And now his first trip out would be on a bus with bars over the windows.” Of one 23-year-old black drug dealer, facing a number of years in prison, Haller (as narrator) comments: “I felt like he was another one who’d never had a shot at anything but thug life in the first place.… He had never been to a county beach, let alone outside Los Angeles. I could not help one without hurting the other.” Both the book and film essentially hinge on Haller’s efforts to solve that legal-ethical problem.Ĭonnelly writes intelligently, and not without sensitivity for the plight of many in the Los Angeles area. “I believed that I had one client,” explains the lawyer in the novel, “who was guilty of the murder another client was serving a life sentence for.

In the end, Haller faces an apparently impossible dilemma. The immediate case appears to be linked to a previous one in which Haller convinced his client, a young Latino, to plead guilty to murder and accept a life sentence to avoid the death penalty.

It will not be giving away too much to reveal that their inquiries soon indicate that Roulet is hardly the innocent he claims to be. Macy), set to work looking into the details of the violent incident. Haller and his investigator, Frank Levin (William H.

Backed by his millionaire mother and her well-connected legal adviser, Roulet emphatically insists on his innocence and repudiates any plea bargain or possible agreement with the authorities. A very wealthy young man, Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe), stands accused of severely beating and threatening to rape a prostitute. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation.”Īn apparently lucrative case falls into Haller’s lap. Summing up, Connelly writes in his novel: “The law was not about truth. In fact, he asserts early on that there is no client as frightening as an innocent one, because if a lawyer fails to prevent such an individual from going to prison, it will scar the attorney for life. Haller operates in what he himself describes, in Connelly’s work, as “the gray areas.” He has no interest in the innocence or guilt of his clients. His usual clients are drug dealers, call girls, con artists and petty criminals of one kind or another. The story concerns a Los Angeles lawyer Mickey Haller (Matthew McConaughey), who conducts business from the Lincoln Town Car of the title. The film follows the general framework of the original relatively closely. The Lincoln Lawyer is a thriller-courtroom drama directed by Brad Furman ( The Take) and adapted from the best-selling 2005 novel by veteran crime writer Michael Connelly.

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