A Satire of Law Firm Employment Practices (Book Review of Anonymous Lawyer, by Jeremy Blachman)

My essay is a review of Jeremy Blachman’s new book, Anonymous Lawyer. The book is a black-humorous stab at the hearts and souls of large elite law firms everywhere (if firms had such things as hearts and souls). In this review essay, I discuss why the blog struck a chord with so many readers, and why the novel Anonymous Lawyer contains a serious message about employment at law firms. First, I place Anonymous Lawyer within the tradition of satire surrounding the legal profession. Specifically, I compare Blachman’s novel to John Jay Osborne Jr.’s earlier novel The Associates, which also takes large law firm life as its subject. Second, I want to examine how this novel fits into the literature that describes working life at a large elite law firm. Anonymous Lawyer highlights the issues of associate turnover, work-life imbalance, and workplace hierarchies that seem to characterize employment at large law firms. Ultimately, I conclude that Anonymous Lawyer adds to the formal academic discourse on law firm culture and, through its humor, challenges and goads the system toward change

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (Cases): Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Harassment Since the Passage of Title Vii

This Article, which is part of a symposium on the 40th Anniversary of Title VII appearing in the Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal, evaluates the progress of women in the workforce by critically analyzing the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Written in the early 1960s and made into a 1967 movie, How to Succeed follows the adventures of J. Pierrepont Finch, a window washer who, with the aid of a sarcastic self-help book, schemes his way up the corporate ladder. It also includes the sexual exploits of the exclusively male executive corps among the female secretarial pool. As How to Succeed was written and first performed contemporaneously with the passage of Title VII, the musical offers an opportunity to examine, from both a law and literature and law and popular culture perspective, how the view of women in the workforce has either progressed or remained stagnant during the past forty years. Although progress has been made toward gender equality, many issues highlighted in the musical are still problems today: sexual harassment; sex segregation of the workforce and pink collar ghettos; and the glass ceiling. This Article discusses these issues seriatim

Employment Status for Essential Workers : The Case for Gig Worker Parity

The continuing misclassification of gig workers as independent contractors has been problematic for over a decade. Several misconceptions have contributed to this marginalization of on-demand workers: technology that often obscures the work that is being performed; the view that platform work is a side hustle; or that platform work exists only for customer convenience or frivolous requests. During the coronavirus pandemic these myths about gig work were turned upside down as on-demand workers were recognized for their efforts and labeled essential workers. With that recognition came newly-awarded benefits, like pandemic unemployment assistance and paid sick leave. As such, the events of the pandemic moved—at least some—gig workers closer to parity with traditional employees, even if temporarily. But the status issue in the law remains, and adds to a problem that I term the “essential worker paradox.” In this Article, I contend that platform workers have proven their value to the workforce and economy, and should be classified as employees

People Analytics and Invisible Labor

(Excerpt) In recent years, I have been writing about two increasingly salient labor and employment law issues: the presence of invisible labor and the rise of people analytics.\u27 First, invisible labor could include emotion work, such as being a colleague\u27s work wife, or could include identity work that is time and effort spent on making others feel comfortable with the worker. Invisible labor might also include uncompensated time spent in looking good and sounding right. It could also include instances where technology obscures work that is being done through a website platform or mobile application. The second trend is the increasing adoption of people analytics, which seeks to use data to quantify and analyze traits, experiences, and skills of employees. People analytics aims to promote more accurate measures about quantity and quality of work to hire, promote, and fire employees, rather than the unreliable and often biased gut instinct or anecdotal observation. When contemplated together, however, the two issues of invisible labor and people analytics are an uneasy fit. The ability to quantify and analyze work data depends on that data being readily visible, in a manner that statistical metrics can accurately capture. If the factors that lead to success at work cannot be accurately measured by analytics, then analytics are of limited usefulness. Further, hidden and invisible labor are fundamentally concerning, especially when they serve to hide particular functions that workers take on for little or no pay. In some instances, such work is not even apparent to the workers themselves. Is it even possible to capture these forms of missing labor or workers

The Gamification of Work

(Excerpt) In the science fiction novel Ender\u27s Game, a young boy, Andrew Ender Wiggin, believes that he is at military school, learning how to play a computer war simulation game. In reality, Ender has been genetically engineered to excel in military tactics and is the final hope of humanity, which is under attack by the Formics, an alien insect species. For his final examination, Ender must defend the Earth from a series of attacks. He passes the exam by attempting a desperate aggressive maneuver, which utterly wipes out the attacker\u27s home world but which also destroys part of his own fleet. After completing the battle simulation, the young Ender-along with the reader-learns that the simulated final exam was actually a real life battle and that, in fact, many of the warships that Ender ordered to be sacrificed were manned by his own friends from the military academy. Although Earth won the war, Ender sank into a deep depression and only recovered when, in a later sequel, he was able to understand and heal the rift with the surviving Formic, who had attacked the Earth in error. Ender\u27s Game and its element of attack by a hostile alien species are, thankfully, wholly within the realm of science fiction. However, the idea that people could be working while they play a video game-in some instances without even knowing that they are working-is becoming part of our reality. In the language of cyberspace, introducing elements of play and gaming into non-game situations is known as the process of gamification. Gamification is an important element of what in previous writing I have termed virtual work, that is, work taking place at the intersection of the Internet, crowdsourcing arrangements, and virtual worlds. Virtual work is part of a broader transformation of work from assembly lines to knowledge and information. Indeed, in her book From Widgets to Digits, Katherine Van Wezel Stone documents how the manufacturing economy is increasingly giving way to work based on knowledge work. Professor Stone insightfully catalogues these systemic changes. Gamification, like some other forms of virtual work, blurs the line between work and leisure. The gamification of work is a growing trend with important implications for employment law. Analyzing this topic will help us make sensible choices about regulation (or the lack thereof) of these new forms of work

Morality and Markets: A Comment on Predicting Crime

(Excerpt) In their article, Predicting Crime, Professors Henderson, Wolfers, and Zitzewitz propose an intriguing and futuristic series of market-based models surrounding the broad topic of crime prevention. Harnessing widely dispersed knowledge among groups of people, including cops on the beat, criminologists, residents of neighborhoods, elected officials, snitches, and possibly even the criminals themselves, the authors posit that prediction markets will help to estimate crime statistics more accurately and therefore result in more efficient deployment of policing resources. Further, they hypothesize that posing particular policy alternatives—for example, the option of eliminating the death penalty—to a widely dispersed market will result in a more transparent and open decision-making process. In addition to making important contributions to questions of prediction market design, their article explores and amplifies a discussion already underway that seeks to identify productive and socially beneficial uses for prediction markets. Crime prevention would surely rank highly along any measure of important governmental functions, and the topic the authors have selected is therefore of particular significance. Over the past decade, prediction markets have become both a more familiar and a more acceptable way to forecast a wide variety of future events. Prediction markets have recently proliferated because, among other reasons, technological barriers to entry are lower than they once were and numerous prediction market providers have entered the field. As a greater number of people learn about these markets and their potential for gathering and consolidating information, new uses and possibilities continue to be explored. Also, as a greater number of people learn that prediction markets can also be fun—certainly, winning provides a hedonic benefit—the lure to potential participants increases. Politically minded students have told me that they tracked prediction markets in the last election the same way that those in my age group check polls. The main difference is that while checking polls is largely a passive exercise, prediction markets, on the other hand, give their participants a stake in the outcome by allowing them to contribute information; thus, participants in prediction markets feel more engaged and involved as market participants

Gig Economy: Settlements Leave Labor Issues Unsettled

This short paper, which appeared on the Law360 blog, is an effort to think through the consequences of the proposed April 2016 settlement of the Uber drivers\u27 lawsuits. This paper makes reference to the special issue of the Journal of Comparative Labor Law & Policy that is dedicated to the legal and economic issuessurrounding crowdwork