Lawyerly Love: Deja Vu All Over Again

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." King Henry VI

It's the title that draws you in--"Greed, Sex, Lies and the Pursuit of a Swivel Chair." It's the title that promises an unprecedented expose of the secret lives of lawyers, a positively hair-raising account of what really goes on in those board rooms and oak-paneled office buildings. It's the title that feeds on this decade's ambivalent fascination with lawyers to attract an audience.

Court TV and the O.J. Simpson trial made household names of Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran and Christopher Darden. We followed the Simpson case from its beginnings for unknown reasons--perhaps it was the murder, the celebrity, the racist conspiracy theories, the still-shocking taboo of an interracial marriage--and we followed the lawyers as well.

We knew their faces and haircuts, noticed what they wore in court, styled ourselves legal experts after absorbing the legal terms they shouted back and forth so that come the Monica Lewinsky scandal, we knew enough to label Linda Tripp's fun with her tape recorder "entrapment." We thought television had given us a real sense of what it meant to be a lawyer.

That was nothing.

Or so Cameron Stracher claims. The Harvard Law School graduate's Double Billing attempts a no-holds-barred examination of the gritty, often seedy, underbelly of lawyerdom according to Stracher's own experience.

The book jacket enticingly advertises within its pages that "Stracher doesn't mince words about the outrageous practices and questionable conduct of many of the lawyers on the highest rungs of the legal profession." Stracher, indeed, does not "mince words." His prose is clear, accessible and peppered with frequent and helpful explanations--the distinction between criminal and civil law, the hierarchy of law office personnel, the legal prescriptions for whatever case he's working on, but despite the potential of Stracher's writing to produce a real shocker and the attractive claims of its book jacket, Double Billing hardly lives up to its packaging. Let's deconstruct that titillating title:

Greed: Stracher's point of view in the novel is that of a fresh-out-of-law-school associate at the Wall Street firm of Crowley and Cavanaugh where he is paid $80,000 each year but is pressured to earn even more.

It was greed that drove Stracher to Crowley and Cavanaugh in the first place: "My classmates professed interest in signing up with employers like the ACLU...But by their second year, when interviewers from the biggest firms swarm onto campus waving stacks of cash...few are idealistic enough to resist."

Greed drives young associates to work inordinate hours just to bill enough hours (upwards of 300 each month) and ensure job security and a hefty bonus. But that's it.

The push for more and more billable hours occasionally manifests itself in legal maneuvers to postpone trial for a few weeks. This is hardly the promised scandal--anyone who's seen The Firm is familiar with lawyerly fudging of billing sheets--nothing new here.

Sex: OK, here we go--lawyers seducing judges in chambers for favorable rulings, associates and paralegals in after-hours orgies, female climbers sleeping their way to partnership, right? Not so. Even Stracher admits that "[w]e want to believe these stories because they paint a portrait of law firm life as racy and sexy."

Stracher's few mentions of sex in Double Billing go only so far as to relate the unspoken rules of office conduct--whom an associate could and could not sleep with (anyone but the paralegals)--and a blandly uncontroversial dalliance between two colleagues. I could unearth greater scandal among postal workers.

Lies: Beyond the billing-sheet dishonesty, the lying in Double Billing occurs among the lawyers who actually convince themselves that they are satisfied with their lives. Stracher's strength here is in his description of his attempts to simply like his job and the disillusionment that finally compels him to abandon corporate law all together.

While Double Billing is guilty of a bit of false advertising, its message is still one to be taken to heart by Americans (lawyers or not) who work past midnight, weekends be damned, at jobs from which they derive no satisfaction.

Stracher himself found no fulfillment in the hours of tedious research, lack of recognition for his effort and the background position he was forced to occupy while "I had friends who were in front of juries every day in the District Attorney's Office." He writes, "I did not want to practice law where form swallowed substance, where responsibility was bestowed upon associates in dribbles." So he left.

And so should we, should our professions ever reach the point of all work and no reward (and we're not just talking money, either). It is not the revelation of unknown aspects of lawerly existence that makes Double Billing a memorable and commendable piece, for its confessions are far from hair-curling; it is Stracher's courage to turn his back on a lifetime of money and material comfort.

Supposedly, there are four things you can do with a Harvard degree--law school, medical school, investment banking and management consulting. Stracher, however, embodies the hope of Harvard's writers, actors, dancers and artists: no, you don't have to chain yourself to a desk for 30 years and, yes, you can go where your heart beckons.