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The Life and Career of Jeremy Blachman: Author, Anonymous Lawyer

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published August 14, 2006

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( 40 votes, average: 4.9 out of 5)
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<<Blachman, who started his Anonymous Lawyer blog after watching a variety of parody blogs crop up on the Internet, started out blogging about his law school experience under his own name. However, once he noticed a shortage of blogs being written by partners in law firms, he decided to go where no blawger had gone before.

"I started the Anonymous Lawyer blog mostly on a whim, just to see what would happen if I tried to write funny entries from the perspective of a hiring partner," Blachman said. "I expected the blog would last maybe a week and then I'd run out of things to say, or no one would be reading and I'd forget about it. But the readership built up fairly quickly, and I found that I did have things to say in the voice of this character, even though at the time the blog started, I hadn't worked at a firm at all and was basing it all on the interviews and things I'd heard and my imagination. But very quickly, before my summer associate job even started, I had about 700 readers a day."


The main character in Blachman's Anonymous Lawyer blog is based on a combination of the attorneys he met while interviewing for a job after his 2L year.

"I think I did 20 first-round interviews and then seven or eight callbacks—so I'd met maybe 50 attorneys; and they all seemed sort of the same," he said. "There was definitely one character I felt like I could create from all of them together."

At first, Blachman got most of his ideas for the blog entries from his own interview experiences and by imagining "the harshest, most wicked hiring partner" that he could.

"I thought about the kinds of stupid things I did in my interviews—asking dumb questions about work-life balance, worrying about whether I was using the right knife to butter my bread at lunch, not knowing enough about the firm—and what I could imagine was going through the partner's mind," he said.

Once he started his summer associate position, he began to use his experiences at the firm for inspiration.

"When the summer started, getting ideas for entries was pretty easy. I would notice little things throughout the day and then exaggerate them or flip them around to create posts. Oftentimes, emails or comments from readers have helped inspire entries. And now that the character is pretty well-developed and his voice is fairly consistent, I can develop a post out of pretty much anything in the news or things I hear when talking to friends."

It was after an article about his Anonymous Lawyer blog appeared in the New York Times in December 2004 that Blachman was approached by publishers about a book deal. At first, he was a bit overwhelmed and nervous at the thought of turning the blog into a book. He said there were times when he wasn't sure the blog format would work over the course of an entire book, but he kept at it. A mere eight months later, he turned in his final draft.

"I was building off of almost 60,000 words of source material on the blog. So the character was already fairly well-developed; and a lot of the ideas were already there, even though 90 percent of the material was new," he said.

"The biggest difference between blog and book is that the blog didn't have a story," he said. "There was no dramatic arc, no cast of characters beyond Anonymous Lawyer, no forward motion. So, I had to start from scratch and figure out what kinds of stories I could tell with this character, what his motivations were, what goal could drive an entire novel."

Blachman finally decided he would build the plot around Anonymous Lawyer's quest for the position of chairman of his firm, and he began creating other characters (not found in the blog) and events that would help move the plot toward that goal.

"I spent about four months revising and revising and revising—rewriting the ending a few times until it felt right, swapping some characters out and putting new ones in, changing a bunch of the blog posts—until it felt like it was a satisfying book from start to finish," he said.

In the book, Anonymous Lawyer, described by Publisher's Weekly as "ill-humored" and "ill-tempered," is a hiring partner at a large corporate firm in Los Angeles who starts a weblog to chronicle his frustrations with big-firm life. Written as a collection of blog posts and emails, the book has been described by USA Today as "wickedly amusing" and by Publisher's Weekly as "side-achingly funny."

Blachman first became interested in pursuing a professional writing career while writing songs and sketches for Princeton's Triangle Club as an undergraduate, and the Triangle Club was also where he met Robert Duke and Jay Kerr, whom he lists among his mentors.

"They taught me how to write—and especially how to rewrite—how to find a punch line; how to structure a piece of writing with a beginning, middle, and an end—and they awakened in me a passion for writing that I never knew I had," he said.

Upon graduation from Princeton, he got a job working for a software company and began writing on the side. However, after a while, Blachman became dissatisfied with the work, feeling like it wasn't getting him any closer to his dreams; and that's when he decided to go to law school.

"I figured that law school would buy me—albeit at an expensive cost—three years to figure out how to be a writer and time to write; but at the same time, I'd end up with a degree that had real value and would give me a pretty solid backup plan if the writing didn't work out," he said.

Blachman admits that he went to law school to figure out how to be a writer, not a lawyer; and the first thing he did when he got there was email the Harvard Lampoon and the law school newspaper. He went on to begin blogging about his law school experience and started writing for whatever projects he could find, including the school's a cappella group and parody show.

"While most of my classmates were looking for law firm jobs for the summer after 1L year, I ended up splitting my summer interning for a publishing company and a political advertising firm," he said. "So, my goal was always to use the three years at law school to find a path to becoming a writer."

Blachman, who is 27 years old, graduated from Harvard Law School in 2005 and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he's working on various writing projects, including another book. At this point in his life, he has no intention of practicing law.

"If I need to practice law at some point down the road, I will; but for now, I'm hoping to continue to pursue writing opportunities," he said.

When asked if he had any advice for law students, Blachman responded, "If you have passions, if there are things you wish you could pursue after law school, don't necessarily be resigned to ending up at a firm because that's what everyone does. Think about what you can be doing to pursue your passions while at law school, and take steps to meet people who can help—to get your product out there and to get noticed. And maybe nothing will happen, but at least give yourself the chance for good fortune to strike."

In his own life, Blachman is grateful for one of his law professors, Elizabeth Warren. She encouraged him to do what he wanted and not what was expected of him.

"She gave a talk to our section [during] 1L year about how the way to find passion in what you do for a living is to do it, to pursue what you love, and hopefully find that you can make that intersect with a career," he said. "[She] definitely inspired me to realize it's okay to go to law school and then use the law degree in whatever way would help me find the career I want to have, even if it's not the traditional path."

Anonymous Lawyer hit bookstore shelves on July 25. For more information, visit Blachman's blog at http://anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com.
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  6. The Life and Career of Jeremy Blachman: Author, Anonymous Lawyer

published August 14, 2006

( 40 votes, average: 4.9 out of 5)
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.

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