Hollywood Law

There is something wonderfully reassuring about a legal drama. You may not know who committed the crime, who is going to win the case, or which junior lawyer is about to have a nervous breakdown, but you can be absolutely certain that certain things will happen. They have to. This is Hollywood Law, a parallel universe where trials take 47 minutes, lawyers have photographic memories, judges are frequently corrupt, and crucial evidence can always be discovered with five minutes left in the episode.

For starters, if there is a divorce lawyer, he or she is almost certainly having an affair with a client. Apparently, professional boundaries are simply too dull for television. The more complicated the divorce, the more likely the attorney-client relationship will become an attorney-client-love-triangle. Conflict of interest? Probably. Ethical violation? Possibly. Excellent television? Absolutely.

Every legal drama has one junior lawyer: fresh-faced, enthusiastic, ambitious and spectacularly unprepared for the case they have just been handed. Their first appearance in court will be a disaster. They will forget something important, misunderstand the judge, annoy opposing counsel and generally look as though they obtained their law degree from a cereal box. The senior partner watches from the back with the expression of someone who has just discovered that their promising new associate is, in fact, an expensive liability. To be fair, I hear that the humiliation part may not be entirely fictional.

Criminal defence lawyers, meanwhile, seem to have a supernatural ability to attract innocent clients. The client may look guilty, behave guilty, have been arrested at the scene and even have confessed, but there will always be a twist. They are innocent. The real murderer is still out there, and the defence lawyer's job is apparently not merely to practise law but also to become a detective, investigator, forensic scientist and amateur psychologist. Every episode also requires at least one bizarre, precedent-setting case. Ordinary legal disputes apparently do not exist on television. Nobody is suing over a straightforward contract. Every case will somehow redefine constitutional law, corporate responsibility, inheritance rights or the legal status of artificial intelligence.

Naturally, the trial will begin terribly for the lawyer. The witness is hostile, the judge is irritated, the jury looks unconvinced and opposing counsel is smirking. Things appear hopeless until, approximately five minutes before the end of the programme, the Private Investigator bursts in with a folder and announces, "I found something." Of course they did. It will be exactly the piece of evidence required to turn the entire case around. Nobody will ask why it wasn't found three days earlier, why the lawyers hadn't thought of looking for it, or why this supposedly crucial evidence happened to arrive at precisely the moment required by the script. Evidence in Hollywood Law operates according to its own rules: it must never be discovered early enough to be useful.

Clients are equally reliable. They will always have hidden something important from their lawyer. When asked, "Is there anything else I should know?" The answer is invariably no, followed shortly by the revelation that they knew the victim, were at the scene, owned the company, had another family or were somehow involved in the crime. Why didn't they mention this earlier? Because if they had, there would be no episode. The lawyers themselves never seem particularly concerned about money either. Fees, retainers, hourly rates and invoices are apparently forbidden subjects. Lawyers work for Justice, which seems to be an extraordinarily generous client.

This brings us to the  guilty client, which is when the entire firm develops a sudden and passionate interest in legal ethics. Half the lawyers argue that everyone deserves representation while the other half declare that they cannot, in good conscience, continue. The firm divides into opposing moral camps, usually for the entire episode, until someone discovers a brilliant legal solution that allows everyone to feel ethically vindicated.

Television lawyers, of course, are all eloquent. They never stumble, hesitate, ramble or say "um." They can deliver a five-minute closing argument without notes and somehow make every sentence sound like it belongs in a courtroom anthology. The legal assistants are equally predictable. They are either young, attractive and studying law at night, or they are terrifying battle-axes who have worked at the firm since the invention of the fax machine. There is apparently no room in Hollywood Law for the perfectly ordinary legal assistant who is 42, drinks too much coffee and has absolutely no intention of becoming a lawyer.

Wills are another reliable source of drama. Nobody on television ever draws up a simple will. Every person making one is wealthy, eccentric and surrounded by complicated family relationships. There is always a mansion, a secret child, an estranged relative, an unexpected beneficiary or a mysterious clause. Someone is inevitably disinherited, someone inherits everything and somebody gasps when the will is read. The judge will then call the lawyers into chambers, because judges in television dramas apparently conduct half their important business in small wood-panelled rooms while speaking in ominous whispers.

Judges themselves are remarkably unreliable. Roughly every third one seems to be corrupt. They take bribes, conceal evidence, have secret connections to litigants or participate in elaborate conspiracies. When the judge isn't corrupt, the lawyers will usually resort to courtroom theatrics instead. They pace dramatically, approach witnesses, wave documents around, raise their voices and produce last-minute revelations that would probably result in a real judge reaching for the contempt citation. But this is television, so the jury gasps, the opposing counsel looks horrified and the audience applauds internally.

The research is equally efficient. A lawyer can spend four minutes looking through a database and find the exact precedent required to win the case. It will be a case from 1978, decided by an obscure court, involving facts almost identical to those currently before the court. Nobody else has ever heard of it, but our hero somehow knows exactly where to look. In real life, I suspect legal research may occasionally take slightly longer.

Then  there is the greatest legal fiction of all: cases actually end. A complicated trial involving multiple witnesses, expert evidence, constitutional questions and millions of dollars will somehow be resolved within the hour. There are no months of discovery, scheduling problems, adjournments, procedural motions, expert reports or appeals. Evidence appears, someone gives a stirring speech, the judge makes a decision and everybody walks dramatically out of the courthouse before the credits roll.

That is the great comfort of Hollywood Law. Justice may be complicated, but it is never slow. The rich client may have the best lawyers, the opposing side may have manipulated the system and the judge may even be corrupt, but the truth will always emerge triumphantly—usually about five minutes before the end.

The junior lawyer will survive the humiliation, the client will finally confess what they should have disclosed in the first interview, the Private Investigator will find the missing evidence, the lawyer will discover the perfect precedent, the judge will summon everyone into chambers, and some lawyer will deliver a closing argument worthy of Shakespeare. Justice will prevail, the innocent will be vindicated, the guilty will be exposed, and the lawyers will walk dramatically out of the courthouse.

Never fear , next week, we do it all over again. The divorce lawyer will fall for another client, another judge will turn out to be corrupt, another eccentric millionaire will leave behind a controversial will, a  criminal defendant will be innocent, and some obscure precedent will miraculously save the day.

All in 47 minutes.

The real miracle isn't that television lawyers win so many cases. It's that they never find time to bill anyone.