Fascinating, shocking,
              cautionary, essential.

How Did It Happen to Him? 
Could It Happen to You?

Did you ever see the Abel Ferrara movie "Bad Lieutenant," with Harvey Keitel? It's about a NY cop on the edge of annihilating himself, whose behavior and character have so deteriorated that it is unclear that redemption is even possible.

One might well call this book, which purports to be an anonymous memoir, "Bad Attorney." Only it's not fiction, and at the end of the book no gesture of redemption seems forthcoming.

But it's a mesmerizing read. The author begins his tale by describing a single lawsuit over a fall from a horse in which he was never able to bring himself to file the papers necessary to go to court. He goes on from there to recount in affecting detail his grossly incompetent law
practice, his systematic deceit of clients, the day-trading habit that he embezzled money from clients in order to support, and his eventual disbarment.

Woven into this narrative of self-destruction, too, is the author's infidelity to his wife, the dissolution of two marriages (the second to a woman twenty years his junior), his brushes with various characters who wish him harm, and his attempts to make a living first selling cars and then as a pop-up advertiser and salesman for “work-at-home” scams. The tone of the narrative is neither apologetic nor proud; if anything, it tends toward shell-shocked. Read it as a cautionary tale about procrastination, or as a warning to take extreme care when picking out your next lawyer.