After college, Rick Lax moved back into his parents’ house. The closest thing he had to a job was eating his parents’ food, sitting on his parents’ couch, and watching The Price is Right. An amateur magician, he spent the rest of his time practicing card tricks and rope tricks. And though he could tie four different slipknots, the necktie posed some difficulties.

Rick’s father, a successful Michigan attorney, told Rick it was time to move out and enter the real world. Rick certainly wasn’t going to get a job, so he went to law school instead.

This is the story of Rick’s journey from childhood to lawyerhood.

In Lawyer Boy, Rick uses the skills he developed as a magician to succeed in class, and learns how to become a lawyer without becoming his father. His journey through law school was exhausting, exciting, and infuriating, and, the way he tells it, so funny it’s criminal.

"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)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Rick Lax attended the DePaul University College of Law and works as a freelance writer. He has written for The Michigan Daily, The American Enterprise, and Sojourners. An amateur magician, he lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he continues to practice prestidigitation. He blogs at ricklax.com.