AND JUSTICE FOR MALL

A family lawyer gets schooled by her 11-year-old multimillionaire client.

Despite a string of successful forays into criminal defense, New Jersey transplant Sandy Moss intends to spend the rest of her career negotiating divorce decrees and custody settlements at the Southern California firm of Seaton, Taylor, Evans, and Wentworth. But Riley Schoenberg isn’t looking for better parental support because she accepts the fact that neither parent supports her. Her mother is dead, and her father is currently a guest of the state prison in Lancaster, just north of Los Angeles, convicted of her mother’s murder. Instead, Riley is convinced that Sandy can exonerate him based on what to an 11-year-old is an unassailable legal argument: He didn’t do it. Although unimpressed with Riley’s understanding of American jurisprudence, Sandy is swayed by the child’s determination, and on reviewing the case, she finds errors on the part of the court that would seem to warrant a new trial. While she’s waiting to file her motion, her boyfriend, television actor Patrick McNabb, urges her to look at properties that could accommodate their soon-to-be-merged households. With a combination of egocentric logic and raw persistence that rivals Riley’s, he hires Emily Webster, a realtor he knows is competent because she’s his former fiancee, someone he’s willing to trust even though she tried to hire a hit man to kill Sandy. Text-messaged threats against Sandy and her pint-sized client, a kidnapping, and a grenade-wielding abductor in a Covid-protective mask are only some of the zaniness Copperman has on tap for his latest dose of legal mayhem.

Can a Jersey girl become a Valley girl? Wait and see.