Opinionistas Reveals Herself

There's a New York Observer article where it's revealed that the author of the Opinionistas blog is a 27-year-old law firm associate (well, until recently) named Melissa Lafsky.  I've been compulsively reloading the Observer web site for the past fifteen minutes or so, as I started to notice they were putting up this week's new articles, because I was briefly interviewed on the phone this morning by the reporter and wanted to see whether I got mentioned in the piece.  I didn't realize until I saw the Gawker story this afternoon that it was for an article about Opinionistas' reveal -- the article talks more generally about anonymous bloggers coming forward, and that's what the reporter told me it was about.  But once I saw the Gawker story, I figured that's what it was.  [Incidentally, as of right now, the link to Page 3 of the article is broken on the site.  My amazing URL-decoding skills have located it here.]

I am briefly mentioned in Page 2 of the article:

...JEREMY BLACHMAN, WHO WRITES the Anonymous Lawyer blog in the voice of a fictional law-firm partner, also had decided that he wanted to do something besides practice law. So he grabbed for that little brass ring by dropping an e-mail to a Times reporter who had interviewed him on a prior occasion.

“I knew that I wanted to write, but I wasn’t sure how to find those opportunities. I was definitely eager for someone to write a story about me,” he said.

Sidenote: I find it so nervewracking to get interviewed by a reporter for anything, even something this small and innocuous, especially on the phone.  I am not very good at this.  I should take a deep breath and actually think about giving a good answer, instead of just trying to think as I talk.  This was a five-minute interview, easy questions about why I revealed myself as Anonymous Lawyer, and still I obsessed afterwards about whether I could have possibly said something wrong or that could have come off differently from how I meant it, or anything like that.  Maybe I'm just neurotic, but it's really frightening to talk to a reporter on the phone.  I don't know how people who have to do it regularly do it effectively.

I'm totally curious what other people think about Opinionistas' reveal, but I don't know that I have anything to add to the discussion.  I think the Observer piece is actually pretty interesting, regarding the coordinated set of activities she's done before coming forward (like, "Last week, she posed in a nightgown for a spread on female bloggers for a future issue of Fashion Week Daily.").  It shows how this stuff has changed just over the course of a year.  I had no idea what would happen after my Times piece.  I got very lucky.  But I didn't expect to end up with a book deal, or plan on it.  I didn't know how many people would see the piece, or what the response would be.  Now people are orchestrating this stuff.  The blogosphere's growing up, kids.  I hear Instapundit's posing in that same nightgown spread.

Comments

[ASSociate]

I am really disappointed that she probably made up about 70% of her posts. She doesn't work at one of the big powerhouse firms. She's at a powderpuff firm with 1900 min billables and below market pay. Previous experience as a summer or legal assistant really doesn't count. Totally different perspective.

In fact I feel like she may have ripped of a lot of your AL style. I've worked at the largest law firm in the world and left because those people are crazy.

I never said she was a he, but always held out that a lot of it was fiction.

[ASSociate]

Correction: I just checked and the firm I was at is now #3 by number of lawyers. I remember it being called the largest at the time.

ASSociate thinks Littler Mendelsson is a "powder puff firm"? S/he better hope they don't sic their attack dog litigators on her/him. Sheesh!

[ASSociate]

Any below market 1900 hour firm is "powderpuff" in my estimation. I'd welcome their "attack dog litigators" any day - of course I don't practice employment law, so that is unlikely.

In any event, it surely ins't the high end white shoe firm O seemed to say she worked at.

[ASSociate]

In fact, I just got off the phone with someone at LM in the NY office who says the firm is very laid back and causual - total QoL firm. My anon contact says that everyone at the firm is abuzz with how none of the stuff O wrote about happened there.

[alkali]

I thought a lot of what O had to say was plausible. No one is pretending that everything is right with big-firm professional culture. I thought in particular her self-characterization was well done (i.e., she didn't always portray herself sympathetically).

That said, a lot of the anecdotes that O depended a lot for their impact on some close subjective evaluations, e.g., the partner who blows a fuse over nits vs. the partner who is upset because a draft brief turned in late is awful. I would note that that kind of conflict is endemic to service professions; it is a rare resident/sous-chef who hasn't had his/her a** handed to him on many occasions. Lawyers may just be the best at articulating what it's like to be on the receiving end of one of those blowups.

Further, O's description of the time commitment required of junior attorneys was -- if such a thing is possible -- dramatically overstated, for at least two reasons.

First, while it is true that sometimes a junior attorney will be living out of his/her office (or, worse, a distant conference room) for weeks at a time, it is also the case that there are some weeks that attorneys slide in at 10 and out at 5, with a break at lunch to hit the gym. Big firm practice is cyclical all over the place; that's the nature of the beast. (Too many associates nevertheless spend late nights at the office doing god-knows-what during dry spells; they would be a lot happier if they could make themselves not do that. Go home and play XBox or something.) O didn't really depict this phenomenon accurately.

Second, O's notion -- shared by many junior attorneys -- that partners always want a junior attorney to be at his/her desk is just, well, wrong. What do partners really think of associates? To rip off Jon Stewart's line about U.S.-Canadian relations: "What do we think of Canada ... we don't." If a partner is working at 9 p.m. and an associate who isn't in the office owes him/her an assignment, that very likely will drive that partner up a wall. But an associate who doesn't owe the partner something? May as well not exist. Take your Blackberry and hit a museum.

[ASSociate]

I really am not tring to bash O. I liked the blog - read it all the time. I just feel like James Frey's readers must. O said that the events were real, even if they took place a couple weeks before she wrote about them. It just isn't realistic at the firm she was at. I worked at a hell hole firm. It was huge and most of the partners and senior associates were more interested in covering their own behinds than anything else. Face time was everything. Hours were for bragging. Famous saying "Thank Gd it's Friday, only two days left!"

O never worked at such a firm. How dare she write as if she did? As a reader I sympathized with her because "she was one of us" In fact, she wasn't.

Liar Liar Pants on Fire.

i think the most interesting thing about all of this is that she is jordan catalano's stepsister.

[mg]

Wait, so, let me get this straight, ASSociate. Your concern is not that the events Ms. Lefsky described in her blog seem unrealistic, but rather that things so terrible could only have happened to you, and not to her? What prestige does that claim buy you? If you're right, then congratulations on your stunning victory in the pissing contest called "Whose life sucks more?" Go enjoy the hollow shell of your day-to-day misery, she'll go back to entertaining thousands of loyal internet readers, and just like in kindergarten everyone is a winner. Sort of.

If you're wrong, and life in her firm was as she described it, well, your life still sucks (as you readily boast) and, to boot, you get to fill out your nickname quite nicely. So, uh, yeah. Good work! Way to go.

[mg]

Apologies, Lafsky.

[RES]

I was not particularly invested in Opinionistas and read her blog only once in a while, although I did enjoy it. Now, though, that she's 'outed' herself, I confess that my first reaction was that she was *totally* riding on your coattails, Jeremy, and I hope that her systemic and methodical self-promotion campaign doesn't steal any of your thunder.

It's interesting to me that she's peeved that people didn't believe she was who she said she was. Well, newsflash, SHE WASN'T. She wasn't a third year associate (she certainly didn't represent herself as a member of the class of 04), she really didn't have experience as an associate at several top-drawer firms, she really wasn't sharing her experiences, with the edges blurred to protect herself.

I'm all for fiction. But when someone presents themself as writing a memoir -- and maybe this represents a turning point for blogs, in that you can no longer take them as a sort of public non-fiction journal, even if the author says he's writing non-fiction -- don't expect me to be happy when I discover, ten months later, that I was reading fiction.

Opinionistas basically did what you, Jeremy, made a conscious choice NOT to do, when you made it clear early on that Anonymous Lawyer was a fiction.

RES

[Mark Lyon]

Fair warning: I got a virus alert from that "page 3" link.

Looks like there is some sort of malicious script on the page.

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