Lawyerly Lairs: Hie Thee to Iowa?

Want to escape to the heartland? Check out the lovely home of a former Biglaw partner and general counsel, which is now on the market -- for a very modest price....

Are you having a difficult time finding a position in the depressed legal job market? Maybe you need to think about relocating. Have you considered moving to Iowa? As noted by Vivia Chen over at The Careerist, the “Life Changing” state is experiencing a lawyer shortage.

Lawyer jobs and husks of corn aren’t all that Iowa has to offer. The state also has a reasonable cost of living, including some very well-priced real estate.

Take the Iowa home of a former partner Biglaw partner and former general counsel to a major media company. This lovely residence is currently on the market for a surprisingly modest sum….

The lawyer in question is Katie McGuinness, a former partner at O’Melveny & Myers who left the law for the writer’s life. Her new novel, Terminal Ambition: A Maggie Mahoney Novel (affiliate link), just came out last month. Given its Biglaw setting — it’s about a female partner engaged in a power struggle at her firm (is this a roman à clef about OMM?) — it might be of interest to Above the Law readers. And it has been blurbed by a number of legal luminaries, including Susan Estrich, Steven J. Harper, and ATL’s very own Will Meyerhofer.

Regarding her house, McGuinness reached out to us by email:

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Vivia’s post about the shortage of lawyers in Iowa made me think about your recurring feature on lawyers’ homes. I’m a former partner of O’Melveny & Myers and former General Counsel of Times Mirror (then a Fortune 500 company, now part of the Tribune bankruptcy debacle.)

My husband is a long-time devotee of Transcendental Meditation, which is centered in Fairfield, Iowa (because the “movement” took over a defunct college). Thus, we moved to Fairfield. Oprah Winfrey has recently embraced TM and did a one-hour special on Fairfield about two months ago.

A real positive aspect of living there is the low price of real estate. I have a 3,600-square-foot, Prairie-style house, on two acres. It’s on the market for $385,000. I’m not as interested in TM as my soon to be ex-husband!

Very nice. You don’t need to move to Texas to land 3500 square feet for under half a million. (And since we’re in Iowa, an ethanol-powered Lexus might be nice.)

Let’s check out the house listing and some pictures, shall we?

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