The Firm

1
The Firm

• The Firm's primary focus is on Mitch McDeere, who
  graduated third in his class at Harward Law
  School. Mitch has recently married his girlfriend
  from college, Abby, his brother Ray is serving a
  prison term, and his other brother, Rusty, died
  in Vietnam.
• Mitch has offers from law firms in New York and
  Chicago but eventually decides to join Bendini,
  Lambert and Locke, a small tax law firm based in
  Memphis. The firm seduces him by offering him a
  large salary and a large house, as well as paying
  off his student loans. Soon after he joins, his
  new colleagues help him study and pass his bar
  exam..
• Two of Mitch's colleagues die in a scuba diving
  accident in the Cayman Islands the week he starts
  at the firm Mitch finds the deaths unsettling,
  but ignores it to work hard, faced with the
  prospect of becoming a partner after only a few
  years. Then, an FBI agent, Wayne Tarrance,
  confronts Mitch, and he learns gradually that the
  firm is actually part of the white collar
  operations of the Morolto crime family of
  Chicago. For years, the Moroltos have lured new
  lawyers from poor backgrounds into the firm with
  promises of wealth and security. By the time a
  lawyer is aware of the the firm's actual
  operations, he cannot leave. No lawyer has
  actually escaped the firm alive, as the death of
  his two colleagues makes him so aware. Mitch
  learns that his house, office and car are bugged.
  He and Abby are also routinely followed, making
  his meetings with the FBI dangerous. Pressure
  from both the firm and the FBI, who warns him he
  will regret not cooperating later on, if he
  chooses to ignore the problem, force Mitch to
  make a decision quickly.

2
The rainmaker

• Rudy already has one case, a case of insurance
  bad faith, which he passionately believes in. He
  represents a poor family, Dot and Buddy Black
  whom he met through a class visit to a community
  centre. The case could be worth several million
  dollars in damages, but his personal life is
  falling to pieces and he is about to declare
  himself bankrupt. When his employer is raided by
  the police and the FBI, he and Deck set up in
  practice themselves and file suit on behalf of
  the Blacks, whose son Donny Ray is dying of
  leukemia but almost certainly could have been
  saved with a bone marrow transplant since he has
  an identical twin brother, a fact which would
  make the procedure virtually certain to work due
  to the perfect genetic match. The procedure
  should be covered by their insurance company,
  Great Benefit Life Insurance.
• Before the trial commences, the Blacks' son dies.
  The case goes to trial and Rudy uncovers a scheme
  Great Benefit ran throughout 1991 to deny every
  insurance claim submitted, regardless of
  validity. Great Benefit was playing on the odds
  that the insured would not consult an attorney
  (which Dot Black didn't until it was too late for
  Donny Ray). A former employee of Great Benefit
  testifies that the scheme generated an extra 40
  million in revenue for the company.

3
The runaway jury

• Widow Celeste Wood is suing a tobacco company for
  sending her husband to an early grave. She hires
  a lawyer named Mr. Rohr, who has had mixed
  results in court cases before, never one this
  big. The judge in the case is found out to be
  Judge Harkin, who is about to have the largest
  case he has ever seen in his courtroom.
• On the defence are the tobacco companies. In
  particular a tobacco company known as Pynex and
  its head, Mr. Jankin. It is part of a group known
  as the Big Four, a small group of very powerful
  and influential cigarette companies that has
  joined forces to defend their names. Together,
  they have formed "The Fund" - a seemingly
  bottomless well of money intended to be used in
  the cases such as this.
• They hire Rankin Fitch - an expert who has helped
  to "win" cases like this before. He is virtually
  unknown to everyone else in the world, except for
  the rich companies. He does not get directly
  involved in courtroom, but prefers to remain
  hidden and let Mr. Cable, another lawyer take
  care of the talking.

4
The king of torts

• Clay Carter is a public defender, dreaming of one
  day joining a big law firm. Reluctantly, he takes
  on the case of Tequila Watson, a man accused of a
  random street killing. Clay assumes that it is
  just another D.C. murder.
• Clay soon learns of a pharmaceutical conspiracy,
  with the help of the mysterious Max Pace, and
  finds himself landing a huge settlement. Soon
  Clay finds himself being one of the legal
  professions biggest tort lawyers. Unfortunately,
  this sudden fame isn't without a price.

5
The insider

• This is the true story of Jeffrey Wigand (Russell
  Crowe), a man who signed a confidentiality
  agreement before getting fired from a big tobacco
  company. Hotshot 60 minutes producer Bergman
  (Al Pacino) asks Wigand to decipher some
  technical documents, and soon realizes there's a
  bigger story hiding inside Wigand. On top of
  that, Wigand is recruited to testify in
  Mississippi for a case that claims cigarettes
  are addictive. The 60 minutes piece will
  eventually be pulled because of corporate
  pressure. Wigand deals with his personal dilemma,
  and Bergman battles the corporation.

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8
Erin Brockovich

• Erin Brockovich is an unemployed single mother of
  three who, after losing a personal injury lawsuit
  against a doctor in a car accident she was in,
  asks her lawyer, Edward L. Masry, if he can find
  her a job in compensation for the loss. Ed gives
  her work as a file clerk in his office, and she
  runs across some files on a pro bono case
  involving real-estate and medical records against
  Pacific Gas and Electric Company.
• Erin begins digging into the particulars of the
  case, convinced that the facts simply do not add
  up, and persuades Ed to allow her further
  research. After investigation, she discovers a
  systematic cover-up of the industrial poisoning
  (Hexavalent Chromium) of the town of Hinkley's
  water supply that threatens the health of an
  entire community. She finds that PGE is
  responsible for the extensive illnesses residents
  of Hinkley have been diagnosed with and fights to
  bring the company to justice.

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10
Silkwood

• Silkwood is a 1983, Oscar-nominated film which
  dramatizes the story of Karen Silkwood, who died
  under suspicious circumstances while
  investigating alleged wrongdoing at the
  Kerr-McGee plutonium plant where she worked

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12
A civil action

• Jan Schlichtmann (John Travolta) is a successful
  lawyer who has started his own practice. Early
  legal victories have made him wealthy and one of
  Boston's most eligible bachelors. All of this
  begins to collapse after Jan begins activity on
  one of his firm's cases, a lawsuit on behalf of
  the parents of deceased children in a small
  industrial town against the companies they
  believe to have polluted their water. The
  pollutant in question is trichloroethylene, an
  industrial solvent, and it appears to have caused
  fatal cases of leukemia and cancer, as well as a
  wide variety of other health problems, among the
  citizens of the town.
• Jan believes that this case will be easily won,
  resulting in a fortune for him and the families
  and prestige for his firm. However, the huge
  expenses in both time and money incurred in the
  class action suit soon begin to take their toll
  on his finances, ambitions, and career.

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14
Class action

• The story is about a lawsuit concerning injuries
  caused by a defective automobile. The suit takes
  on a personal dimension because the injured
  plaintiff's attorney (Hackman) is the father of
  the automobile manufacturer's attorney
  (Mastrantonio). The central premise of the film
  is roughly analogous to the controversy
  surrounding the Ford Pinto.
• The auto manufacturer in the film also utilizes a
  "bean-counting" approach to risk management,
  whereby the projections of actuaries for probable
  deaths and injured car-owners is weighed against
  the cost of re-tooling and re-manufacturing the
  car without the defect (exploding gas tanks) with
  the resulting decision to keep the car as-is to
  positively benefit short term profitability.
• The film makes remarks concerning challenges
  brought about by "dumping" by Japanese car makers
  (temporarily selling below cost to grab market
  share, then raising prices exorbitantly after
  driving competition out of business), and the
  increased need to cut costs to keep pace with
  Asian car makers (Korea, Japan, China, etc.) that
  don't pay anywhere near the union wages of
  Detroit's auto workers.