EXPLAINING THE INEXPLICABLE: The Rodent's Guide to Lawyers

Exposing the dirt on lawyer life, a humorous guide offers tips on how to gnaw through law school, pass the pesky bar exam, master the art of overbilling, sabotage colleagues, and understand lawyer personality types.

"The Firm is a hotbed of overcharged clients, overpaid lawyers and oversized egos," declares the pseudonymous author, who regularly satirizes the weird world of corporate law in a newsletter and a column syndicated in legal newspapers. This handbook from the underside is amusing but thin?some of the best material is not the Rodent's own but public domain anecdotes like the tale of the firm that added a 40% surcharge when it billed a client for a lawyer's pastries. Sometimes the author strains for laughs: a sample law school application offers Salman Rushdie and Roman Polanski as personal references. Other efforts have the edge of authenticity: a faux memo regarding the treatment of summer associates proposes the mantra: "The Firm isn't a sweatshop"; wearing the same clothes to the office for two days running, the author observes, is a sign not of amatory success but of pulling an all-nighter. A broadside warning for starry-eyed students and others lost in law.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.