The Practice: Season 7

Lindsay is sentenced to life imprisonment. Harvard Law graduate Jamie Stringer is hired despite Ellenor's discomfort over Jamie's interview, in which the outgoing, friendly candidate accurately picked apart the flaws in the firm's defense of Lindsay. Jimmy is hired by a woman who told him she had kidnapped a girl 16 years ago and had raised as her daughter. This woman hired Jimmy to tell the person whose daughter she had kidnapped about the kidnapping, as well as the person accused of kidnapping

Rebecca takes Lindsay's case to the state Supreme Court while Lindsay faces the prospect of not being allowed visits from her son for several months. Jimmy continues on the case of the kidnapping. An innocent woman is charged. Rebecca gets a new trial for Lindsay after the state Supreme Court rules Walsh violated her constitutional rights, infuriating Walsh who's also taken aback when Helen tells him directly she once admired him but now questions him. The woman who kidnapped the daughter is con

Jamie is given her first solo case, a man accused of flashing teenage girls while urinating publicly---and gets a surprise mid-trial when he unexpectedly claims free speech while he's on the witness stand. The rest of the firm is working on prosecutorial misconduct for Lindsay. Jamie's client refuses a plea bargain and is convicted. Walsh's somewhat dissembling argument before the judge further exposes his prosecutorial misconduct, and the judge dismisses Lindsay's case with prejudice; she gets

Bobby and Eugene defend a family of Christian Scientists whose son died from a lack of medical care. Walsh loses control in front of a judge when going against Ellenor and Jamie in an unborn baby case. After a tenant next door to the firm decides to retire when he can no longer rent his single-room office, Lindsay decides to start her own practice in that office, with lower-key cases than criminal ones, dealing with stress from her imprisonment. After Ellenor and Helen talk to him separately, th

Eugene, Ellenor, and Jamie defend the head of a stem-cell research firm whose location was zoned against by the city. Lindsay's first case on her own involves a friendly woman who is sued by her neighbour for singing loudly. Eugene gets into arguments with both Jimmy and Bobby over religion and Catholicism, based somewhat on the stem-cell research firm case. Lindsay's client is allowed to sing her favourite song during the lawsuit trial.

Eugene and Ellenor sue for a man whose friend recommended he see a priest that had raped him, and eventually raped their client. The opposing attorney is Father Patrick. Eugene is upset with Bobby because Bobby is a Catholic, and Lindsay unnerves Bobby further when she tells him she refuses to allow their son to be christened in the Catholic Church. Lindsay and Jamie arbitrate a feud between former lovers. They are neighbors, and the woman screams loudly during sex, which he claims is a nuisance

Bobby and Jimmy are assigned the case of a child molester and go against Helen. Features Anton Yelchin as the abused boy, Justin. Meanwhile, Ellenor defends an animal cruelty case where a man who practices Santaria slit the throat of a goat and the media got it on video. Bobby's priest recommends he quit being a defense attorney.

Ellenor and Eugene defend a fiery yet frightened client named Cassie Ray, a murder suspect with a shadowy past. Moreover, Cassie's alibi witness has significant skeletons in her own closet. In a separate case, Lindsay reluctantly defends an airline that refuses to carry passengers of Arab descent.

A cop-killing case rattles Bobby, whose anemic defense of an unsavory client leads Helen to suspect that he's "tanking the trial"; a drug bust raises search-and-seizure issues.

Walsh returns to work but a brief confrontation with Bobby indicates the A.D.A. hasn't really learned as much from his break and his threapy as he wants people to think. Bobby has been benched due to his erratic behavior, so Eugene must take his place as lead counsel in a controversial murder case. Meanwhile Lindsay defends a killer, against her own better judgement, and Jamie is placed in a compromising situation involving a judge whom Ellenor and Jimmy suggested she flirt with during a suppres

Ellenor fights to save Denise Freeman, a rehabilitated death-row prisoner who has devoted her prison time to helping younger inmates---and whose own prison warden supports stopping her execution. In a last-ditch effort to stay her execution, Ellenor bases an appeal on the medication the court ordered Denise to take at trial, which prevented the jury from observing her schizophrenia. Eugene argues a civil suit that blames a beer company for the death of college-age Michael Berry. To be continued.

Ellenor's plan for Denise to show insanity by stopping her medication backfired, so Ellenor now races time to prevent Denise's execution. Eugene and Bobby, meanwhile, can't agree over the Berrys' refusal to accept a settlement in their suit against the brewer whose beers contributed to their son's death.

Jimmy defends his high school crush, Brenda Miller, who is under investigation for a suspicious homicide in which the actual killer, Herrick Smoltz, may have set her up, and slightly nervous Claire Wyatt interviews for a job at Lindsay's newly formed law firm. Eugene helps an executive in a sexual harassment case with a bizarre twist: the executive shared gym workout classes with his young female employee and took one of her bras to wear himself hoping to rejuvenate his sex life with his wife. J

A wrongful-imprisonment suit occupies Bobby, whose client spent 15 years in jail for a killing he didn't commit; a case involving a youth's soccer injury tests Claire's mettle in court: she's suing a municipality for supporting soccer which she believes can be a dangerous sport.

Helen faces up against the firm in a case involving Russell Bakey, accused of killing three women in supermarkets and whose overprotective mother Sylvia alibis for him. Concurrently, disturbed Stanley Deeks---whom Lindsay defended successfully in a murder trial while she knows he needs psychiatric treatment desperately---re-enters her life unexpectedly and disturbingly. Bakey may have sent Helen a not-so-veiled threat via computer even though he has no direct computer access. To be continued...

Russell Bakey plagues Helen and Stanley Deeks continues plaguing Lindsay. Bakey's overprotective mother Sylvia now sues Helen for defamation over her trial cross examination, while Eugene and Jimmy can't convince Bakey to stop threatening Helen. Deeks ties Lindsay's hands on client privilege after admitting he's killed a young girl whose desperate parents want to find and bury her---which leads to her and Claire being jailed for contempt for refusing to violate attorney-client privilege and disc

The firm defends Kyle Healy (Christopher Reeve), a quadriplegic whose wife is charged with murdering his brother, the heir to a multimillion-dollar estate. Jimmy and Ellenor's defense is damaged by compelling circumstantial evidence, testimony about the defendant's stability — and the prosecution's playing of a shattering trump card. In other storylines, Jamie champions the cause of a lawyer who claims firms won't hire her because she's a rape victim; and Bobby, whose marriage is in trouble, une

Jimmy, Eugene, and Sarah---a former prosecutor---go to a death penalty hearing held by a committee of prosecutors who have decided to ask for the death penalty for one of the firm's clients, 19-year-old drug dealer Troy Ezekiel, who fired at a threatening rival but accidentally killed a 36-year-old mother of three. After Eugene, Jimmy, and Troy himself plead passionately, the committee recommends life in prison without parole to the client, but the Attorney General rejects their recommendation.

Fallout from when Lindsay saw Bobby kissing Sarah. Jimmy is held hostage with CBS President Les Moonves by a client, Grace Chapman, who wants to make the entire episode a reality television program involving a Russian Roulette variation. Sarah Barker and Lindsay talk a few times: about the kiss, chiefly discussing Bobby's inability to communicate, about Bobby's losing faith in being a criminal defense lawyer, and the marriage. Bobby and Lindsay talk about their marriage and say that they aren't

A date-rape case is testy for the firm: Eugene is defending the suspect, but one of his former victims is Jamie, who's now a prosecution witness. Crazed Stanley Deeks re-enters Lindsay's life yet again, after we learn he may have murdered Russell Bakey, who's found dead in his bathtub. Seeming at first to have turned his life around, Deeks reveals he's become a high school teacher. Still terrified of him despite his pleas, Lindsay reveals his past to his new employers, costing him his job. Despi

After Lindsay arranged and attended the funeral of Stanley Deeks, the collapse of her marriage to Bobby preludes a professional crisis. Eugene and Jamie represent a pregnant woman who claims she killed her abusive husband in defense of their unborn child. Jimmy helps Claire in a case involving a ten-year-old girl in a liability suit after she fell from a balcony. Lindsay makes a final decision about her marriage. To be continued...

Twists in the trial of accused wife-killer Tom Bartos rattle Jimmy and Rebecca---including that the victim's body was never found, that Bartos had an affair with his sister-in-law at the time of his brother's murder, that the sister-in-law was charged with murdering her abusive husband a decade earlier, and that Bartos may have helped fake the sister-in-law's own death. Bobby tells Eugene, Ellenor, Jimmy, Rebecca, and Lucy that he's decided to leave the firm and remake both his career and his li