Lawyers in Fiction

I am out of town this weekend, so I hope this goes up in time. I started writing this earlier in the week than usual, taking notes on one of the train ticket printouts from last year’s big vacation.

It’s the Ides of March! Watch your back, and avoid toga parties.

So I’m trying out Andor while the first season is on Hulu. People have been saying it’s good. Not sure what the next book will be at this point.

Lawyers in Fiction

Have you ever noticed that lawyers in popular fiction are really, really bad at their jobs?

This is on my mind because of the recent release of Daredevil: Born Again, in which the titular hero’s day job is as a lawyer. I don’t have Disney+; however, I’ve seen a lot of reviews that called out that Matt did something in the most recent episode that, as a lawyer, was kind of dumb. I mean, it proved the guy was innocent to the jury, though it also screwed up his entire life. And one commentator even pointed out that it was an argument that a competent lawyer could poke holes through.

It reminded me a little of a conversation my sister and I had when watching The Flash. There’s an episode in which Barry is framed for a murder. One of the other characters, Cecille, acts as his defense attorney, and she does a terrible job. We’re meant to think that the reason Barry’s declared guilty is because the villains are clever and stacked everything against him. In reality, it’s because his defense attorney is terrible at her job. At no point does she even decide that there needs to be a question of how Barry apparently dragged a wheelchair-bound college professor into his apartment and murdered him, without his wheelchair, without anyone noticing.

That, and also courtroom procedure being thrown out the window: this trial happens in a week, and Cecille interrupts the prosecutor multiple times during witness questioning.

[The end of the episode also has the judge dramatically declaring in a monologue that he’s never seen such evil or depravity in his entire life in the history of Central City, which is bizarre. This is a city in which metahumans routinely murder each other, but this is the crime that was worst of all? Really?]

I also think a lot about my dad’s statements on Law & Order. I distinctly remember one time he was sitting with us while it was on, and he said, “If I was in charge, I’d fire all of them” (the cops and the lawyers. Because they always get the wrong people at first, grill the heck out of them, and only get it right when the twist is revealed towards the end. Alright, that’s a simplification, but it happens a lot.

It illustrates the reasoning of this structure in fiction, though. Why are so many lawyers bad at their jobs in fiction? Because it makes Drama. Obviously, if the show is about lawyers, it doesn’t make good television (or literature, or film, or what-have-you) if they can always fix their problems easily. It’s very difficult to turn that into good drama! But if you have them struggle, or even fail, then you have dramatic beats and character development. And most audiences don’t actually understand the courtroom better than an episode of Law & Order anyway, then it feels okay for writers to handwave any actual problems because they hope it makes an entertaining story.

That doesn’t make it not dumb. Yeah, you can have a heroic character who fails or is bad at his or her job. There are tons of underdog-type stories about characters like that! A hero who wants to be a great warrior but keeps losing; a wizard who is terrible at magic; a police officer who struggles to solve crimes. Those aren’t bad stories. You can even have it so that it’s not the hero’s fault! There’s an early episode of Person of Interest in which Reese has to protect a lawyer (a public defender, I think?), and she is struggling not because she’s a bad lawyer, but because she’s overworked, underfunded, and going up against people who have much more resources than she does.

The problem is with fictional lawyers who we, the audience, are meant to think are good at their jobs, and clearly aren’t. Lawyers who break the rules, who don’t ask basic questions, who ruin the lives of their clients without asking them–these are all terrible things to do as a lawyer! And yet they keep doing them, and we’re still meant to think they’re good at their jobs, because writers need to keep the drama rolling. 

I keep flashing back to Limyaael’s quote (which was originally about love triangles, but it applies to so much): an idiot that I am not supposed to regard as an idiot is intolerable. Likewise, a professional who is plainly terrible at his or her job, and we’re not supposed to notice, is intolerable. If you want to make this work, do a heck of a lot more homework on how lawyers behave, and think about what makes sense, and what holes someone may poke in a legal argument. Then write that courtroom scene.

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Now, I wish I had some Suits example, but I only watched the first season when it came out, and I don’t remember it. I certainly don’t remember a lot of courtroom scenes. I remember the theme song, though, that was dope.