Blog Posts

I’ve a confession to make: I’ve not stepped into a courtroom since sometime in early March of this year, and I haven’t missed it one bit.
This is a confession because I am a trial- and appellate-lawyer. I make my living, or at least I used to make my...

I imagine John Grisham, the best-selling author of plot-driven legal thrillers, channel surfing late one night on his 100-plus-acre farm in Oxford, Mississippi, and settling on an episode of "Better Call Saul." The author of books selling 275 million worldwide must have felt a pang of regret on...

“Everybody talks,” the prosecutor said. He was confident, strutting his stuff in the well of the court. “In the end, everyone talks,” he said again.
I felt as though I were watching a bad version of Inspector Javert, from Victor Hugo’s “Les...

Despite the fact that I spend as much time as I can in courtrooms, I still enjoy reading fiction about the law and lawyering. I worry always about what I am missing as I stand in the middle of someone else’s storm. Legal fiction provides perspective, and, frankly, entertainment.
Why is...

I called one of the law’s great septuagenarians just after the new year to commiserate about the passing of New Haven attorney William Gallagher.


“I didn’t see this coming,” he said, noting that Gallagher, like him, was in his 70s.
Death is...

Michael Connelly never practiced law a day in his life, but his fiction best approximates the gritty reality of the private practice of law. His Mickey Haller series continues to amaze me. I repeatedly find myself underlining sentences in the book that capture exactly the sense of creative chaos...

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing and even a little chest-thumping about the collapse of Manhattan mega-firm Dewey LaBoeuf. The hand wringers wonder what has become of the law; the chest thumpers can’t say I told you so loudly enough. From where I sit, the collapse of a Biglaw giant...

Michael Connelly is as good as it gets when it comes to telling tales about lawyers and policemen engaged in the dark but heroic act of combatting what we like to think of as the evil in our midst. The Drop, Connelly’s latest, does not disappoint. Harry Bosch, the intrepid and now aging...

Clarence Darrow is the sort of icon whose status guarantees that new biographies will be produced about him from time to time. Although dead now some 73 years, his presence lingers. He is on anyone’s short list as one of the nation’s greatest trial lawyers. Andrew Kersten’s,...

It actually felt like summer the other day: a long, languid sort of day with sunshine, no place to go, and fields humming with life. After a winter in which we saw one outbuilding collapse and the roof on another begin to crumble, the day felt like a gift. So when evening came, I decided to...