Double Billing: What They Didn't Teach Me at Harvard Law School I Learned at a Major Wall Street Law Firm

In the cautionary tradition of John J. Osborn's Paper Chase and Scott Turow's One L comes this engaging account of a Harvard Law graduate's disastrous entr e into big-firm litigation. Drawing on both his own experience and interviews with other associates, Stracher (The Laws of Return) creates a ""composite"" portrait of a white-shoe New York practice he dubs ""Cavanaugh & Crowley."" For Stracher, life at ""C&C"" is round-the-clock ""make-work,"" a dehumanizing marathon of superfluous research assignments and mindless clerical tasks relieved by late night Chinese takeout. Not only is the work tedious, it's also lonely: after the bracing Socratic dialogues of law school, he is staggered by the lack of feedback and the overall ""coldness of law firm life."" In three years of employment, Stracher has only minimal interactions with three partners and three senior associates, and a bantering familiarity with a handful of other young associates consisting mainly of comparing billable hours. His complaint that the work isn't more interesting is intended as an indictment of ""C&C,"" but it also makes for an undramatic story. Readers enticed by the subtitle's promise of ""greed, lies [and] sex"" may be disappointed: the only dish is a glimpse of a first-year associate embracing a paralegal at the annual Christmas bash, and a secondhand report of a partner who read faxes of a merger agreement during Passover seder. On the other hand, Stracher's characterizations are vivid and humane, his criticisms are convincing and his observations of workaday lawyering are as sharp as the corners of a legal brief. Editor, Claire Wachtel; agent, Lisa Bankoff/ICM. (Nov.)