Advice for the Lawlame: Hell Hath No Fury Like An Advice Columnist Mocked

Back in this post, an ATL reader confessed to playing a little trick on Ann Israel, the legal recruiter who writes NYLawyer.com’s popular Advice for the Lawlorn column. He wrote:

Love ATL’s Advice for the Lawlame column. My friends and I have been reading NYLawyer.com’s Advice for the Lawlorn with a sort of amused contempt for a year.

After a while, we grew tired of the formulaic cluelessness of the posts and the answers, so we challeged each other to get our fake submissions answered. I won, with this entry….

Well, it appears that Ann Israel got wind of this prank. And she’s none too pleased about it.
Her fit of pique, after the jump.


In this week’s Advice for the Lawlorn column, a reader asks Ann for advice about how to land a Biglaw job despite his accent and reserved demeanor. You can read the full letter here.
This request for advice strikes us as real. It’s permeated by earnestness, but not over-the-top enough to be a joke. Yet Ann begins her response to the poor sap as follows:

Over the past twelve years of writing this column I have received many questions that I thought were probably made up by people who had nothing better to do with their time than goof on me. Why anyone thinks it is funny to waste their time sending fictitious questions to me is beyond my imagination but clearly they are very bored with their own lives or else perhaps they feel they have been treated poorly by headhunters in the past and are just trying to find a way to get back at one of us. Whatever.

Jeez, Ann, lighten up a little! Are you really this humorless, this incapable of laughing at yourself every now and then?
To be sure, answering joke letters may be pointless and a waste of time. But is it any more pointless than counseling a lawyer who barely graduated from a fourth-tier law school on how to get a job at Simpson Thacher? You should be grateful to the pranksters, not angry at them!
Earlier: Advice for the Lawlame: An Amusing Anecdote

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