Legal movies and television shows are popular, but they also need to be believable. Lawyers behind shows like Diggstown and Billable Hours use their legal skills and experience to create authenticity.
For entertainment value, few things can beat a good movie or television show about lawyers. From drama, comedy, and social justice to all the sordid, juicy little details that spin out in a dramatized courtroom, the law has something for everyone.
The law is popular: a recent entry on Internet movie site IMDb lists no less than 198 law programs on television alone, and that’s likely a small number. Social media pundits debate the merits of law-based programming. Lawyer Jayne Reardon, in her article Grading TV Lawyers: Ethics vs. Entertainment, says, “We know that lawyer television shows are aired for entertainment – not as a primer on the work of lawyers or their ethics. Yet, these shows have a huge impact on the image of the profession in the eyes of the public.”
While public perception of lawyers’ ethics and honesty has dropped (a 2023 U.S. Gallup poll put lawyers at 16 per cent approval – a seven per cent decline from 2019), viewers just can’t get enough of the law. According to YouGov data journalist Hoang Nguyen, “Stories of the justice system and the people who practice within – and sometimes outside – the confines of the law continue to intrigue Americans.” And writer Emily Hinkley cited a survey of 500 legal professionals that found that “over half of respondents … agreed that their career choice was influenced by what they had seen on TV.”
Something this popular demands authenticity, and producers of law-based entertainment shows want to ensure that real-life lawyers vet their scripts.
Like Americans, Canadians are fans of justice-system programming, and the country is home to many popular award-winning legal shows, including Burden of Truth, Diggstown, Family Law, Street Legal (created by famed Canadian crime fiction author and long-time defense lawyer William Deverell), the humorous panelist show This Is The Law, and Da Vinci’s Inquest. Shows like these created opportunities for Canadian legal minds like Donald C. Murray KC, and Adam Till, who found work in both creating and scrutinizing their genuineness.
Donald C. Murray
Based in Dartmouth, Murray reviewed the scripts for the multiple award-winning, gritty street drama Diggstown (2019-2022), created by Dalhousie Law School graduate Floyd Kane. It follows the experiences of fictional lawyer Marcie Diggs as she moves from corporate law to legal aid, taking on cases ranging from human rights and poverty to racism.
As a defence lawyer and legal arbitrator with more than 35 years of experience and who continues to represent clients in court, Murray was approached by Kane and spent three seasons with the show.
“Floyd was working on issues important to the Black community and criminal justice,” says Murray. Kane “had a number of excellent writers working for him.” Murray found his own knowledge and experience of courtroom procedure highly valued, as he was able to relay how a criminal case “plays out in a courtroom. My role was saying ‘this is something that happens in a courtroom.’”
If the scriptwriter wrote that something specific would happen procedure-wise, Murray might explain that it wasn’t possible, telling them, “‘let’s modify the script a little.’ As Floyd and I often discussed over the course of the years that I was working on the show, it needs to look like real life. I was pleased and honoured to be given the scope to say, ‘This is the way it’s going to happen, or ‘this is not the way it’s going to happen.’”
One little “tug-of-war” between Murray and Diggstown’s showrunners was about Supreme Court-based cases on the show. In Canada’s Supreme Court, lawyers wear gowns. This was a no-no for Diggstown, as its producers sought to sell the show to American networks (no gowns in the U.S. Supreme Court), and that decision proved successful.
Diggstown’s format allowed its writers to highlight significant social issues, and the authenticity came through in each production. Not only did he review the scripts for accuracy, Murray also put Kane in touch with legal representatives from Crown prosecutors to pathologists, underscoring the show’s commitment to be as realistic as possible.
Adam Till
In Adam Till’s case, he was a law student whose parents really wanted him to become a doctor. He became a lawyer anyway, but what he really wanted to do was write comedy. Seriously.
So, he did. More than two decades ago, lawyer Till had a mission: take his nascent corporate law career with Goodmans LLP and rewrite it into something entertaining, fun, and a touch more fulfilling than an endless routine of legal work.
His writing career began as he sought to harness his creative writing energy and make it work for him. A graduate of the Schulich School (MBA) and Osgoode Hall Law School (JD), Till says he “just realized [a legal career] was a grind and a lot of detail work, especially corporate law.”
His first big venture into television was co-creating specialty channel Showcase’s Billable Hours (2006-2008), a show about three young lawyers who “find that being a lawyer in a large corporate law firm sucks and that it will take more than hard work to get ahead – only to be rewarded with more hard work,” according to an entry on IMDb. The show (as quirkily hilarious two decades later as in its heyday) was a winner, garnering a Gemini Award for writing, and earning rave reviews during its three-season run.
Before Billable Hours, Till crafted a novel and then a screenplay. He was fortunate to find a mentor in entertainment lawyer Michael Levine, who “just thought I had a natural kind of ear for dialogue and a good sense of scene.” Levine took him on as a client at his firm, Westwood Creative Artists, allowing Till to retire from the law “at the ripe age of 26 or 27,” he says with a chuckle. His deeply embedded law experience led to work with famed director Atom Egoyan, then on to creating Billable Hours (with writer/actor Fabrizio Filippo, who also starred in the show). Years later, after making short films, feature films and television movies (including crafting the screenplay for the 2005 short film Leo, for which he won a Canadian Comedy Award for Film Writing) Till became a teacher and director at the Toronto Film School, where he’s now vice-president.
Aiming for authenticity
So, are law shows realistic, and what makes them believable?
Till says that “while every show is different, a lot of the Law and Order-type shows seem to focus on real cases, but always the most exciting parts of them. You just don’t want to have someone (on a show) sitting in front of a computer doing research or drafting a document. I’m not from the criminal law world, but my criminal law friends tell me that these shows are accurate, but they leave out huge swaths of boring motions, evidence and discovery and all that … and in corporate law, the exciting parts are almost never there. So that’s why I made it (Billable Hours) a comedy…it’s about the funny stuff you do in between the boring work.”
People can also sense when a show rings true. They know “when you’re actually being genuine in the way you describe the world. So having been a lawyer, writing a show about lawyers made sense.” And a big compliment is having strangers see Till’s work and say, “‘you must have been a lawyer!’”
Murray also received his share of accolades. As a defense lawyer, he is often asked for commentary after handling a case, and “there were media people who hadn’t known that I’d been involved in the show, and they would talk about how good it was.”
The aftermath
Till’s years of writing and production experience led him to take on mentorship roles, from directing the Toronto Film School’s screenwriting diploma program (as well as its online associate diploma program) to helming Yorkville University’s Bachelor of Creative Arts program before assuming a more senior role. Working at the Toronto Film School allows him to guide up-and-coming writers, and some have gone on to work on legal shows, including a graduate who worked on Diggstown.
For Murray, Diggstown was a singular experience. As for his likes and dislikes, he admits that he doesn’t watch much television but enjoys justice-related movies. A favourite motion picture is The Paper Chase, a 1973 movie (and later a television series) starring John Houseman as a no-nonsense law professor. He also likes The Lincoln Lawyer, starring Matthew McConaughey as a free-wheeling criminal defense attorney whose office is a chauffeur-driven Lincoln.
But TV shows like the acclaimed Better Call Saul? They’re not on Murray’s list. As a defence lawyer, Better Call Saul cut a little too close at times to Murray’s own experience.
Several years ago, “I was working with a firm of mostly family lawyers and one who did some civil litigation,” he says. “They all loved watching Better Call Saul, and they’d come in and want to talk to me about it. But I was dealing with that kind of stuff every day, so it wouldn’t have been relaxing for me to watch it on TV. I didn’t want to believe that lawyers [on the show] would be as corrupt as they were. So no, I’ve never watched an episode of it.”
As for Till, having created an impressive collection of television movies, shows and feature films, the project that is still most dear to him is, not surprisingly, Billable Hours.
“I was quite lucky to get to make a show about my experiences. I appreciated it at the time, but I didn’t fully appreciate it the way I do now. People work their whole careers to create their own series, and I got to do it about a world that I knew and that I loved, but I had a different take on it from everybody else.”
And the law career? While he doesn’t miss it, Till says the detail, discipline and organized nature of legal work created a solid foundation for his future writing. “It helped me in so many ways – the education and the skill set were very good.”
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DISCLAIMER The information in this article was correct at time of publishing. The law may have changed since then. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of LawNow or the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta.
About John Cooper
