Legal Profession
The Practice was considered more accurate in its portrayal of the law than L.A. Law or Ally McBeal. The importance of legal strategy sometimes at the expense of the truth rang true. One attorney said, "t's really about the tactics and the mistakes that opposing counsel makes." Judges were represented as complex, less-than-perfect human beings, sometimes with emotional problems. Plots demonstrated how a defendant's personality would impact the adjudication of a case. Stuart Levine of Variety magazine said, " isn't afraid to paint the firm's clients as the dregs of society." Kelley said,
| “ | One of the most fundamental questions people have about defense attorneys is, 'How can you do that? How can you go to bat every day for a person whom you may not know is guilty but you have a pretty good idea that he's not so innocent? | ” |
Other aspects of the legal profession in Kelley's shows have been criticized as unrealistic. Attorneys have complained that:
- Ex parte meetings (where lawyers meet in a judge's chambers without opposing counsel present) do not happen,
- Judges would not allow attorneys to badger or attack witnesses,
- His shows overplayed prosecutorial and law enforcement misconduct,
- The time required to select and empanel a jury is never shown and is not allowed for in the story's timeline, and
- Many of the cases would never have made it to trial.
Read more about this topic: David E. Kelley
Famous quotes containing the words legal profession, legal and/or profession:
“Lawyers are necessary in a community. Some of you ... take a different view; but as I am a member of that legal profession, or was at one time, and have only lost standing in it to become a politician, I still retain the pride of the profession. And I still insist that it is the law and the lawyer that make popular government under a written constitution and written statutes possible.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Priests and physicians should never look one another in the face. They have no common ground, nor is there any to mediate between them. When the one comes, the other goes. They could not come together without laughter, or a significant silence, for the one’s profession is a satire on the other’s, and either’s success would be the other’s failure.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)