Boston Legal: What's In It for You?

By Rogue Slayer Law Student

One of my favorite new shows is Boston Legal. (The other is Lost, if you were wondering.) Boston Legal is a spinoff of The Practice, which in turn was a spinoff of Ally McBeal, and mixes the best of both. Ally McBeal tended to favor humor in place of realistic legal situations, and The Practice is set up as a drama with some humor, Boston Legal has great humor and juxtaposes realistic litigation situations and office interactions with eccentric personalities and sometimes odd behavior.

But what I really love is that the writers seem to have done their legal research, and draw on realistic ethical dilemmas and litigation problems and procedures. I'm a second year law student (evening division), and so many times I'll be analyzing something that's been put forward for whether it's accurate or not, or trying to predict what strategy they might employ in a particular situation. Some of the ethical situations would make for great discussion topics in this semester's Law and Ethics of Lawyering class I'm in.

They don't go in for cut and dry moralizing across the board, either, although the continuum seems to be spread among the characters in this way:

• The junior partners are divided. One sees everything as black and white, one lives in the shades of grey, and the third struggles in each situation.

• The associates have a tendency to be influenced strongly by whichever junior partner they've been working with most closely. This becomes problematic, especially when they're emulating the grey attorney, Alan Shore (played by James Spader). They often simply don't have the finesse and experience to juggle to the extent he does. They also don't have the established power to utilize when the more senior attorneys are coming down on them for their perhaps poor choices.

• The senior partners tend to be more decisive, and put the needs of the firm and the duty to the client first.

    Some of the dilemmas faced thus far:

• Your client has been shot, and it is suspected that this occurred as he was robbing a convenience store. The only real evidence that will hold up, however, is the bullet lodged in his torso. Your client is stable, but if the bullet shifts it will kill him. The police want the ER to remove the bullet, but your client confesses to you that he did indeed get shot committing the crime, and doesn't want the bullet removed.

• You discover that one of your associates inadvertently discovered that one of your opposing counsel has come into the same bar as her, and leads him to believe that she is a flight attendant in order to get him to talk about his work. He falls for it and reveals confidential information that will lock up the case for you. How do you dig out of the mess without damaging the firm?

• One of your larger, long-term corporate clients is originally from Sudan, and travels back there regularly to visit family. He wants to use some of his extensive funds to bring suit against the United States to "make some noise" about the US's inaction in the ongoing genocide. On what possible grounds could you base a suit that wouldn't be immediately dismissed?

• A friend who is a therapist comes to you for advice regarding a patient who may or may not be planning to kill his ex-wife. The therapist is unsure if he should report his suspicions to the police or the ex-wife, and asks you to sit in on a session, posing as a therapist, to assist in his evaluation. Alan Shore advises what to do if you want to cover your butt, but adds that he himself rather enjoys the feel of a stiff breeze on his rosy cheeks.

Some of the other enjoyable interactions are between the liberal and conservatives members of the firm. For example, Denny Crane (William Shatner) accuses Shirley Schmidt (Candice Bergen) of Bush-bashing. She had talked about the war on terrorism, and "when liberals talk about war, that's Bush-bashing!"

In another episode, after Denny has successfully shot a man who was holding Alan Shore hostage (don't worry, the guy lived), he explains to Alan "something you liberals don't understand. This is a frontier country. We're cowboys and settlers. We work hard, and want to keep what we earn. And shoot the bad guys... to protect the people we love."

For a glimpse at the seamier (and equally entertaining) side of the show, see Will Work for Favorable Dicta.

Bret Fausett at LexText provided this analysis of the show's presentation of ethical choices after the first episode, and found the writing a bit lacking in the reality department, but had hope that over the season the writers would get it right. I admit that I missed the first few episodes, but I think that Bret's hopes have come to fruition. And even though the characters still sometimes make the wrong choices, it's fun to try to spot the errors before the other characters do (or don't).

About the Author: Rogue Slayer Law Student, a 2LE at New England School of Law, spends her days as a technical writer for a financial software company. She says, "I live in the greater Boston area, and am an admitted geek and television/movie nut.  The most helpful tool I've acquired for surviving law school is my Tivo."

Comments

[Bill Childs]

Interesting review. Most law shows make me shriek in agony and so I avoid them (L&O excepted, sometimes).

One note, though: The Practice was not an Ally McBeal spinoff. In fact, the first episode of The Practice aired in March of 1997, and Ally McBeal debuted in September of that year. The latter did have an execrable "repurposing" spinoff, Ally, which happily died a quick death.

(And no, I don't have those dates memorized; it just seemed wrong so I did quick episode guide searches...)

[RSLS]

Thanks for the correction. I may have to hang up my tv geek credentials for not verifying the dates and lineage!

[Evan]

When I was in law school, L.A. Law was all the rage. It was so popular that it was blamed for a big increase in law-school applicants, all of whom went on to graduate about the time of the recession in the early 1990s.

Here's another L.A. Law website. It was a pretty good show.

[RSLS]

In an effort to atone for my gaff, I've compiled this history of the shows in question. Everything you wish you didn't know about David E. Kelley and his legal shows.

[Tanizaki]

As a second-year night school student, what do you know about litigation problems?

[Evan]

Tanizaki: Why, do you have one?

[Tanizaki]

Evan: Do I have one what? Litigation problem? Yes, I have them all the time. I can't get a process server to serve a corporation properly to save my life.

[Evan]

You should hire a law student to be your process server. I'm sure he or she would get the job done right.

[Tanizaki]

I don't have "a" process server. We send a summons off to Joe Blow Process Servers and pray they don't foul it up. Then I get the affidavit of service and have to explain to those clowns that no, service was not proper, so do it again.

Things like whether or not service is good or if a court has personal jurisdiction are litigation problems, not a shifting bullet inside a client's body.

A client who goes cavorting off to Sudan is a "realistic ethical dilemma and litigation problem"? Is that a joke?

[RSLS]

Tanizaki, why did you assume that the fictitious client was cavorting in Sudan? The visits to family in that country was a hint as to how the attorney approached the problem presented. She looked at the issue from a torts perspective, and asked if he had ever directly seen any atrocities himself, which might put him in the zone of danger and give him a cause of action. Turns out he had witnessed his uncle being tortured and burned alive. They didn't feel they had any kind of shot at ultimately winning the case, but felt that they at least came up with grounds sufficient to file, which was all the client was seeking.

These are all simply exercises in creative thinking that are presented by a creative and entertaining show. You might want to check it out - if nothing else, you can locate all the flaws, and it might even make you smile.

[Ted]

I was the only person at my college who got into Yale Law, and I strongly suspect it was because my personal essay was about how I wasn't sure if I was qualified to be a lawyer because I'd never seen an episode of LA Law.

[Evan]

Ted: Yale rejected me. I didn't see LA Law until I was a 2L, but I didn't think to put that in my essay. Damn.

[Tanizaki]

I assumed nothing. You said that he "travels back there [Sudan] regularly". Maybe I should have said, "gallivanting". At any rate, I am amazed to learn that Massachusetts tort law extends to Sudan. I hope your tax code does not extend to Florida.

Like I said, these things don't happen. Clients want me to enforce a contract or get personal jurisdiction over an out-of-state defendant, not pretend that Florida's tort laws apply to acts committed in Africa. Maybe the next realistic litigation problem of "Boston Legal" will be a gay couple who wants to enforce _Goodridge_ in South Korea.

I'm sure the show is great, but to say that the scenarios of the show are realistic ethical dilemmas and litigation problems is just silly. Opposing counsel who makes speaking objections is a realistic litigation problem. A shifting bullet is not.

[Anonymous 2L]

Uhm, yeah, except that it is a realistic litigation problem because it actually happened. The episode was based on Winston v. Lee, 470 U.S. 753 (1985) where that exact scenario occurred.

And the whole point of the Sudan episode was that it was a stretch: how could you generate publicity from a suit while surviving a 12(b)(6) motion for what is not a conventionally actionable claim? The theory they came up with was pretty interesting (and they were suing the U.S. government, not the Sudan or Florida. The problem was not choice of law, but sovereign immunity, which was addressed). It's an absurd show (cases go to trial a few hours after the client comes in) but it clearly has a lawyer or two on staff to come up with the topics and make sure the procedure is as correct as practicable given the constraints of creating a watchable show.

[OLS]

Interestingly a real life link to the shifting bullet episode has recently come up - Aussie police want an Australian-first court order to force a murder suspect to submit to surgery to remove a bullet from his back - see the full story here.

- OLS