Another week, another client TGW connects with on a personal level. This time it's a wrongly convicted criminal defendant and his retrial brought with it these nuggets for discussion:

Remember:

• The Good Wife = TGW
• Her Boss = Will
• Her Scary "Mentor" =  Power Suit
• Super Comptetitive Associate Played by the Former Logan Huntzberger = Hot Shot

The Stereotypical Public Interest Attorney:  Originally the defendant was represented by a "Legal Aid" attorney and boy is she a doozy. A closely cropped pixie cut, the same suit over the course of multiple trial days, and a series of shoddy defense tactics mark this lady lawyer as a classic negative depiction of public interest attorneys. Well that's not fair - the haircut isn't necessarily a negative, just a cliche. 

Pragmatic Discrimination: Hot Shot and TGW get a quick turnaround assignment, which leads to this division of gem of a line: "you're the faster typist." This made me think of all the times I've heard women complain about how they get stuck with secretarial work in their offices under similar pretexts. Hot Shot gets to do the research and craft an argument and it's TGW's job to type it up. And this makes sense because that's what she's good at doing. I've heard the same thing with respect to court document filings and other similarly tedious but detail oriented work. This is a rational form of discrimination, but it's still discrimination.

Mrs. v. Ms: Just this week I read a great piece by Nancy Gibbs in Time about the derivation and current usage of these salutations. Now here's cranky judge continually referring to TGW as Mrs. Florrick. Did this grate on your ears the way it did mine?

OK this last complaint has nothing to do with depictions of gender in the profession. But is anyone else just unwilling to suspend rational understanding about ex parte communications with witnesses even for the sake of fiction and tv and go-with-the-flow-ness?