BAR NONE

The ratings were, of course, phenomenal.

Lawrence Joseph’s new book, Lawyerland, occupies a similar market niche. It’s a book about lawyers — how they talk, how they complain, how they eat – – and at $ 22 a throw, it’s the kind of book you give to a recent law-school graduate (surely the latespring publication date is no accident?) or to your lawyer dad for Father’s Day, or, if you’re really unlucky, to the Alan Dershowitz in your life.

The book is subtitled, with remarkable chutzpah, “What Lawyers Talk About When They Talk About Law,” which suggests that somehow, despite the Simpson trial, Greta Van Susteren, Court TV, John Grisham, Jones v. Clinton, Anita Hill, the Menendez defense, L.A. Law, and Alan Dershowitz, we aren’t getting an accurate picture of what lawyers talk about when they talk about law. Apparently, according to Joseph, they have a few more things they’d like to share.

Joseph has gathered a collection of characters — composites, he tells us, of real New York lawyers — who talk about their careers and the law in pretty much non-stop monologues, punctuated here and there by a bit of description or an interjection by the author. The book is “truthful rather than factual,” Joseph declares in a note to the reader. “The names, circumstances, and characteristics of the persons and places portrayed have been changed,” he writes, adding that “those readers who are also lawyers will especially appreciate why.” As if it takes three years of law school to ” especially appreciate” why you wouldn’t want your actual name associated with this: “I don’t remember having to watch myself all the time, the way I have to now. Take documents for example. You’ve got lawyers telling clients to destroy documents — they implicate their clients in the fraud. There are clients who want their lawyers to commit fraud, so the lawyers are in it with them. Billing. It’s worse than ever. Maybe I shouldn’t say worse.”

Or this:

“What’s a ‘zoid?

“Short for sleazoids. Even the personal-injury ‘zoids who make a hell of a lot more than we do hate our asses. We at least have clients who actually pay us. Can you imagine your livelihood depending on how braindead a brain-dead baby is? There’s a term I heard the other day — a “cancer misdiagnosis case.” “Please, Lord, won’t you send me a cancer misdiagnosis case!”

Or this: “In the eighties, there’d be guys who’d bill whole days when they were out [with] call girls . . . everybody knew it, no one cared, there was so much money flying around.”

Memo to self: Review next attorney’s bill very carefully.

The anonymous quality, though, is what keeps the book moving along. Lawyers, when speaking for attribution, are remarkably pompous. Freely rifting, as they do here, on the law, justice, billing, and society in general, they sound a lot like the rest of us: profane, cynical, funny, incoherent. Joseph is a snappy writer, and his sense of pace is terrific — when a character gets boring or too intense he’s hustled off stage and a new one is trotted on. And the cast of characters — a bitter black barrister, a sardonic female judge, a huckster corporate lawyer, a foulmouthed criminal defense attorney — are good choices for this sort of thing, much better than the slim pickings available in, say, Washington, D.C. That Lawyerland would have been a very different book. It’s hard to imagine anything juicy coming from, for example, an intellectual-property attorney, an environmental-rights lawyer, a former congressman, and a guy from the Natural Fibers Council. Joseph picked the right city — New York — and the right lawyers.

But Lawyerland, for all its Mametstyle rat-a-tat dialogue and “tough guy” diction, is pretty pointless. It’s not really about “what lawyers talk about when they talk about law”; it’s about “what colorful New Yorkers talk about when they’re trying to be colorful.”

The book was sitting on my coffee table when a lawyer friend of mine dropped by. He picked up the book and scoffed. “Looks boring,” he said. But he didn’t put it down. He flipped through it for a few minutes, trying to keep up his end of our conversation, but getting distracted. “Mind if I borrow this?” he finally asked. “Go ahead,” I said, knowing that “borrow,” in the lawyer’s lexicon, means “keep forever.”

Lend Lawyerland to the Dersh in your life. It will take him three billable hours to read, and the price of the book is probably deductible.

Rob Long, a contributing editor of National Review, is a writer-producer for television whose new series, “George and Leo,” premieres on CBS this fall.