(The Firm)

John Grisham has made a living writing about bad lawyers and their firms. It started with his 1991 bestseller, The Firm, made two years later into a blockbuster film starring Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman. It focuses on a young associate who joins a shady tax firm in Memphis, Tennessee, that turns out to be a front for organized crime. The firm doles out expensive perks to recruit lawyers and then blackmails them to keep them in line. And if they don’t, they get transferred—usually to the bottom of the ocean or somewhere else where accidents tend to happen.

Bendini, Lambert & Locke is one of many shady law firms in the Grishamverse, including White and Blazevich (The Pelican Brief), Tinley Britt (The Rainmaker) and Whitney & Cable & White, the firm in The Runaway Jury that uses unethical jury consultant Rankin Fitch (played in the movie by Hackman).