The Lincoln Lawyer

“The law was a large, rusting machine that sucked up people and lives and money. I was just a mechanic. I had become expert at going into the machine and fixing things and extracting what I needed from it in return.” 

Mick concludes that the legal system is corrupt and unfair to his clients, especially as they come from backgrounds that set them up to live a criminal life. As a defense attorney, he cuts many corners and often breaks the law in order to help his clients. In the beginning of the novel, he justifies his behaviors by thinking of himself as a mechanic that can fix the problems within the corrupt system.

“Much of society thought of me as the devil but they were wrong. I was a greasy angel.” 

Mick is aware that he fits the stereotype of a corrupt defense attorney who represents the worst possible clients. He often defends drug dealers, thieves, prostitutes, and gang members. Most people assume that an attorney would only choose this line of work if they were a bad person. However, Mick thinks that people don’t understand the complexity of his clients. He believes even a guilty client has as much right to legal representation as an innocent one. He also knows that there is just as much corruption in the wealthier clientele who rely on tax evasion and other means of scamming the system. 

“For a long time I had put my law practice ahead of my parenting practice. It was something I promised myself to change.”

Mick rarely sees his daughter. Rather than spending time with her, he just sends Hayley expensive gifts. His ex-wife has stopped telling their daughter, Hayley, that he will come see her because she is tired of seeing their daughter disappointed. Mick explains that he stopped trying to have a relationship with Hayley when she was younger because he didn’t know how to relate to her. Now that she is eight, he is finding that he really enjoys being with her and wants to become more involved in her life. 

“What mattered was the evidence against him—the proof—and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.” 

When Mick takes a client to trial, the prosecution must prove his client guilty. Mick only bears the burden of proving that it is possible his client didn’t do it. If he can argue persuasively enough to provide reasonable doubt to the jury, he has done his job. So he has become adept at manipulating the truth and seeing what seems to be a black and white situation from new perspectives in order to show the potential for reasonable doubt.

“He was damn good and it made me proud to carry his name. But the law was different now. It was grayer. Ideals had long been downgraded to notions. Notions were optional.” 

Mick lost his father when he was five years old. Everything he knows about his father comes from the books left behind. His father was a prolific and well-respected defense attorney and author. Carrying the same name helps Mick gain clout in the legal community, but Mick feels like he can’t live up to the name. He claims that the legal system has changed since the days when his father practiced law and that he cannot adhere to the same ideals his father espoused. 

“I hated representing women who were incarcerated […] I had found that almost all of the time, their crimes could be traced back to men. Men who took advantage of them, abused them, deserted them, hurt them.” 

Like his father, Mick has a soft spot for representing sex workers. He feels a great deal of compassion for them, as he believes they never turn to selling their bodies of their own volition. He sees women as victims of society and then the legal system. Even though he makes no money representing Gloria Dayton, he repeatedly represents her in order to get her sentences reduced or help her get into a rehab program. At the end of the novel, he gives her $25,000 to leave L.A. and start a new life in Hawaii.

“He said the scariest client a lawyer will ever have is an innocent client. Because if you fuck up and he goes to prison, it’ll scar you for life.” 

These are the words of Mick’s father. Mick becomes so afraid of missing a client’s innocence that he ends up missing the more important thing: evil. He also misses the importance of believing his client’s words, rather than trusting the evidence against him, and convinces an innocent client to plead guilty.

“I know McGinley dealt death and destruction in the form of rock cocaine and probably committed untold violence and other offences he was never charged with, but I still felt bad for him. I felt like he was another one who’d never had a shot at anything but thug life in the first place.” 

McGinley was born in the projects, never knew his father, and had no opportunity to earn a degree or pursue a career outside of selling drugs. He simply started doing what was typical. Mick has enough empathy to understand that although McGinley is a criminal, he is the product of an unjust society. 

“Don’t worry about your mother. A mother will do what she has to do to protect her young.” 

Mick doesn’t realize when he speaks these words how far Mary Windsor will go (and has already) to protect her young. Mick is trying to convince Roulet that Mary should testify about her rape to explain why they both carry knives everywhere they go. Mick doesn’t know yet that she fabricated this story to help protect Roulet, and that she will be willing to kill in order to keep him out of prison. 

“The woman I had never been able to get by or get over, whose rejection sent me reeling.”

The softest side of Mick’s character comes out when he talks about his ex-wife, Maggie. He is still in love with her. She divorced him because she is a prosecutor who believes in fighting for justice, and it was too difficult for her to watch her husband defend the very criminals that assaulted and stole from her innocent clients. She also says that he couldn’t leave the sleazy lawyer act at the door, so they would end up fighting most of the time. Despite all this, she still loves him and wants him in her and their daughter’s lives. 

“I could only think of Jesus Menendez’s eyes, because I knew I was the one who had killed the light in them.” 

After Mick visits Jesus in prison he is forced to see for himself the toll that pleading guilty took on Jesus. When he convinced Jesus to plead guilty, Mick thought that in 15 years Jesus would still be young enough to lead a life. Seeing the way Jesus has changed, aged rapidly and lost any desire to live, Mick can no longer believe his own story. The guilt that he feels for convincing Jesus to plead guilty overcomes him and haunts him for the rest of his life. 

“I knew then that he had been keeping tabs on me since the Menendez case.” 

When Roulet explains how he let himself into Mick’s house, it becomes clear that as soon as Mick began defending Jesus, Roulet began to follow Mick. Roulet knew that Mick had the potential to discover that Roulet is the real killer, so when he was accused of attacking Reggie Campo, he already knew that hiring Mick would keep his evil deeds secret though attorney-client privilege. 

“Roulet paid his way through by purchasing from other students completed class assignments, test answers, and even a ninety-page senior thesis on the life and work of John Fante.” 

This allusion to author John Fante, famous for writing novels about the gritty reality of Los Angeles, may be included as a nod to work that inspired Connelly’s own. 

“I view people two ways. They’re either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-other-cheek people. She’s definitely an eye-for-an-eye person and I can’t see her keeping it quiet unless she was protecting that guy […] I’m telling you, man, Roulet is evil […] the more I look at him, the more I see the devil.”

Levin is the first one to make the connection that Mary and Roulet are either lying or that Roulet may have been present during her attack. However, Levin still identifies Roulet as the evil one. No one suspects Mary—the reader is shocked when Mary’s murderousness is revealed in the final pages. 

“There is nothing like the start of a season, before all the one-run losses, pitching breakdowns and missed opportunities. Before reality sets in.” 

Mick’s excitement about the start of the baseball season is a metaphor for the start of a new trial. When he began Roulet’s case, he was thrilled to represent a seemingly innocent client who would also pay enormous legal fees. He felt confident that he could win this legal battle. As the case unfolds and trial begins, he is like an exhausted baseball player who has suffered many losses and the reality of potentially losing everything sets in. 

“All I know is I should have been afraid of one thing but I was afraid of the complete opposite.” 

Mick believes that criminals are people who made bad choices, rather than evil. He is afraid of representing an innocent client and losing the case, but he has never been afraid of representing an evil client. Because he is so used to seeing the world through his gray lens of reasonable doubt, he doesn’t notice the clear-cut case of evil sitting in front of him. 

“In his words I heard the threat and in his smile I saw the evil that Raul Levin had seen.” 

Mick finally sees that Roulet is evil when Roulet threatens Mick’s family. Until this point, Roulet has managed to fake or control his emotions well. But when backed into a corner, he threatens Mick and reveals his true colors. 

“You’re a sleazy defense lawyer with two ex-wives and an eight-year old daughter. And we all still love you.”

Both of Mick’s ex-wives still love him. Lorna works for him as his personal assistant and Maggie can’t seem to stay away from him. His daughter idolizes him even though he sees her so rarely. Maggie’s words remind the reader that Mick is a good, if contradictory, man.

“And some job it is. Lying for a living. Tricking people from looking at the truth. Living in a world without truth.” 

Detectives have a particularly hard time with Mick. He often takes the same evidence that they worked so hard to collect and uses it to convince the jury or judge that his client is wrongly accused. Or that the evidence is inadmissible. Roulet’s case is a particularly egregious example as Mick is using victim-blaming and minor errors or discrepancies in police procedure to convince a jury that Roulet is innocent.

“Bullshit or not, I didn’t think Kurlen was leaving the courthouse. He was a man who understood duty and the law. He lived by it. It was what I was counting on. He would be in the courtroom until discharged. Or until he understood why I had called him there.” 

Mick sends Kurlen a fake subpoena so that he will be in the courtroom when Corliss takes the stand, counting on Kurlen’s blind duty to the law to show up. It works, and Kurlen hears testimony that connects the Martha Renteria case with Reggie Campo’s. This is another example of Mick breaking rules in order to make something important happen. It is difficult to blame Mick for his actions, as the detectives didn’t even look for another suspect in the Renteria murder, and without Mick’s careful plan, Roulet was going to go free. 

“I had to be careful. I needed to argue vigorously against Corliss taking the stand but I also needed to lose the argument.” 

Mick has to get Corliss to reveal important information that will connect Roulet to Martha Renteria, while still arguing well enough to win the current case. If he loses the case or gives himself away, Roulet will follow through on his threats. His entire plan hinges on Corliss saying just the right words so that Kurlen understands and re-opens the Renteria investigation. 

“But Menendez will never go away. He is the one who gets to me at night […] he was pardoned and released […] but he only traded one life sentence for another. It was revealed that he contracted HIV in prison and the governor doesn’t have a pardon for that. Nobody does. Whatever happens to Jesus Menendez is on me.”

Mick recovers from his gunshot wound and surgeries and moves past Roulet and his mother’s evil, but he cannot stop thinking about Menendez. Just as his father predicted, messing up an innocent client’s case has scarred him for life. He believes that he is responsible the rest of Menendez’s life, whatever it may entail, because serving time in prison and contracting HIV has ruined his life. Menendez becomes an example of someone who gets swallowed up by the machine. 

“I traded evil for innocence.” 

Mick tries to console himself about Jesus by remembering that Roulet is in prison for life. Leading the detectives to the evidence they needed in order to convict Roulet also allowed the governor to pardon Jesus Menendez. So when Roulet was convicted and Jesus released, Mick traded innocence for evil.