Lawyerland: What Lawyers Talk about when They Talk about Law

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.