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)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Amongst the learned the lawyers claim first place, the most self-satisfied class of people, as they roll their rock of Sisyphus and string together six hundred laws in the same breath, no matter whether relevant or not, piling up opinion on opinion and gloss on gloss to make their profession seem the most difficult of all. Anything which causes trouble has special merit in their eyes.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)