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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

continued on back

Jeremy Blachman: Author, Anonymous Lawyer [By Charisse Dengler]

Jeremy Blachman, the brains behind the hit Blogspot blog Anonymous Lawyer, recently went a step further in

documenting the exploits of his mysteriously anonymous main character. In his brand-new book, Anonymous Lawyer,

Blachman elaborates on the life and times of Anonymous Lawyer, bringing in new characters and events while

throwing in plenty of the sarcastic humor that has made his blog both wildly popular and endlessly entertaining.

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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

�L 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] �L

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.

ON THE NET

Anonymous Lawyer

anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com

Anonymous Law Firm

anonymouslawfirm.com

Princeton Triangle Club

www.princeton.edu/~triangle