Biglaw, Books

Standard Of Review: BIGLAW Will Give Readers Anxiety (In A Good Way)

This book will make for a good read if you can manage to sneak out of the office.

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As regular readers of this website are well aware, Biglaw firms are typically not the most warm and fuzzy environments in which to work. Many individuals that become successful Biglaw partners are either socially awkward or Gordon Gekko wannabes (or both), leading to less-than-ideal work environments. Nevertheless, thousands of recently graduated lawyers join the Biglaw ranks every year, unable to shake the ethos of being the best — going to the best schools, getting the best grades, and then working at the best firm. Of course, many young associates detest the Biglaw environment, leading to unhappiness and high rates of attrition. In her new novel BIGLAW (yes, in all caps), author and former Biglaw attorney Lindsay Cameron explores this downside to being a young corporate associate. I promise that this is a compliment, but after reading this novel, seemingly no sane-minded person would ever want to work as a Biglaw corporate associate.

BIGLAW’s protagonist is Mackenzie Corbett, a second-year corporate associate at the fictional law firm of Freedman & Downs (“F&D”). Mackenzie has an enviable pedigree — she graduated from Princeton and Georgetown Law Center — and is a rising star at her firm. She has earned real responsibility on two major deals, and she is in an ostensibly solid romantic relationship with Jason Kermode, an F&D trusts and estates associate.

But Mackenzie’s life is not as glamorous as it seems. The novel begins in media res, as Mackenzie is called in for questioning by a representative from the Securities and Exchange Commission for suspicious trading in companies involved in some of her deals. The novel then flashes back several months, as the reader sees the events that lead up to this meeting, including several strange occurrences suggesting that someone may be trading on privileged information taken from Mackenzie. As I’ve written before, I generally dislike beginning stories in media res, because this tactic is frequently utilized for no particular reason. But BIGLAW is one of the rare instances where beginning in media res is effective, as I was able to focus on the clues and suspects leading up to the SEC meeting.

While the SEC mystery is interesting, the real meat of the novel is Cameron’s depiction of being a Biglaw corporate associate. Merely being staffed on one deal is bad enough for Mackenzie, as the partner, Ben Girardi, has ordered the associates to conduct due diligence on a draconian schedule, causing her social life (and her ability to sleep) to virtually evaporate. Ben routinely emails Mackenzie in the middle of the night, expecting an immediate response. He also passive-aggressively criticizes her for deigning to spend even one day with her family on Christmas.

To make matters worse, Mackenzie is put on a second deal involving another partner, Saul Siever, who constantly screams at his associates, dropping so many f-bombs in daily conversation that he would make Eric Cartman blush. Saul is known for ripping up an associate’s work or lighting it on fire if it displeases him. The second deal also contains Mackenzie’s icy associate mentor Sarah Clarke, who attempts to undermine Mackenzie at every turn.

Even though I work in a litigation department instead of in corporate, I appreciated some of the little details that Cameron includes that will be very familiar to any associate, such as the proper technique to “sneak” out of the office by pretending to be on the way to a meeting or the various strategies to maximize the amount of food or drink that one can bill to the client without going over the Seamless limit.

But Cameron goes one step further and describes the unique horrors to working in the corporate department at a massive firm like F&D. Mackenzie is routinely chastised by her superiors for daring to leave the office before 2:00 a.m., let alone having any semblance of a social life. At a certain point, Mackenzie has a town car bring her home in the middle of the night every night, with the town car staying idle outside her apartment so it can bring her back by 7:00 a.m.. In one particularly jarring scene, Mackenzie is forced to find a working fax machine in her hometown on Christmas Eve in order to send a document to a partner on a tropical vacation.

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Moreover, Cameron depicts the casual sexism and general inappropriateness that plague many Biglaw partners. In one scene that would be right at home in a Tom Wolfe novel, Mackenzie attends a decadent F&D porterhouse steak dinner to celebrate the closing of a deal, in which the partners at the table drunkenly swear and make lewd and lascivious comments about the firm’s secretaries. The saddest aspect of the scene is that Mackenzie points out that of the 20 attorneys attending the dinner, she is the only woman.

Mackenzie is a very well drawn character, as Cameron depicts her descent from seemingly normal person into a Biglaw monster. Mackenzie can feel her fuse getting shorter and her patience growing thinner, but that does not stop her from doing appalling things in the name of work, such as shooting compressed air on a junior associate in order to wake him up. Of the supporting characters, Mackenzie’s secretary Rita is the most effective; with a thick accent and an extremely high degree of confidence, Rita reminds me of many Biglaw secretaries. The only character that rings to me is Sarah, as her iciness and general demeanor seems too over-the-top and caricatured at times.

Nevertheless, BIGLAW is an excellent novel, albeit one that literally made me concerned that that I am not billing enough hours. If you can get over that, the book will make for a good read if you can manage to sneak out of the office.

Disclosure: I received a review copy of BIGLAW.

BIGLAW [Amazon (affiliate link)]

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Harry Graff is a litigation associate at a firm, but he spends days wishing that he was writing about film, television, literature, and pop culture instead of writing briefs. If there is a law-related movie, television show, book, or any other form of media that you would like Harry Graff to discuss, he can be reached at harrygraff19@gmail.com. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.

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