About

The author of this blog is Lorelei Laird, a freelance writer and editor who specializes in writing about the law and the people who practice it. I’ve been writing for and about lawyers and the law since 2002, but as you may have guessed, I am not myself a lawyer. I’m someone who observes and gets excited about some legal issues in a way that most nonlawyers don’t. After months of boring my friends (most of whom are also not lawyers) on legal topics they don’t care about, I decided to take it to the Internet. I figure that here, the audience is at least self-selected.

I am both pleased and sorry that I am not a lawyer. It’s not that I think they’re bad people; they’re no better or worse than any other group of well-educated American professionals. I want to be a lawyer when I see the good lawyers can do in little ways, imagine knocking ‘em dead with a well-reasoned argument, encounter an unfamiliar phrase in Latin, or can’t focus on some appellate decision. I don’t want to be a lawyer when I see how much financial pressure law students are under, think about work-life balance for the ones who opt for BigLaw, or can’t focus on some appellate decision.

As of this writing, this blog is about any legal issue that I think is worth sharing: specific practice areas, trends in the law, options for law students, judicial independence and salaries, public policy, bad and good legal writing. I do a lot of writing on personal-injury, criminal, appellate and corporate topics, so you can expect to see those. Why should you care? Maybe you shouldn’t. I am not a lawyer. I just watch from the sidelines.

The header image, by the way, is a photo of a 200-year-old contract by flickr user Mr-Scratch, who kindly shared it under a Creative Commons license.