When Melissa Lafsky '00 wrote her first weblog entry on March 14, 2005, she had no idea that less than a year later she would quit her job at a law firm, receive threatening e-mails and begin writing a book based on her experience as a 27-year-old associate lawyer. Lafsky's blog, in which she anonymously recounted life in a competitive Manhattan law firm, received nearly one million hits by the end of last year and garnered press coverage from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Law Record and the American Bar Association Journal.
"I honestly didn't think that it was going to be this big a deal," she said.
Lafsky identified herself last week after blogging for 10 months under the name "Opinionistas." In December, she quit her job at labor and employment firm Littler Mendelson to start her career as a novelist.
In frequent posts, she depicted aspects of her take on law firm culture -- the jaded employees who regret attending law school, the tirades of higher-ups who expected total devotion to the firm, and the incessant slaving into the night in pursuit of more billable hours -- with an irreverence and frankness that attracted thousands of visits daily from law students, fellow lawyers and voyeuristic readers.
"I say what a lot of people are thinking but don't have the guts to say. I say what's on the minds of a lot of people that I interact with," she said.
Working around 60 hours a week at the firm, Lafsky turned to writing, with a "dramatic license," as a therapeutic escape from a lifestyle that fueled her depression and chronic insomnia.
"I originally put this blog on the internet because I thought it might amuse others in my life. I then learned that it touched a nerve with countless people who share the same doubts and turmoil, lawyers or no," she wrote in September. "My experience is not unique -- I write for the hollow-eyed, pasty compatriots holed up in the myriad highrises around me, and the hundreds of cutthroat hungry law students lining up to take our places once we're carted away."
Then things began to change.
Once a media website discovered her blog, thousands of readers flocked to her site, and major media attention followed. The popularity also meant an eventual end to her anonymity, and thus her job. She received her first threat to out her in July, sent from a fake e-mail account to her e-mail account at work.
After revealing her identity, Lafsky has received hundreds of e-mails, mostly supportive. Some readers thanked her for inspiring a reconsideration of their career decisions, while others called her "ugly," "stupid" and a "slut."
"Ninety-nine percent of them have been so uplifting and positive. The one percent have been absolute asses."
Lafsky grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, where she attended a "fancy prep school with the children of D.C. politicians." After majoring in English at Dartmouth ("a fancy college filled with Connecticut WASPs and underloved gold-card-toting bankerspawn"), she received her law degree from the University of Virginia.
Dartmouth, she wrote in her blog, "presented four comfortably-sequestered years of perfecting skills such as binge drinking, avoiding responsibility and general slacking. The remainder of my time I spent writing the occasional paper on Chaucer or Robert Lowell and battling a persistent eating disorder picked up in high school."
She doesn't blame the College for her choice to follow what she described as "the default path to the LSATs and law school."
"It's tough to say what pressure was caused by Dartmouth, what pressure was caused be peers, what pressure was caused by my parents and what pressure was caused by myself," she said, noting, "Dartmouth produced a lot of great artists, a lot of people who stepped outside the box."
Working at several law firms in Manhattan, Lafsky acquired a distaste for their culture. While she said there were lawyers who were perfectly happy working for a firm, it wasn't the right career for her. She hated the competitive atmosphere preoccupied with billable hours, the unreasonable demands placed on employees and the unquestioning confidence placed in higher-ups.
"I have a problem with authority," she admitted. "I hated taking orders from this rigid hierarchical structure where whatever the partners say is the word of God."
Lafsky was particularly angered by what she called the continuation of the fraternity-sorority principle: "that a person's worth is somehow judged by their school, fraternity, law school or law firm."
In reflecting upon her own career decisions, Lafsky advises law school-bound seniors to take some time off before deciding to go to law school, a decision she herself does not completely regret.
"Don't go straight to law school," she said. "If you're thinking about law school, take two years minimum and make yourself do something else, and then decide whether you actually want to go to law school."
Lafsky is in the process of writing a manuscript for her novel. After shopping the manuscript to publishers, she hopes to get a book deal and write the book, a novel about a female twenty-something Manhattan lawyer, based on her time in the legal "rat race." She said that while the novel will incorporate some of the postings from the blog, she does not intend to simply turn the blog into a book; it will contain overwhelmingly original content.
Despite how much she disliked her time working for a law firm, Lafsky acknowledged its redeeming aspect: "It's given me something to write about."
