Law V. Life: What Lawyers Are Afraid to Say About the Legal Profession

by Walt Bachman

With wisdom, humor, and unflinching candor, Walt Bachman takes readers inside the American legal profession and recounts the facts of life for a practicing lawyer. His vivid testimony will change the way we look at American society and the legal system we have created. Anyone practicing law, teaching it, learning it, studying about it, or thinking about whether to do any of these things should read “Law v. Life”. It embodies much of the wisdom that a lawyer will need to practice both successfully and sanely in late 20th century America—and does so in a modest, elegant and refreshing way. Few American attorneys have his exceptional breadth of legal experience, from which Bachman gives rare insight into the dynamics at work affecting the training and actual day-to-day activities of attorneys functioning in our adversarial system, and the stresses those dynamics place on lawyers and everyone who encounters the legal system. This is an important book, at a crucial time in the law and the lives of lawyers.

Genres: Law

140 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Terry Heller · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of young lawyers struggle with the practice of law, and ask themselves whether the demands of their job, over time, turn them into people they don't recognize, and who they never wanted to bcome. Law vs. Life is the best and clearest-written exploration of those issues that I have ever come across; basically, it is the sort of book that I wish had been recommeded to me earlier in my legal career. The book was written almost twenty years ago, and so some of the statistics Bachman cites are no longer accurate. The sad thing is that most of them have gotten worse -- even more lawyers are depressed than twenty years ago, student loan dept is considerably higher, big firms in big cities demand even more billable hours out of their attorneys, etc. A lot of my friends on Goodreads are attorneys, or close to attorenys, and they should all read this book. Its 140 pages adn you can read it in an afternoon, or on a single plane flight. I recommend that you do so.