About The Practice
The Practice follows the scrappy, perpetually cash-strapped Boston defense firm of Robert Donnell and Associates, a band of lawyers who claw out a living in the unglamorous trenches of criminal law. Unlike the polished attorneys of glossier dramas, these are working-class fighters who take the cases nobody else wants and live with the consequences. David E. Kelley built the series around a single uncomfortable question that never goes away.
What does it cost to defend the guilty? Episode after episode, the firm wrestles with the moral compromises of zealous advocacy, where winning an acquittal for a client who may have done the deed feels less like victory and more like a wound. The show refuses easy answers, dragging its characters and its audience through courtroom verdicts that satisfy the law but rarely the conscience. It is the darker, grittier precursor to the sunnier spin-off Boston Legal.
Over eight seasons the firm endures betrayals, breakdowns, ethics charges, and the slow erosion of idealism, all while delivering some of television's most electric closing arguments. The ensemble shifts and fractures, but the core tension holds: justice is expensive, and somebody always pays. The series stars Dylan McDermott as the firm's brooding leader, Steve Harris as its fiercest courtroom voice, and Camryn Manheim as its compassionate, tough-as-nails conscience.