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Review by Paul Gillan
Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about lawyers, but few have considered what lawyers think of themselves. In Lawyerland, Lawrence Joseph narrates eight "interviews" with a handful of downtown attorneys practicing law in the fast lane, weaving one common thread among them: each presents an insider's unique and candid take on the "noble profession" of practicing law.
Joseph, a law professor at St. John's University, uses the interview as a medium for exploring one archetypal attorney: a reflective -- almost ruminative -- cynical, piercingly perceptive, and articulate practitioner, able to give thought and voice to the principles, both real and apparent, at the very core of the practice of law. Though the attitudes differ and the conversations vary delightfully, each interviewee in Lawrence's eclectic array has thought long and hard about what lawyering is all about, and doesn't mind spending a little time to explain it.
None of the characters is particularly endearing, nor is it pretended that they should be. Each candidate -- from the criminal defense attorney who refuses clients capable of paying (too likely to be connected to the mob) to the judge who relates a subway-scenario pickup (Daisy Mae meets Crain & Swartout) to the green yet somehow hardened first-year associate (reticent, says Lawrence) -- takes precise aim at what appears to be and dispatches it with a healthy shot of what is.
If there is one drawback about Lawyerland it is that the characters, though markedly distinct in their thoughts and impressions, tend to sound the same -- leaving the reader to wonder whether the interviews are real or fictional. Looking past their style, though, the strength of the substance exposed in their sometimes lengthy diatribes makes the weakness, if indeed it is, forgivable.
Joseph's work strikes a narrow balance between lawyer-bashing and lawyer-adulation. It is in the nature of most lawyers' practice to operate where people and the law collide, thus the maxim much espoused in Joseph's book that lawyers "know too much," are told too many secrets, make of their profession a daily preoccupation with their clients' proclivities and neuroses. At a deeper level, Joseph explores the possibility that we all, as a society, have become too lawyerlike in our thinking -- that perhaps we all "know too much" about our own humanity for our own good.
Every lawyer reading Lawyerland will find at least one passage that is drop-jaw accurate. Every non-lawyer reading Lawyerland will find at least one passage that is drop-jaw unbelievable.
Paul Gillan is an attorney and a writer in Albany, New York. He can be reached at PaulG@HSPMALB.MHS.Compuserve.Com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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