A semi-professional magician and a general disgrace, Rick decides it’s time to get his life together and join his father’s ranks in making “The Only Acceptable Career Choice.” Born to a long line of lawyers, Rick knew that it was only a matter of time until he too entered the fold. Besides, it’s hard to get girls with lines like “Want to come back to my parents’ place?”

After suffering a few sudden, crushing disappointments, he is accepted to DePaul Law School in Chicago. With a dry, intelligent wit, Rick Lax dissects the application process and his first year of law school for our amusement. Notoriously difficult, Rick’s trials and travails prove that even the most unprepared and unlikely 1L’s can survive the test of the first year, and furthermore can maintain and even nourish a lively sense of humor.

Peppered with explanations of real cases and legal jargon, reading LAWYER BOY (St. Martin’s Press / Hardcover / July 2008 / 0-312-37335-X / $24.95) is like borrowing notes from the class clown—It won’t get you an A, but it’s probably the best reading you’ll find in law school.  

"Rick Lax is really funny and uses his background in magic to see through the bullshit and hypocrisy that make up the law school experience. I'm really glad he's getting the law degree so he has a job other than magic—we don't need this kind of competition."

First-time author Lax delivers an entertaining and sometimes zany look at the first year of law school. Although he dreams of being a professional magician, Lax realizes after college that being a lawyer—like his father and most of his relatives (he provides a family tree showing the remarkable number of lawyers who are relatives)—is inevitable. After being accepted into the DePaul School of Law in Chicago, where passenger trains "screamed past the classroom every ten minutes," he finds that the world of torts and criminal law is both like and unlike everything he had imagined. The workload is still brutal—as a professor tells him, "For the next year, the American legal system will be your girlfriend." But Lax's discoveries of what he didn't expect offer fascinating up-to-date insights such as the inevitability of the depression he develops (lawyers "are about four times more likely to experience clinical depression than the general population") and the hard fact that "[l]aw schools don't fail students like they used to. They need the tuition dollars to stay competitive."
(July)

"Rick Lax has done a bit of magic here: He's made learning about rudimentary tort law, promissory estoppel, and, yes, even Marbury v. Madison immensely amusing. Only time will tell whether Lax will find success as a lawyer, but I can tell you this: he's found it as a writer and I'll be buying his books for a long time to come."  

"Lawyer Boy is a blast.  Rick Lax is an ideal guide to law school, generous with practical advice and juicy gossip.  It's The Paper Chase on nitrous–an oddball's journey into the deepest inner circles of law
school hell.  The absolute best magician/law student/cowbellist memoir ever written."

Rick Lax may be at law school—and he may try and impress girls at parties by doing magic tricks—but he isn't a total geek. Okay, that's a lie. He is a total geek—but Lawyer Boy is thoroughly entertaining nevertheless." 

"Rick Lax writes with a sharp wit and a fine sense of the absurd. Lawyer Boy might not help anyone succeed in law school, but it will certainly make the experience more enjoyable."  

“A very entertaining work by a clever, hopeful and unavoidably unscrupulous guy. My kinda book.”