Book review: The Litigators by John Grisham

I came upon this book with the events from The Confession still fresh from my mind so I was expecting another hard-hitting legal fiction.. After the first few pages imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself laughing.. Laughter caused by a Grisham novel? Yeah, I found it hard to believe too.. But there it was..

Poor David is a young successful attorney who's on the verge of a serious meltdown when he came to work that fateful day.. He decided right there and there that he's had enough so he jumped back into the elevator, ignored his phone, and luckily stumbled into a pub with a good bartender where he sufficiently got wasted..

On the cab home, still inebriated, he saw this "boutique" law firm nestled between a massage parlor and a lawnmower repair shop. It was a far cry from the big and successful corporate firm he's been slaving at for years and so out of nowhere, he applied for a job on this small firm. A laugh out loud moment for me was when he, still in a drunken state, tried to swing a piece of metal against other lawyers to keep them from taking "their" clients when they all ran to site. This impressed the partners of the firm of Finley & Figg - a small legal firm who's so low on funds and clients that the junior partner had opted to advertise their trade on bingo cards, teehee..

The junior partner, Wally, dreams big and is always on a hunt for juicy cases that would result in a huge settlement with almost no work on their part.. A too-good-to-be-true case lands in their lap when Wally meets the son of a recently deceased old client of theirs. Brimming with anticipation, Wally realised that they could join a class action against a pharmaceutical company for a drug that was thought to cause heart attacks. In short, Wally was already counting his share on the huge settlement he was sure the pharma company would shell out. Were they successful? Won't say.. Hehe..

The main characters:

The characters are flawed but you know they're good guys and so you can't help but love them.. Wally is like any person who dreams to have it all and goes about achieving it by using shortcuts. David loves the law but is inexperienced with litigation (it was funny how he started to read Perry Mason books just so he could have an idea on what to do in a courtroom, hahaha.. Kudos to Grisham for mentioning Erle Stanley Gardner (via Perry Mason) in his book.. I don't know if he's done it before, but I loved it because I'm such a Perry Mason fan!) and was at a point in his life that he (bravely!) chose to be happy earning so little rather than earning big but wasting away. Oscar, the senior partner, doesn't really want to rock the boat and just wants a divorce from his wife and then retire peacefully.. Rochelle is the glue that binds these men together with her quick wit and managerial skills.

My thoughts:

The book is surprisingly funny and serious at the same time..  It was so funny how David ended up doing all the work for their class action. For a newbie, he seriously was able to pull it off on cross examination. The Perry Mason novels helped, I suppose, hahaha.. He also ended up with cases of his own that were seriously downplayed in the novel but were actually the ones that brought about results. Ah, the irony! It was everywhere in this book, starting from the title itself. I loved it, I simply loved it!

The serious tone of the book was the lead poisoning case that David and by extension, his wife, worked on.. It could happen and the thought really scares me.. Toys for kids should be strictly QA'ed and made with kid-friendly materials.. Not all firms in the real world are as quick to claim responsibility as the one in this novel..

I highly recommend this book and I know you'd enjoy it the same way that I did, Grisham fan or not..

Til then!