The office of the public defender is not known as a training
ground for bright young litigators. Clay Carter has been there too
long and, like most of his colleagues, dreams of a better job in a
real firm. When he reluctantly takes the case of a young man
charged with a random street killing, he assumes it is just another
of the many senseless murders that hit D.C. every week.
As he digs into the background of his client, Clay stumbles on a
conspiracy too horrible to believe. He suddenly finds himself in
the middle of a complex case against one of the largest
pharmaceutical companies in the world, looking at the kind of
enormous settlement that would totally change his life—that would
make him, almost overnight, the legal profession’s newest king of
torts...