at all. Looks like the long-running Anonymous Lawyer weblog has spawned a book and a viral marketing campaign.
posted by tomharpel at 7:41 AM on June 3, 2006

Unrelated and probably better.

More online content, that's for sure -- and it depends what you mean by 'better', but it's kind of rare that I come across a blog that's more satisfying than a book.

Blogs tend to be more open-ended, more provisional and have less effort put into them. Whereas the gatekeeper role that publishers play tends to filter out a lot of the crap that might end up in a blog.

I know it's not very fashionable, but what can I say? Give me a real book, anyday.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 7:45 AM on June 3, 2006

There's a small firm in Colorado that has (had?) somewhat the same aesthetic, except I think it was for real. In fact, I found out about it from a Metafilter thread. Googling turns up some crumbs for Powers Phillips, but the main web site is down and most of the caches don't respond. (Maybe it's my connection?)

An excerpt:

Powers Phillips, P.C., is a small law firm located in downtown Denver, Colorado within convenient walking distance of over fifty bars and a couple of doughnut shops. Powers Phillips also maintains a small satellite office-in-exile on the cow-covered hillsides near Carbondale, Colorado, where it puts out to pasture some of its aging attorneys.
The firm is composed of lawyers from the two major strains of the legal profession, those who litigate and those who wouldn't be caught dead in a courtroom.

posted by spacewrench at 7:46 AM on June 3, 2006

The Future is Dallas.
posted by airguitar at 7:49 AM on June 3, 2006

Each summer, we are proud to select a Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year. The selected attorney is celebrated at a banquet in his or her honor. The prize is two weeks of severance pay.

Savage but brilliant.
posted by rdone at 7:52 AM on June 3, 2006

"so - are you just incredibly distracted - or are you blind?
(see the rightmost navbar link on the site)":-)
posted by quonsar

Well, at least I wasn't the only distracted, blind person here.
But, yeah - embarrassing.
posted by Jody Tresidder at 8:12 AM on June 3, 2006

someone forgot the adfilter tag
posted by evilgenius at 8:23 AM on June 3, 2006

So this book, it vibrates?
posted by Rhomboid at 9:46 AM on June 3, 2006

Anonymous Lawyer was the blog started by Harvard Law School student Jeremy Blachman (who simultaneously had his own non-pseudonymous blog) while he was still a student. Once he was unmasked (with some fanfare) as author of Anonymous Lawyer, he decided to ditch the law, take the book deal and run.

(I love the the picture of corporate yoga on the book site.)
posted by footnote at 10:44 AM on June 3, 2006

Blachman's current blog is here.
posted by Dr. Zira at 12:06 PM on June 3, 2006

Here is a review of the Anonymous Lawyer book by someone who actually knows something about law firms. He's not impressed.
posted by amber_dale at 12:36 PM on June 3, 2006

Associates who divorce their spouses see an immediate boost in productivity, salary, mental health, and the chances of being assigned to do the kinds of intellectually stimulating legal work that brought them to the firm in the first place. These benefits are tripled in cases where the associate chooses to forego visitation with his or her children.
posted by caddis at 9:05 AM on June 4, 2006