Law and fiction — blogs with a real-life view of lawyering

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Writing a character who is a lawyer, but you’re not one — or closely related to one? A recent post on favorite blogs for lawyers on the Washington State Bar Association blog mentioned these, so I took a quick look. Good inside info.

Corporette: subtitled Fashion, Lifestyle, and Career Advice for Over-Achieving Chicks. If your image of women lawyers is pumps and charcoal gray suits, take a look. Things have changed, thank goodness!

Attorney at Work: No pictures of shoes or ruched-sleeve jackets (love ’em!) here. Lots of practical advice for the working lawyer, including ideas for business development, better meeting strategy, and being a good employer. I like this for writers because it reminds us that lawyers are business people, too — and like all business people, some handle it better than others. The pieces here will give you a better idea of a lawyer’s daily life, and may suggest some conflicts, small and large, that you haven’t thought of.

More than 50% of lawyers work on their own, or with only one or two other lawyers. Solo Practice University gives advice for the solo and small-firm lawyer. Like Attorney at Work, quite a few posts apply concepts from other fields to lawyering, which I like very much.

Remember that the more you understand about your character’s real life and daily struggles, the more conflict you can add to your stories and the more fully you can develop your characters — and understanding what they want and will do to get it is what leads to plot. Blogs are a great way to catch a glimpse of daily concerns and struggles, the very stuff that help us build intiguing characters on the page.

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