By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif.—While a student at Harvard Law School, Jeremy Blachman recently created a character named "Anonymous Lawyer" and gave him his own blog. This cyber-attorney, supposedly a partner in a high-powered Los Angeles law firm who liked to ruminate about the lying, cheating and carrying-on behind the closed doors of his firm,  soon attracted a following among lawyers and would-be lawyers around the globe.

Many people thought that perhaps this cynical, arrogant, but funny, unnamed attorney  was someone in their own firm. Even more hilariously, some attorneys feared that his barbed comments about the seemingly real partners, associates, interns and staff in his law firm really were about them.

Blachman's diversion evolved into a novel in which Anonymous Lawyer contends against his chief rival, "The Jerk "  to become the next managing partner.

In one posting, Anonymous Lawyer talks about how he sometimes likes to imagine different ways The Jerk could be killed, adding: "I bill the time I think about these sorts of things.  I call it 'research.'  The clients never question it.  'Research' is code for surfing the Internet, 'drafting' is code for eating in your office, 'misc. legal forms' is code for ordering gifts on line, and 'preparing for meeting' is code for taking a crap.  Everyone knows.  It's no big deal."

In another, he talks about the perks of taking summer interns (called "summers" for short) out to lunch on his $50-per-meal expense account.  "We had a student last summer who kept kosher," he writes.  "But anytime she got offered lunch at some place exceptional, suddenly she wasn't kosher anymore.  You asked her to go to a cheap Indian place down the street, oh, she can't, she's kosher. But if you wanted to drive up the coast for a long lunch at Nobu in Malibu, perfect, she'd eat anything.  She'd eat raw shrimp wrapped in bacon with a glass of milk, off the naked stomach of a Palestinian, on Yom Kippur, if you told her it was expensive."

Anonymous Lawyer makes complaining a satiric art form.  "As you get older, you can't control your body," he kvetches at one point. "My shoulder hurts from throwing a pair of scissors at my secretary last week.  My elbow hurts from fighting for one of the swivel chairs at my department lunch in the conference room on Tuesday.  My foot hurts from kicking a homeless man who was lingering around my car in the parking lot.  I think he was homeless.  He may have been a paralegal.  I'm not sure..."

Oh, if only he were the Managing Partner of the firm.  He'd lay down the law about taking off for unnecessary  holidays.  "But what are people celebrating on Memorial Day, and why can't they do it at work?  Wear a red, white and blue tie if you have to. But clients don't ask less of us just because there's no mail delivery... 

"I'm more flexible than a lot of my colleagues," he rants on. "If someone's Jewish and wants to go to temple on Rosh Hashana, I'll happily schedule the meeting for between the services. If someone needs an hour to take his daughter for a pregnancy test, he can participate in the conference call by phone, that's fine.  But I don't know why people insist on needing to take their wives out to dinner on the exact date of their anniversary.  If she leaves you for something like that, you're probably better off..."

The book is savvy, and it's a riot. Whether Blachman really will convert that Harvard Law School education into a career as an attorney, or chuck it to someday become a writer for Saturday Night Live—especially now that Tina Fey is leaving—remains to be seen. Whatever career path he takes, he's likely to make big waves.