Movies About Lawyers — Unpredictable

There are a lot of movies about lawyers. Courtrooms are fancy buildings, and their mahogany or marble looks dramatic on screen. Lawsuits have winners and losers who can be dramatized into heroes and villains. There’s a natural narrative arc: discovery, battle, resolution. And lawyers are supposed to be eloquent, so screenwriters see an opportunity to write impassioned dialogue.

Real litigation, however, is rarely cinematic. Most courtroom movies concern criminal prosecution, and I recognize that civil disputes may be less interesting. Still, there are some films that I think capture the work of civil litigation better than others.

Why should you read this post about litigation in film?

You know who should play me in a movie about this blog.
You want to watch a movie that romanticizes a job that some consider a little square.
You refuse to believe people regularly break into tearful confessions on the witness stand.

Credit: Julia Roberts F15 on Wikimedia Commons: Troops show Roberts an F15 jet at an air base in Turkey, 2001. *(Photo by Airman 1st Class Tanaya Harms).*

Marriage Story (2019)

Even though this movie is about family law and not a commercial lawsuit, I regularly cite it as the one that most closely reflects legal practice. In the movie, Alan Alda, Laura Dern, and Ray Liotta play three different kinds of lawyers. Ray Liotta plays an expensive shark, Alan Alda plays an unglamorous and unexciting pragmatist, and Laura Dern plays a pretentious, elite lawyer. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson play the divorcing couple.

One of the things I enjoy about Alda's character is that he is both correct and uninspiring. A client comes to a lawyer seeking an ally and someone who will fight for them. Alda points out that fighting is expensive and not worth it, but many people do not want to hear that, especially when the dispute is over something as important as family. And so Adam Driver's character switches lawyers from Alda to Liotta.

Another thing that I find accurate in the movie is that the litigation between Liotta and Dern has less to do with their clients' true feelings or desire to have an amicable split, and more to do with their self-imposed desire to get the best results for their clients. This ends up having harsh consequences for the clients' emotional well-being and personal lives, but the lawyers only care about winning and fight to make that happen. Unfortunately, some lawyers decide for themselves what is in their clients' best interests, even if the battles they take on seem alien to the people they fight for.

The Rainmaker (1997)

I loved this John Grisham book and the movie, but both apply some Hollywood gloss to a lawsuit, while also describing a litigation world that existed before the internet.

One thing I recall from the movie is that Matt Damon is a new law graduate, aided by paralegal Danny DeVito, taking on the pompous lawyer of a huge insurance company. It is my experience, however, that a new law graduate wouldn't even know where to begin in litigating a case, even with a wise paralegal's help. Taking depositions, filing bills of particular, objecting to document demands: law school is poor preparation for any of those details. The idea that Damon could have done any of this is fantastic.

Moreover, the evil law firm defending the insurance company didn't ring true to me. Most lawyers defending insurance companies against Tennessee claims by individual insureds aren't pompous millionaires, but regular workaday lawyers who aren't much wealthier than the plaintiffs' lawyers, and often less wealthy. That's not to say that insurance companies can't act terrible; they have many times, but the lawyers I see typically defending them are less Jon Voight and more like DeVito (if DeVito's character had passed the bar).

The Social Network (2010)

Something I like from the movie is that both of the big lawsuits in the case settle after depositions. It may surprise people to discover that many cases involve witness testimony, but never go to trial. And it’s true that many big disputes, particularly when both sides are represented by large firms, settle. I often felt large firms often consider trial unseemly, the stuff of scrappier smaller shops.

But depositions are seldom the stuff of high drama. True, people's personalities sometimes come out because it is hard to pretend to be a robot for several hours when a witness is forced to talk about a subject they are emotional about. Still, the depositions in this movie feel more like interviews in a documentary—defenses of philosophies and debates about character in a free-flowing format rather than the narrow legal questions and terse answers more common in a deposition.

Depositions instead are usually dull. If you're not asking or answering the questions, it can be easy to nod off. So to make movies of them necessarily requires some dramatic license.

Erin Brockovich (2000)

This film concerns a mass tort action—many plaintiffs suing an energy company for contaminated water that injured people—and a paralegal who pursued the case.

Here, it is hard for me to say the film is inaccurate to my experience since it is based on the true story of Erin Brockovich (and the attorney Ed Masry). Still, I want to discuss two key elements of the case: the protagonist earning the trust of the plaintiffs, and uncovering a “smoking gun” document that compels the plaintiffs' victory.

I agree that it is important to earn clients' trust. But I am skeptical that anyone besides the lawyer can do this. I find that, when clients are reticent to advance a claim or to select one lawyer over another, they look for answers to their legal questions or experience with similar cases. Perhaps a paralegal who isn't the lawyer on the case can do this: typically "rainmaker" or "relationship" partners are the ones who earn a client's trust while another lawyer actually drafts papers or argues in court. But I think it would be much harder for a non-lawyer to do this.

While this case seemed to involve smoking-gun evidence that the big, bad guys were in on the evil deed all along, I find this to be more of a Hollywood device more than something that comes up in real life often. Maybe the real bad guys have just gotten better at hiding their tracks, but in my experience, actual witnesses and a pattern of evidence wins cases more than a single perfect, and initially hidden, document that changes everything.