Eye on the Blogosphere§ Trials and television: Why legal firms make good TV fodder

By Taryn Hartman Legal News I'll be the first to say I wish I were snowed in on the east coast right now. Nothing is more appealing to me than spending the day, or possibly several, in sweatpants, on the couch, under a blanket, reading through the stack of books and magazines that I haven't been able to finish. Plus, the very concept of a "blizzard warning" is sexy, and I can't say with any certainty that despite all my years in Michigan I've ever lived through a real, live blizzard. Also, thunder and lightning with my snow, as Chuck Gaidica predicted last week? Yes, please, and supersize it while you're at it. Sometimes I think we need something along the lines of a three-foot torrent of snow to literally force us to slow down our lives, even if it's just for a day. I'm sure there was no shortage of East Coasters catching up on their Netflix last week as they waited out the frozen deluge. Seasons of "The Wire" and "Big Love" are currently in my queue. What's in yours? While on Ms. JD (http://ms-jd.org/) a few weeks ago, I saw that they've been doing weekly recaps of the CBS series "The Good Wife," a ripped-from-the-headlines-legal-drama about a lawyer (played by Julianna Margulies) who is forced back into life as a junior associate when she stays with her State's Attorney husband after he resigns from office and is jailed amid a sex scandal. It's not on DVD yet, but I started watching it one week last fall when there was nothing else on and I've really been enjoying it and hope it sticks around past one season. Ms. JD's recaps (http://tinyurl.com/ygwr3uc) are short and sweet and highlight some of the legal-world issues that come up each episode, like "The BigLaw v. Public Service debate," "The truth about billable hours," and "Failure to take credit (feminine modesty/crappy business development)." In the Week 6 recap from November, the blog addresses the issue of "Pragmatic Discrimination": "Hot Shot [the competitive young associate] and TGW [lead character Alicia Florrick, The Good Wife] get a quick turnaround assignment, which leads to this division of [sic] gem of a line: 'you're the faster typist.' This made me think of all the times I've heard women complain about how they get stuck with secretarial work in their offices under similar pretexts. Hot Shot gets to do the research and craft an argument and it's TGW's job to type it up. And this makes sense because that's what she's good at doing. I've heard the same thing with respect to court document filings and other similarly tedious but detail oriented work. This is a rational form of discrimination, but it's still discrimination," the blogger writes. That got me thinking about other law-focused shows and the constant interest small-screen writers seem to take in the legal industry. In recent years we've had "Boston Legal," "Eli Stone" (which I totally loved), and "Damages," and before that long-running hits like "The Practice" and "Ally McBeal," to say nothing of legends like "L.A. Law." Why does law make such a compelling TV topic, and lawyers such intriguing characters? The Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas at Austin has an exhaustive online list of TV courtroom dramas as well as shows of other genres that "depicted a lawyer in a significant and recurring role." (http://tinyurl.com/2zwby2) The list includes a number of shows that lasted less than a season, sometimes only a handful of episodes, yet life inside a law firm seems to be an evergreen topic spanning decades. The earliest shows on the Tarlton list aired in the 50s, and even now we have "The Good Wife" and the recently-launched "The Deep End" about a group of first-year associates in a cutthroat firm, to say nothing of the perennial "Law & Order" and its multiple spinoffs. Last August, the ABA Journal asked "a jury of 12 experts § nine lawyers, two scholars and a TV critic" to name their top 25 legal shows of all time. View the results at http://tinyurl.com/y8gy6vq. While TV may not always depict accurate representations of a courtroom layout or trial procedure, law-related shows aren't all inherent legal fallacies. In 2007, Mary Flood posted on her Legal Trade blog (http://blogs.chron.com/legaltrade/) the opinions of several lawyers who asserted that while CSI lab techs certainly aren't out in the field interviewing witnesses, legal TV shows sometimes are more educational than what's reported in a 24/7 news culture. "Some of them suggested that for all the faults of the fictional TV shows, the portrayal of the law in fiction leaves a more accurate impression than a lot of the law reported as celebrity news on CNN and other 24-hour news channels," Flood wrote. Included in her post were the thoughts of Wayne State law professor Peter Henning, "Blog Editor Emeritus" of the White Collar Crime Prof Blog (http://tinyurl.com/2coajm), who said law-focused TV shows may actually show more balanced representations of a court and a trial than the news does when a celebrity is on trial. Like our girl Paris was last summer. "Henning said when Court TV gets boring and shows a case that is not compressed in time, that's when the viewer gets a glimpse of reality," Flood wrote. Published: Fri, Feb 19, 2010

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