Order in the court!

The tagline for George Clooney’s new legal thriller “Michael Clayton” — “The truth can be adjusted” — is hardly news to anyone familiar with the genre.

Allow me to cite precedent.

In “The Verdict,” when Frank Gavin (Paul Newman) is offered a settlement in a Catholic hospital medical malpractice case that left a young girl in a coma, he says, saddened and catching on, “And no one will ever know the truth?” To which Bishop Brophy responds, “What is the truth?”

In “Primal Fear,” when a reporter asks top Chicago attorney Martin Vail (Richard Gere), “So where are you with truth?,” Vail looks up from washing his face, slightly annoyed. “Truth?” he says. “How do you mean?”

And in “A Civil Action,” plaintiff’s attorney Jan Schlichtmann (John Travolta) convinces himself that refusing a $20 million settlement makes sense by saying of the jury, “They’ll see the truth.” To which the corporate defense attorney, Jerome Facher (Robert Duvall), responds, “The truth? I thought we were talking about a court of law.”

Facher’s response is actually the least cynical, and the most accurate, of the bunch. A court of law isn’t interested in truth so much as facts. It’s not interested in justice so much as closure. It wants dispassion, not passion. Hollywood wants the opposite of each of these things and gets it. That’s the irony of the tagline. Hollywood is forever tut-tutting about the malleability of courtroom truth when — in movies about lawyers — it always adjusts the truth to include the kinds of things so often missing from life: namely, drama and justice.

What the movies get wrong
My day job, which certain MSNBC readers are forever telling me not to quit, is editor of eight “Super Lawyers” publications around the country, and I wondered what some of these lawyers thought of the Hollywood version of their profession.

Begin with rules of evidence. “I always catch myself saying ‘That's hearsay,’ ‘Object to that,’ ‘That never happens,’ before I have to just stop and say, ‘It's a movie,’” says Jennifer McClellan, corporate attorney for Verizon and a state representative in Virginia. “Also, trials are very rarely as exciting as they seem in the movies.”

20th Century Fox In “The Verdict,” Frank Gavin (Paul Newman) is offered a settlement in a medical malpractice case that left a young girl in a coma, he says, saddened and catching on, “And no one will ever know the truth?”

Plaintiff’s attorney Robert Habush, for whom Wisconsin’s “Trial Lawyer of the Year Award” is named, agrees. “Most trials,” he says, “are 90 percent boring,10 percent exciting, rather than 100 percent exciting.”

First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams adds: “With the exception of Jimmy Stewart in a favorite of mine, ‘Anatomy of a Murder,’ you never see a lawyer reading a book, writing a brief or thinking about anything. Put another way, they never show lawyers working.”

This is also what bothers Employment & Labor lawyer Elaine Bredehoft of Virginia. “When I am preparing for a trial,” she says, “I have no life. I don't go out to dinner, I don't have morning firm meetings, I don't meet opposing counsel for drinks. I am working... The movies don’t get that and have lawyers in a myriad of social settings.”

What the movies get right
But the news ain’t all bad.

“What they get right,” says Karen Mathis, immediate past president of the American Bar Association, “is what the legal system looks like, what courtrooms look like, what a lawyer does and what juries do.” To her, this is no small matter. “Any time in an open society that people have access to understanding the legal system — however imperfect that portrayal might be — is a good thing. Do you think they let people in Burma understand their legal system?

Slide show   Clooney's world From "Facts of Life" to "Michael Clayton," the making of a major star. more photos

For Bredehoft, the most significant thing the movies get right, oddly enough, are all of those cantankerous, biased judges. “You will see the judge (in the movie) make rulings that are not expected or reflect that judge's views or attitude,” she says. “That happens in real life all the time. Lawyers analyze cases by who their judge is … I have had juries turn against the Court and in my favor because they thought the Court was behaving inappropriately in favoring the other side.”

So do real-life lawyers ever identify with the versions of themselves they see on the screen? Habush points to Joe Miller (Denzel Washington) in “Philadelphia” because, he says, like Miller, “throughout my career I have taken cases other attorneys turned away from.”

Abrams remains impressed with Frank Gavin (Paul Newman) in “The Verdict.” “While we don't exactly have a lot in common,” he says, “(I don't show up at funerals and hand my card out, don't have a pronounced drinking problem, and certainly can't quite compare with Newman's looks and persona), I found his dedication to his clients, his extraordinarily zealous advocacy and his bravery under fire in court to be worthy of the greatest admiration.”

Christopher Knapp, legal consultant on ABC’s “Dirty Sexy Money,” also cites Gavin — but for almost the opposite reasons. “Paul Newman's character,” he says, “had internalized the disillusionment that many lawyers feel when they realize that winning and losing a case depends a helluva lot more on the facts you are given than on your brilliance as an attorney.”

Along with Newman’s realistic portrait, however, “The Verdict” still gives us a whopper of a fantasy. During the trial, crucial evidence is introduced favorable to Gavin’s case; then it’s ruled inadmissible and the jury is instructed to ignore it. Gavin has no case. So what does he do? During his final summation, he implies that the jury shouldn’t ignore the inadmissible evidence. “Today,” he tells them, “you are the law. Not some book, not some lawyers, not a marble statue or the trappings of the court.” And he wins.

“The term for that is ‘jury nullification,’” says Knapp. “That speech by Newman was totally unrealistic, 100 percent improper and wonderfully dramatic.  Exactly the ways in which Hollywood is always wrong about the legal profession.”

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