Anonymous Lawyer Revealed

This story’s been heavily covered all around the blawg world: the unmasking of the formerly anonymous Anonymous Lawyer as Harvard Law Third Year Jeremy Blachman. You can learn all of the details from this New York Times article, Revealing the Soul of a Soulless Lawyer. Though Blachman never thought his hoax would last longer than a week, the blog’s voice “stuck a nerve” amongst many many blawgers, lawyers, students who frequently posted comments at AL’s site or linked to his postings.

While I always enjoyed AL, I personally never understood why the insights were considered so groundbreaking.  For example, I thought that Cameron Stracher had covered much of the same ground, albeit from an associate’s perspective.  Perhaps the power of the blog enable AL to get more exposure or perhaps people really believed that a hiring partner was writing it and gave it a different type of authenticity.  Whatever the reason, I’m glad that these kinds of views like AL’s are so widely available both to law students who are currently making career choices and biglaw attorneys who may be looking for more but feel they’re the only ones who feel that way.  Maybe the end result will be a happier profession.