User Reviews

One of my two favorite episodes of Law and Order is this one. Tony Roberts and Jill Clayburgh play a pair of divorce attorneys who happen to represent a couple getting divorced.

As I believe Carey Lowell commented these two represent the legal system on steroids. Roberts and Clayburgh were in fact married to each other at one time. These two happen to be retained by the husband the wife going through a divorce.

They use the legal system as an athletic arena in which they exercise their hate for each other. One of them actually kills a psychiatrist who was going to give an evaluation that would have torpedoed part of one of the divorce cases.

Usually Law and Order plots are grounded in a whole lot of realism. This one however could have been a movie of the week.

Roberts and Clayburgh were never better. For a Law and Order episode this is one bizarre plot, but its basic nuttiness makes it so effective. Especially when one of the lawyers wears a wire to trap the other in confessing to the murder.

This is certainly one of the sharpest written and twisty Law and Order episodes, because of the secret at the base of it all.

A marriage councilor is murdered in her office, and soon Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis (Jerry Orbach and Benjamin Bratt) are investigating how the killer got into her office in a city hospital. There are one or two typical red herrings: A madman who thinks he is the Pope, and who liked the therapist who helped get him shelter, and the idiot running hospital security who has an excuse for every error that the police find (at one point Orbach says, "I smell a big law suit!" looking at the hidden room of one of the transients the idiot security man boasted they ran out of the building.

When the red herrings start to settle, it turns out that the therapist was supposed to be speaking as an expert witness in a divorce action between Molly Kilpatrick (Haviland Morris) and Billy Kilpatrick (Craig Lawlor). The couple's attempt at an amicable divorce was shot down in flames by their two lawyers, Sheila Atkins for Molly (Jill Claybergh) and Paul Redfield for Billy (Tony Roberts). Subsequently we learn that the two attorneys were once married themselves to each other, and that may explain the harshness that entered the divorce as claims, counter claims, injunctions, demands for discovery, new proceedings, are all being called in the name of the two clients by the attorney.

Roberts keeps insisting that Claybergh is on pointless fishing expeditions to annoy his client. Claybergh keeps insisting that the husband has hidden assets with the connivance of Roberts in off-shore accounts. She may be right, but (as Sam McCoy (Sam Waterston) finds out) the paperwork on the case from Claybergh is very petty at times.

The beginning of the end comes when Claybergh begins to act at supposedly cross purposes from her client's criminal lawyer in trying to arrange a three to five year manslaughter rap for her. Morris is horrified that Claybergh is doing this, insisting she is innocent, but Morris is a pill abuser, and the best suspect. But to get Claybergh to bring Morris to accepting this sentence, McCoy must assist Claybergh in proving that the money laundering is going on.

Roberts brings in an attaché case full of subpoenas and similar documents created by Claybergh to show what he's been up against. One interests Waterston and his assistant Jamey Lowell (Carey Ross): a special request to nullify a Church edict that nullified a marriage on the grounds of a violation of Canon Law. The case actually seemed to have merit, but Claybergh abandoned it...two days after the murder of her star victim. And suddenly the open and shut case against the unstable ex-wife turns into a different direction.

It is a clever episode that shows the superiority of the best of the Law & Order plots. And the incredulity of the story is brought home when the broken hearted widower of the therapist tells off the perpetrator in court. But the final word is ever that of D.A. Adam Schiff (Steven Hill) and Waterson and Ross on the weird twist given to ethics by two venomous lawyers.