Best of Bitter Lawyer

If the past few years have proven anything, it’s that nothing is predictable at law firms anymore. Lockstep gave way to mass layoffs. The billable hour absconded to “alternative billing.” “Offer” was replaced by “defer” and “rescind.” And year-end bonuses—don’t get us started. But there are still a few things that happen annually in BigLaw around [...]

Somewhere Boss Lady took the wrong step inside BigLaw. Maybe she fouled up an important brief or just failed to suck up to the right partner.

QI am currently a 1L at a Tier 1 law school. I finishing my first semester and am very disappointed in how I did.  My grades will not be respectable.  I am determined to improve my grades, but given the exceptional nature of the students I am competing with, I am concerned that I may never [...]

I’m living inside the warhead of the biggest “bad news bomb” of my life, and I don’t know how best to drop it. The longer I wait, the more nuclear it feels. And it’s starting to look like it’s scheduled to detonate at my parents’ house on Christmas, turning a modest home in Reno into [...]

When birthdays and holidays roll around, a lawyer’s friends and family are often left wondering what to get someone who already has everything—or at least everything the lawyer can generally buy. This year, however, there’s a good chance people will be trying to pick out the perfect gift for the lawyer who has nothing—or at [...]

I just got back from a meeting regarding a response (due Monday) to a motion for summary judgment in a trade secrets case. Junior partner who was left in charge of dealing with responding to the 865 statements of undisputed material fact (and who had been aggressively insisting since last Monday that it was “under control”) [...]

Bitter Lawyer sat down with Joe Escalante in 2008 to talk about his career as a lawyer, bassist, popular radio talk-show host, and record label maven. And we asked him about other stuff, like his stint as an amateur matador and his greatest legal moment: convincing Chuck Norris to sing his own theme song on [...]

When you’re in law school you start to think that everyone in the world went to Yale, clerked for the Supreme Court, and speaks 12 languages