Legally Speaking

Speaking to an audience composed mostly of lawyers, David E. Kelley told a joke. It went something like this: “There’s a story right now going around Hollywood that when ‘The Sopranos’ was being developed, in the pilot the protagonist kills his brother [and] puts a contract out on his mother. They thought about making him a lawyer but the network executives said, ‘No, he won’t be sympathetic.’ ”

You could argue that no one more than Kelley, who began his career practicing law, is qualified to deliver such a line, because no one has so managed to bridge the gap between the public’s distaste for attorneys and the television-viewing audience’s love affair with them. With “The Practice,” his most popular show, Kelley strips away the one-note stereotypes and presents lawyers as fallible people in business attire--passionate and loud and as capable of bungling important cases as winning them.

There’s a good bit of fantasy in “The Practice,” in the depiction of lawyering, as USC law professor Susan Estrich puts it: “a western with rules.” But the irresistibility of this fantasy is partly why lawyer groups keep giving Kelley awards, the latest coming Wednesday night at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where Kelley was honored, along with appellate court Justice Earl Johnson Jr., at a fund-raiser for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

At a time when most attorneys on television are squawking pundits and TV judges come across as officious blowhards, “The Practice,” real-life attorneys say, amounts to a respite from the noise, presenting a heightened, idealized world where lawyers actually go to trial, battling unpredictable juries and single-minded judges in a pitched battle for something like justice. Not for nothing do attorneys compare the show wistfully to what they say was the last great legal drama of the airwaves, “The Defenders.”

OK, maybe a few of the attorneys on “The Practice” are too good-looking, and there was that business this season with the homicidal client who cross-dresses as a nun, and the dentist with the bug fetish, and the judge who confesses to having a sex dream about one of the firm’s attorneys. But hey, attorneys shrug, that stuff has to be there to keep people from tuning out. Otherwise, they maintain, “The Practice” is a compelling journey into the soul of practicing law.

“I’m totally intrigued by the show,” says Mark Geragos, a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney whose clients include Susan MacDougal, the former business associate of then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and one of the targets in Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater investigation. “They manage to capture [being a lawyer] in a way that doesn’t lampoon it.”

“It very frequently portrays the phenomenon of insane judges that is really, really accurate and that the viewing public probably thinks is fiction,” adds Stephen Yagman, an attorney whose career litigating against law enforcement comes with a reputation, legion in legal circles, for squaring off with judges.

The ABC series, which won its second straight Emmy as best drama last month, is wooing an ever-growing number of viewers in its third season, averaging just over 17 million viewers so far this season, a significant increase from last year. But if viewers are titillated by the goings-on of psychotic Everyman George Vogelman (Michael Monks) and oversexed Judge Roberta Kittleson (Holland Taylor), attorneys find a different sense of escapism in the show, with its compressed world of indictment-trial-verdict. As clips of two of Kelley’s legal shows, “The Practice” and the unapologetically outrageous comedy “Ally McBeal,” played on giant screens in the Hilton ballroom, it was difficult to tell, given the attendant laughter from the crowd, which show was more make-believe.

Cases Reveal the Characters

Kelley calls “The Practice” an idealized version of criminal law, scripted by someone who’s most interested in how a case reveals something about his characters. In his own understated way, he refers to Donnell, Young, Dole & Frutt as “a rather exciting law firm.”

“Most trials take years and years to get to court,” concedes Kelley, who writes virtually all of the episodes in addition to serving as executive producer of the show. “That’s probably the biggest distortion on ‘The Practice.’ When an issue of right or wrong presents itself we head straight to court and resolve it.”

Kelley practiced mostly civil law in Boston for three years and never tried a case in front of a jury. On “The Practice,” he is assisted behind the scenes by lawyers, including writers Alfonso Moreno and Jill Goldsmith, co-executive producer Robert Breech and producer Pamela Wisne.

“You can’t do things completely accurately,” says Goldsmith, a former public defender in Chicago. “You reduce all the minutiae, focus on the highlights, on the real point of telling the story in the first place.”

That “The Practice” earns praise from attorneys is nevertheless a surprise, given the oftentimes passing relationship to accuracy that legal-based movies and TV shows exhibit. Perhaps more than any other profession, writers trample upon the practice of law, using a courtroom or judge’s chambers as mere window dressing for melodrama, never mind the actual rules of engagement.

“Some of the stuff just makes your teeth itch,” says former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner. “In the middle of examining a witness, a lawyer turns to the jury and addresses them. That’s just some damn fool writer or director who doesn’t care.”

Like other attorneys, Reiner is impressed by the way Kelley balances accuracy with the mandate to do dramatic television, though he does have his quibbles with the show. With the way, for instance, Dist. Atty. Helen Gamble (Lara Flynn Boyle) is involved in seemingly every case. With the way an attorney will discuss a case with a judge without opposing counsel present. With the fact that Kelley’s scrappy law firm is never seen handling the more mundane, court-appointed cases that a firm of its type would have to take on to pay the bills.

“When a client comes to me, I have to fashion a defense around the facts--police reports, possible witnesses,” says Gregory Segal, a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney, raising another objection. “In contrast to ‘The Practice,’ where they can think of a Hollywood ending and then fashion the facts around the conclusion.”

Moreover, Kelley’s defense attorneys specialize in the crisis-of-conscience, allowing their own moral and ethical feelings to intrude upon their jobs. This is what can make the characters both sympathetic to viewers and unrealistic to attorneys. In an episode earlier this season, defense attorney Bobby Donnell (Dylan McDermott) wins freedom for a client accused of murder; when Donnell later uncovers new evidence suggesting his client’s guilt, he indirectly feeds the tip to the district attorney, leading to his client’s re-arrest and Donnell’s own sense that justice has prevailed.

The ending made for a dramatic climax, albeit one that likely would never happen. Kelley himself says he tries to stay away from “the impossible” on “The Practice,” but even that story line strains credulity.

Ethical Insight May Be a Stretch

The public may want to believe criminal defense attorneys openly struggle with the actual guilt or innocence of their clients, but that’s not how the job works. Maria E. Stratton, public defender for the Central District of California, whose office is defending Buford O. Furrow Jr., charged in the Aug. 10 shooting attack at the North Valley Jewish Community Center, says the public is still slow to understand the ultimate role of a criminal defense lawyer--to protect an individual’s right to a fair trial, even if your client is guilty.

“You probably wouldn’t be a happy defense attorney for a long time if you were struggling with defending a guilty person,” she says. “That’s the nature of the criminal justice system. The ultimate legal question is not whether your client is guilty, it’s whether the government can prove it without a reasonable doubt.”

Kelley says he tries to stay away from the legally “impossible” on “The Practice.” He concedes that an attorney who gives a DA evidence incriminating his own client probably wouldn’t be practicing very long.

But years ago, when he was a writer-producer on “L.A. Law,” Kelley was speaking to a group of lawyers when one complained that the show had crossed the believability threshold. Before Kelley could answer, another attorney in the room countered that he’d had a case just like the unbelievable one on “L.A. Law.” More arguments and counterarguments ensued.

“I never even got to answer the question,” Kelley says. “The lawyers with their anecdotal responses made the claim that there are aberrant things happening in courtrooms all over the country.”

* “The Practice” is shown Sunday nights at 10 on ABC. The network has rated it TV-14-DS (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14 with special advisories for suggestive dialogue and sex).