Lawyerland

What do lawyers talk about when they talk about law? Lawrence Joseph, who is both a lawyer and an acclaimed poet, has always known that lawyers think and act differently among themselves than they do when they are on the record in court or in the company of those people who are, as he puts it, "non-lawyers." So he met in downtown Manhattan with lawyers from every sector of the legal world - criminal, corporate, labor, personal injury, insurance defense, you name it - and encouraged them to speak without restraint about their work, their clients, other lawyers, and the law itself. From these exchanges Joseph has created, in Lawyerland, eight composites (or phenotypes, as his Judge Celia Day would call them) who vividly represent the legal culture at the end of the century. Speaking with rare candor, these lawyers are by turns grandiose and filled with self-doubt; piercingly intelligent and breathtakingly crude; wise about their work and innocent of their own egotism and moral compromises. With an unerring ear for dialogue, a cunning artistry, and a prosecutor's radar for loaded testimony, Joseph has captured the argot and mannerisms of the legal trade and the strange truths that emerge when lawyers let their guard down for a while.

Publishers Weekly

Joseph, a poet and law professor at St. John's University in New York, sat down (mostly at meals) with several lawyers of his acquaintance and distilled their conversations into stories that read like radio mini-plays. Indeed, the frank, high-pitched language verges on Mamet. "Reasonable doubt? They go fucking bananas!" declares a weary criminal lawyer of the law-fascinated juries he encounters. A corporate lawyer offers some grim truth: "What we do is determined by who pays us." A loquacious judge, after damning lawyers as liars, finally tells her interviewer of a mind-boggling attempted-murder case involving a husband and wife that resonates with painful clarity. A torts lawyer explicates the world of medical malpractice, where transactional costs trump other considerations: "The public believes in fairness. Well, what's fair for me isn't fair for you." A black lawyer tells a hilarious story about a black law partner who, exasperated by a condescending white client, finally "[g]oes and violates Negro Rule Number One," i.e., never act crazy: act smart. The noirish world that Joseph creates should serve as a tart reminder to practicing lawyers and as a cautionary tale for the aspiring; others may wish for stories with a larger dose of narrative and epiphany. (May)