The Ex-Lawyers Club

Never let it be said that lawyers haven’t contributed something entertaining to popular culture. After all, they’ve inspired a whole genre of jokes. Who could forget a classic like “How can you tell when a lawyer is lying?” (His lips are moving.) Or the ever popular “Why won’t sharks attack lawyers?” (Professional courtesy.)

For years, lawyers have been a popular target for film and television writers, who routinely portrayed attorneys as selfish, briefcase-toting boors. These days, however, a growing number of attorneys have decided to switch sides rather than fight the stereotype. More and more, they are becoming television writers and show runners.

Although there are no reliable statistics, at least two dozen former lawyers have abandoned legal careers and successfully made the transition to cranking out episodes of TV shows. The list is topped by David E. Kelley, the former Boston attorney who, with shows like “The Practice,” “Ally McBeal” and “Boston Public,” is perhaps the highest-profile example of a lawyer making the leap into TV writing success.

Still, several others have made a similar move. Carol Mendelsohn runs CBS’ “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” Rich Appel is the former executive producer of “King of the Hill” and is developing for NBC his own pilot based on his experiences as a federal prosecutor. Barry Schindel is in charge of NBC’s “Law & Order.” Jeff Rake was co-creator of last season’s Fox series “The Street.” Stephen Engel, producer of the recently departed NBC sitcom “Inside Schwartz,” is also a former attorney. “Family Law,” “First Monday” and “The Guardian” are just a few of the other series that employ lawyers as writers.

“I have no doubt that this is a trend,” says Bob Breech, senior vice president for Kelley’s production company. “I think it probably began with the glamorization of lawyers on ‘L.A. Law,’ which swelled the ranks of students in law school. Meanwhile, lawyers saw it and realized, ‘I can do that too.’”

There have been plenty of shows about other professions, such as doctors, bankers, even journalists. However, it seems that the unique nature of their jobs makes attorneys not only perfect for a show but also gives them an advantage when it comes to writing a series.

“Lawyers have a different way of thinking,” says Schindel, who worked as a public defender in the Bronx and as a civil litigator for a private firm before selling a spec script and leaving the practice of law in 1996. “With lawyers, you’re getting very aggressive and competitive people, traits you need to survive in television writing. Fields like medicine and banking aren’t based on adversarial positions. But with the law, the competitive fire is taught to you from the beginning.”

According to Mendelsohn, who in the early 1980s left a burgeoning law career in Washington, D.C., to make it as a writer in Hollywood, having experience as an attorney also provides a sense of discipline that can be lacking in television. “Working as a lawyer gave me a serious work ethic,” she says. “I was spending time writing Supreme Court briefs, and you could lose your job if you literally didn’t dot every I and cross every T.

“You’re taught to look at and solve problems quickly. I remember once being told that notes you get back from producers on how to improve your script can be brutal, and I said, ‘Nothing can be harder than the law, where you get abused a lot more.’ I’ve never had a TV experience that comes close to how difficult it was when I was a lawyer.”

Adds Jonathan Shapiro, who spent eight years as a federal prosecutor before landing a job as story editor on “The Practice,” “I learned how to write my own briefs, which teaches you how to write a particular amount of pages in an assertive, persuasive, entertaining way on a deadline. Being a trial lawyer, as I was, you essentially go into combat every day and, after having adversaries punch holes in your work, you toughen up quick. Which is important if you’re going to make it in television.”

Because the very nature of their job requires lawyers to be waist-deep in the personal dramas of their clients, they often acquire a keen understanding of what makes for a good, compelling story. “The law is a marvelous reservoir of conflict,” says Breech. “The full range of human character traits are on display for you.” And not just the dramatic traits, either.

“Just read some trial transcripts,” says Appel, who went from working for the U.S. attorney’s office in New York to writing on “The Simpsons.” “They’re some of the funniest things you’ll ever see. That’s why, by and large, lawyers are some of the smartest, funniest people I’ve ever known.”

Of course, those transcripts are filled with witness testimony, much of which is as carefully scripted as an episode of “Law & Order.” “Cross-examining witnesses helps immensely with learning how to write dialogue,” says Schindel. “You have to know where you’re going with your witnesses, so you spend a lot of time talking in your head the night before: ‘If I say X, they will say Y, and where do we go from there?’”

Lawyers-turned-TV scribes have plenty of common characteristics that help them make their career transition. However, not all of them have taken the same path to break into the entertainment business. Some grew up loving the law and relished getting their days in court. Even now, a part of them misses the experience of trying real cases.

“On any given day, I could still go to the county courthouse, watch a case being tried and be totally fascinated,” says Shapiro, who continues to work as a judge in small claims court whenever his schedule allows.

For every writer who enjoyed being a lawyer, however, there seems to be twice as many who never intended to make it a career. To them, law school was a way of stalling decisions about what to do with their lives, and being a lawyer was essentially the day job to keep money coming in while they wrote spec scripts.

“Every step of the way, I knew I’d be a writer,” says Alfonso Moreno, a Stanford Law School graduate who worked for three years in civil litigation before enrolling in UCLA film school. “The reason you find so many lawyers turning to TV writing is because so many of them realize how dry the law can be. They are smart enough to practice, but they just don’t ultimately want to be lawyers.”

Adds Appel: “I wanted to be a comedy writer, but that didn’t seem to be a viable career when I was younger. With law school, I had a sense that that was doable. It’s funny now, because people will ask me if they should go to law school. I ask them, ‘Do you want to be a lawyer?’ You’d be surprised how many people don’t have an answer for that question.”

Whatever their feelings about a legal career, these former attorneys have had in effect in their new profession in terms of altering the way lawyers are portrayed on the small screen.

Once upon a time, lawyer shows were like “Perry Mason,” all about mysterious murders and surprising last-act courtroom confessions. When series like “L.A. Law” began to appear, things changed. “Legal shows are grittier now, more truthful than they ever used to be,” says Moreno, currently working on CBS’ “The Guardian.” “I think that comes from having so many people who have done it write about it.”

For lawyers eager to escape their profession, writing for television offers a creative alternative, as well as one of the few jobs with a potential income that can top that of a good law career. “All my lawyer friends are always pitching me ideas,” says Schindel.

Adds Michael Chernuchin, who worked for six years as a Manhattan attorney before working for “Law & Order” and now the Fox drama “24”: “I hear from lawyers nonstop. I think a lot of lawyers are people who ended up going to law school as a last resort.”

Writing can also provide a sense of satisfaction a real-life courtroom might not.

“I once wrote a three-part death penalty episode for a show, and I remember thinking, ‘Doing this, I might actually make a difference on this issue for a lot of people,’” says Moreno.

“We’re lucky because we can create cases where the judges say exactly what we want them to say, and the jurors can come back with the right verdict,” Shapiro says. “This is something that definitely doesn’t happen when you’re practicing law.”

Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson can understand why many of her students and colleagues would be interested in moving over to what she jokingly calls “the dark side.”

“The judges never yell at you,” she says, insisting that there are still plenty of lawyers like her who love practicing law too much to take up television writing. “Television writing is a way for lawyers to be more in the action because, frankly, a lot of what we do as lawyers isn’t very exciting. In television, they can laugh a little bit.”

USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky concurs. “There’s always been a certain number of lawyers and law students working on screenplays,” he says. “But this is Los Angeles. You have a certain number of people in every profession writing screenplays.”