Series / Family Law (2021)

Family Law is a Canadian legal dramedy starring Jewel Staite and Victor Garber. It airs on Global Television Network in Canada and The CW in the US.

After her personal life falls apart, brilliant but arrogant lawyer Abigail Bianchi finds herself forced to work for her estranged father's law firm, along with her two half-siblings. The series also stars Zach Smadu, Genelle Williams, and Lauren Holly.

Not to be confused with the 1999 American series starring Kathleen Quinlan.

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This series contains examples of:

• Accidental Public Confession:
  • Harry goes through a lot to settle with a flame after accidentally giving her chlamydia. Abby agrees to help him keep it quiet so as not to make Harry look foolish. But thanks to bumbling intern Cecil hitting the wrong button on a speakerphone, the entire firm hears Harry complaining about it to that woman.
  • Daniel gets caught spilling the beans about his affair with Martina at Martina and Quinn's wedding on a hot mic.
• The Alcoholic: Abby's drinking has been a problem for a while. She finally hit bottom after puking on her client in court, leading to her losing custody of her kids and being ordered to go to rehab.
• Alcoholic Parent: Abby lost custody of her kids because of her drinking. Her son Nico has forgiven her, but her daughter Sofia is still angry at her.
  • This is one of the few character flaws she inherited from her mother, who is still an unrepentant lush.
• All Lesbians Want Kids: Lucy's wife Maggie really wants kids. Lucy really doesn't, and her resentment towards Maggie causes her to have an affair.
• Alpha Bitch: Among Abby's many challenges is overcoming her reputation as a colossal bitch.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Abby invokes this when a social worker wants to keep a pair of parents with Down Syndrome from being with their child as "imagine his embarrassment of them showing up at his high school." Abby snorts the woman obviously has no children as every teenager feels embarrassed by their parents, no matter who they are.
• Ambiguously Brown: When the firm runs afoul of a right-wing pundit, her followers begin harassing the firm online. They spew a lot of racist filth, but they can't figure our what race Daniel is, so he gets every different kind of racism thrown at him.
• Amicable Exes: One of the few exes that Harry still gets along with is Phaedra Jacard, who also happens to be an escort. In "Fifty Shades of Judginess", she calls upon him to help her when her late beau's daughter tries to get her disinherited.
• Antagonistic Offspring: Abby is still struggling to rebuild her relationship with her daughter after she went viral for all the wrong reasons. This runs in the family; Abigail has never had a great relationship with her father, to the point that he doesn't have any pictures of her or her mother in his office.
• Armored Closet Gay: In "Play It Straight", Daniel and Abigail represent Zander Davenport, an extremely closeted gay actor who's been starring in cheesy Christian romance films in a desperate attempt to convince people he's straight. They're representing him because his younger ex-husband has been talking about him in a one-man play and people have been putting two and two together.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • "Until Death Do Us Part" ends with Abby and Daniel winning their latest case, but the case involves a couple who practically raised Daniel after Harry divorced his mother, and watching their marriage dissolve leaves him in such a low mood that he calls off his engagement to Danielle.
  • The first season ends with Abby and Daniel winning a lucrative case, resulting in Daniel finally earning a partnership and Abby being offered a permanent job at the firm after her probation, with Harry implying that he might even give her a partnership if she stays on long enough. On the other hand, Maggie finds out about Lucy's infidelity and kicks her out, while Abby learns that Frank is still cheating on her, but has been hiding it for months by using a different phone. The only thing that stops her from relapsing in the last minutes of the season is Lucy showing up at her door.
  • Season 2 ends with Abigail being released from probation and winning partial custody of her kids, but also having a "nesting" agreement where every other week, she has to live at her and Frank's shared house. She also gets a permanent position at Svensson and Svensson, but Daniel is now her direct superior, and he's made it clear that she's on his shitlist for staying on. Meanwhile, Lucy wins visitation rights and is legally a co-parent with Maggie, but Maggie has vanished and taken their newborn daughter with her.
• Blatant Lies: Abby is an expert bullshitter. When Frank comes to her office to demand to know if she's drinking and sending a text to his mistress, Abby manages to turn it around to not only deny it but make it sound like Frank is the wrong party in this to the point he apologizes to her. In "Until Death Do Us Part", she also manages to spin otherwise-innocuous financial records into possible evidence of embezzlement in order to win a case.
• Brain Bleach: Daniel's reaction when he introduces girlfriend Clara to the office...then realizes Harry slept with her. Lucy and Abigail's laughter only adds to him realizing he's sleeping with one of his dad's many flings. Clara's defense she didn't even know Harry's last name as "we didn't spend a lot of time talking" doesn't help.
• Broken Pedestal: Sofia, Abigail's daughter, blames her mother for messing up everything and looks up to Frank. She's naturally rocked to realize her dad was cheating all during his supposed "reconciliation" with Abigail.
• Brutal Honesty:
  • Abby prides herself on this, which can cross the line a lot of times. For example, she point blank tells Lucy that if her mom hadn't died, their dad "would have left her too." Naturally, Lucy doesn't take that well.
  • It seems Abby in inherited this from Harry, who's incredibly blunt with everyone and not grasping some of his attitudes don't fit in 2022 society.
• Butch Lesbian: In season 2, Maggie's new beau Alyse is a stocky, muscular woman with short hair.
• Camp Gay: In "Mama Don't Preach", Daniel and Abby take up the case of a gay boy who dresses in fishnets and shawls.
• Commitment Issues: Both Daniel and Lucy have issues committing to a serious romantic relationship and starting a family. Daniel does this by breaking it off with his fiance and Lucy cheats on her wife. Despite Abby being the most messed up of Harry's children, she is very committed to her husband and kids and making things work - possibly because she doesn't want to repeat Harry's mistakes and because unlike the other two Svensson kids, she was never completely raised by him and didn't imprint on his own commitment issues.
• Con Man: The firm runs into a few of these, of both genders. Notably is "A River in Egypt" as Gina's dad falls for the seemingly perfect woman only to be taken. As if it can't get worse, he's introduced to her dozen previous husbands, all of whom fell for her scam.
• Cool Aunt: Sofia and Nico both take rather quickly to their aunt Lucy. Nico is especially thrilled, as he's always wanted an aunt.
• Cool Old Lady: Jerri, Harry's office manager, is the one person at the firm that everyone gets along with, and the only co-worker that Abby genuinely likes at first.
• Cult: In "Under the Influence", Daniel and Abigail take on a client, Sabine, who is involved with a fitness cult, LIFT (an obvious parody mish-mash of NXIVM and CrossFit), which almost manages to ensnare Abigail, too, as she is desperate for approval after a bruising marriage-counseling session. Thankfully, Lucy is on hand to bail her out by deconstructing the cult's tactics, but Sabine nearly loses custody of her kids when it turns out that there were tapes of her having sex with the cult leader.
• Cure Your Gays: In "Mama Don't Preach", the firm takes on the case of a gay teenager seeking to be emancipated from his parents because they're trying to force him into reparative therapy.
• Custody Battle: Svensson & Sons (later Svensson & Svensson) specializes in family law, and thus a few episodes have them negotiating custody during divorce proceedings, most notably in "Addicted to Love", in which their client is a mother who also happens to be a video-game addict. In season 2, some of the protagonists face their own custody battles, as Abby temporarily loses custody of her kids to her cheating ex-husband while Lucy fights to be recognized as the co-parent of her ex-wife's daughter, who was conceived during the marriage.
• Dating Catwoman: The penultimate episode of season one reveals that Harry has been secretly dating the firm's nemesis, Crystal Steele.
• Death Seeker: In "Catch 22", Abby takes on the case of a highly-intelligent women who has early-onset Alzheimer's and wishes to receive a medically-assisted suicide before she loses her faculties.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Over the course of the first season, Abigail slowly learns how to be a better person. Emphasis on "slowly".
• Digging Yourself Deeper: In "Blame It on the Mother", Harry makes a terribly offensive speech at his alma mater, then makes things worse when, instead of apologizing, he tries to defend his comments.
• Disowned Parent: Abigail Bianchi disowned her father, Harry Svensson, years earlier for cheating on her mother, to the point that her kids thought their grandfather was dead before circumstances forced Abby to go work at his law firm.
• Do Wrong, Right: In "Truthiness", Harry's reaction to finding out that his grandson used his calligraphy book to forge signatures for his classmates for money is to offer to help him set up an investment portfolio.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: In-universe as a constant theme is the firm getting cases that mirror the exact same issues the family is having in their lives or with each other. A prime example is "When There's a Will" as Daniel and Harry handle a father and son in a lawsuit over the family business and the fact the father refuses to back out of the business he built when his son is making it more successful clearly weighs on both men.
• Domestic Abuser: Kelly, Lucy's new girlfriend introduced in season 3, is of the emotionally manipulative, gaslighting variety; Kelly uses her psychology skills to drive a wedge between Lucy and her family and isolate her, and even going so far as to block attempts by Maggie to contact Lucy.
• Downer Ending: Season 3 is an unambiguous case, as Abigail reads Sofia's essay and learns just how much her drinking affected her, Harry realizes how badly he treated Joanne when they were together, Danny manages to obliterate any hope of a friendship with Martina and Quinn, and Lucy discovers that Kelly has refused to leave her house. And in the final scene, Abby goes to Ben for comfort, only to find that he's relapsed.
• Due to the Dead: Harry and Lucy have a ritual where, every year, they mark the anniversary of Lucy's mother's death by meeting at a park bench that Harry had installed in her memory.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • For all that Harry is notorious for his harsh tactics, he is appalled when Abby suggests using spurious accusations of "vicious assault" to help the client of the week, a recovering game addict, win her custody battle against her ex-husband, as the first rule of family law is to always consider the kids' needs first, and it's not entirely clear that the kids would be well-served if their mom got sole custody. Subverted when, after Abby is out of earshot, he suggests that Daniel file her suggestion away in case they need it.
  • Harry's breaking point with Crystal was when she used information he gave her in the bedroom to out a teenage trans girl, causing a huge backlash and media firestorm, just to enhance her brand.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Abby has to slowly walk Nina's dad through how he met his girlfriend Michelle online, fell for her on how they both had windfalls, got married and let her have both access to his bank account and signed her to his house deed for the poor guy to realize he's been taken by a con artist.
• First Period Panic: In "Addicted to Love", Sofia gets her first period and runs home in a panic, having never experienced it before and being unsure of what she's supposed to do.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • A lot of Abby's issues can be traced back to her parents' bitter divorce, her mother's drinking as a way of coping with said divorce, and her father's apparent refusal to recognize her as his daughter for years afterwards.
  • Abby's friend is a major anti-vaxxer as she believes a vaccine was responsible for the death of her baby sister. The doctors actually said it was a "crib death," but the woman's mother refused to believe that and passed that belief on to her daughter.
  • In "Acting Out", while talking with Nico, Harry mentions that he grew up in boarding schools and had a very distant relationship with his father, which may go a long way towards explaining his own hands-off parenting style.
• Gaslighting:
  • Throughout the first season and part of the second, Abigail has it repeatedly drummed into her by Frank that her drinking endangered their children emotionally and physically and drove him into having an affair. In the season finale, Abby discovers that Frank was continuing the affair the whole time.
  • In "Wicked Games", Abigail and Daniel represent a woman who is convinced that her ex-husband is waging a campaign to destroy her sanity so that she loses custody of their autistic son. The actual culprit turns out to be her new boyfriend, who wanted to both "prove" that her ex-husband was abusive and also cause her to lose custody of her son, as he didn't want to be a stepfather to an autistic teenager.
  • Lucy's new girlfriend Kelly in season 3 does this to Lucy by isolating her from her friends and family by suggesting they're intruding on Lucy's life.
• Glad I Thought of It: When Harry says he wants to meet his grandchildren, Abby is unsure of it. During an argument with Frank, Abby makes it sound like this is her idea to make amends and get her family together and Frank compliments her for showing growth with this and Abby walks off with a smug smile.
• Happily Married: Jerri's marriage is strong enough that it survived her coming at as a trans woman several decades into it.
• Heteronormative Crusader:
  • In "Mama Don't Preach", Daniel and Abby take on a family who want to send their gay son into conversion therapy.
  • In "I Now Pronoun You", the team is hired by a trans teenager who wants to start hormone therapy. While her dad is supportive, her grandfather is not, and for legal reasons, he has custody of her.
• History Repeats: Abby is worried about this when the kids overhear a nasty fight between her and Frank. She tells Lucy that she remembers how bad it was hearing her parents fight and is doing the same to her own kids. It gets worse when Sofia gets drunk on Joanne's booze and heads to a party, just like Abby did at her age (which ended with Abby losing her virginity).
• Hit Them in the Pocketbook: "Between a Rock and a Hard Place", Daniel Svensson, an altruistic lawyer who usually does pro bono cases helping working-class couples navigate their divorces as amicably as possible, gets stuck with Sabrina Bass, a White-Dwarf Starlet who is open about her intention to extract a fortune from her philanthropist ex-husband to punish him for divorcing her.
• Hope Spot: In the season 2 finale, with Abby's help, Lucy wins the right to be named co-parent to Maggie's daughter and regular visitation rights. In the final scenes, Lucy goes to Maggie's for the first visit only to find an empty apartment to realize Maggie has moved away and taken their daughter with her.
• Hypocrite:
  • Abby and Daniel are rocked when their client reveals he was part of a polyamorous relationship... with the wife being a right-wing blogger who rails on LGBT people "ruining traditional marriage."
  • Frank is this, spending the entire first season judging Abby for wrecking their family with her drinking only for her to discover he's still been carrying on affairs, including when he and Abby briefly got back together.
  • When Joanne calls a woman divorcing a rich lawyer a golddigger, Abby points out they're in the huge mansion Joanne paid for from her three divorces.
  • When Chip Crombie is appointed to the bench, Abby tells him he's another mediocre white man getting ahead due to cronyism instead of merit. It's true, but Abby herself is a rich white woman whose career only recovered from her drunken escapades because her father owns a law firm.
• Innocent Awkward Question: One episode sees Abigail bringing her kids to work to meet their grandfather. When her son Nico encounters Jerri, the firm's transgender office manager, he innocently asks her if she's "the one who used to be a man", much to his mom's horror. Jerri takes it in stride, saying that yes, there was a time when she identified as a man, but she is a woman now, which Nico says sounds neat.
• Innocently Insensitive:
  • During Daniel and Danielle's engagement party in "Addicted to Love", Cecil cheerfully suggests that maybe now Harry will finally get some grandkids, right in front of Abby. When Harry quickly corrects him that he's already got two grandchildren, Cecil then makes things worse by admitting that he forgot that Abby was Harry's daughter.
  • In "Mama Don't Preach", Nico asks Jerri if she's "the one who used to be a man", much to Abby and Sofia's horror.
  • Lucy is stunned when Harry offers to be the sperm donor for her and her wife. Harry sees nothing wrong as this would mean "the child is actually yours," with Lucy coldly stating the child will be theirs no matter whose sperm they use.
• I Reject Your Reality:
  • A key part of Season 1 is Abby completely refusing to accept she's an alcoholic who needs help. She brushes off her early drinking as just a phase, refuses to go to therapy, and will just sit bored in AA meetings or even spend her time looking over notes during them. Every time she meets an addict of some kind, Abby will fail to realize she has the exact same problems they do.
  • Abby goes to her old boss, assuring him as soon as her probation is done, she's ready to come back to work. He has to openly spell out none of Abby's clients want her because they wonder if she was drunk handling their cases, the guy she vomited on is suing the firm and Hell will freeze over before he hires her back.
  • In a talk of nature vs nurture, Abby scoffs to Harry that "if that were true, I'd be a lot more like you." Daniel and Lucy laugh that "you're more like Harry than both of us put together," with Abby instantly denying it even as anyone else could tell that's right.
  • In the third season finale, Lucy learns Kelly kept her from knowing Maggie was reaching out to her and, combined with all her controlling behavior, angrily kicks Kelly out of her home. When Lucy returns later, she's stunned to find Kelly calmly sitting in the living room reading, treating their fight as a minor tiff and she'll spend a night in the guest room to "give you time to calm down and we can talk in the morning." She walks out as Lucy stares in disbelief that she's been hooking up with a sociopath.
• Instant Birth: Just Add Labor!: Subverted in "Parenthood", where Ellie, the client of the week, goes into labor in the middle of a custody hearing; while Abby and the others are quick to get her to the hospital, there are at least a few hours before she actually gives birth.
• It's All About Me:
  • Abby can have the tendency to act like her issues and drinking only affect her, not her family or co-workers and that somehow, the world is conspiring against her when so much of her problems are her own fault.
  • Once more, she inherits this from her father as Harry's reaction to her falling off the wagon is, "does she know how this reflects on me?" Jerri point-blank snaps at him, "don't make this about you."
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: In "Return to Sender", Abigail frequently has to negotiate with Aparna, a mail-order bride who now runs a service for Canadian men to bring foreign women to the country to serve as "traditional" wives. While she is initially unrepentant about setting up the naive Karolinka with a sexist, abusive pig who was prepared to deport her for "failing" to be traditional, after learning that Karolinka is pregnant, she reluctantly agrees to give her a job so that she can stay in the country.
• Junkie Parent: In "Addicted to Love", Abigail takes on the case of a woman who's on the verge of losing her kids because of her video-gaming addiction.
• Karma Houdini Warranty:
  • Lucy cheats on Maggie multiple times in season 1, but decides to stop after she decides she does want to raise children with Maggie. However, in the finale, her mistress exposes her affairs to Maggie. Lucy is then kicked out of her home, and later has to fight for parental rights to the baby.
  • The appropriately named season 3 finale "The Chickens Come Home to Roost" has most of the character's bad deeds catching up with them. Harry realizes his past affairs and behavior was the reason why Joanne broke up with him and cannot trust him. Daniel inadvertently reveals he and Martina had an affair at Martina and Quinn's wedding, possibly wrecking their marriage before it started and completely nuking any chance they all could remain friends. Abby has been halfheartedly doing her moral inventory all season, but by the end comes to terms about just how much her drinking affected her daughter and just how much her family's implosion was her fault.
• Laborious Laziness: At first Abby is in deep denial about having a drinking problem, so she goes to AA meetings and just does paperwork the whole time, schedules therapy appointments and cancels them at the last minute, and otherwise puts far more effort into creating the appearance that she's doing the work to get better than she would have to if she actually tried to get better.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Throughout the first season, Lucy was shamelessly cheating on her wife Maggie. In the second season, when she tries to reconcile, she learns that Maggie has hooked up with one of their mutual friends.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In Season 3, the gang talk on an actor staying in the closet for his career. Jeri notes that "you never see gay actors playing straight leading men" just as Harry, played by the out Victor Garber enters.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: In "Addicted to Love", Abigail arranges for her client Marlee to meet the real-life person behind her online paramour, hoping that he'll be hideous and thus convince Marlee to give up online gaming. Much to her shock, he turns out to be very attractive, with long black curls.
• Loophole Abuse: The firm thinks they've got a fantastic class action lawsuit against a doctor who used his own sperm to impregnate over 50 women. Then the medical insurance company deems the doctor did this intentionally and thus they're not liable and the guy there Daniel talked to was just fired. The doctor relates that with his reputation destroyed and license revoked, he's now facing bankruptcy and so the massive lawsuit can only bear a $200,000 settlement, not nearly enough to cover what the firm has spent on the case. When the firm tries to go after him, they learn that the guy was smart enough to make sure his lavish mansion and yacht are owned by shell companies which makes it harder to prove he's still rich.
• Mail-Order Bride: In "Return to Sender", the firm represents a Russian woman who was brought to Canada to marry a sexist slob who wanted a "traditional" wife.
• Mama Bear: Whatever else, Abby is fiercely protective of her kids. When she comes across her son shoved to the ground by a pack of bullies, Abby issues a threat to the leader that has him cowering on the spot.
• Middle Child Syndrome: Abigail, the oldest Svensson child, was a highly experienced lawyer before losing her old job, and Lucy, the youngest, is an accomplished therapist. Daniel, the middle child, is a junior partner at his dad's law firm who not only has to live up to his dad's reputation but also has to escape from his half-sister's looming shadow.
• Missing Mom: Lucy, the youngest Svensson sibling, lost her mother when she was eight years old.
• My God, You Are Serious!:
  • The reaction of Abby's former boss when he realizes she's under the delusion she is ever going to work for him again after vomiting on a client in court. He swiftly sets her straight there is no chance he ever hires her back.
  • Frank and Abigail get into a fight in the second season premiere over Frank's cheating. When Frank says they have to be united when Abigail moves back home, Abigail is astounded Frank thinks that will still be happening.
• Not So Above It All: In "Addicted to Love", Lucy, normally seen as the "nice" Svensson child, decides to celebrate Daniel's upcoming anniversary with his current girlfriend by starting a betting pool about how soon they're going to break up, as none of Daniel's previous relationships have lasted more than two years. Hilariously, everyone in the office except Daniel and Danielle is in on it, with Jerri quietly slipping Lucy a hundred-dollar bill and Cecil begging her not to tell Daniel that he placed a bid.
• Obscene OB-GYN: In the first-season finale, the firm takes on their receptionist Nina as a client after finding out that the man she thought was father is not genetically related to her - her mom's fertility specialist used his own sperm to fertilize her eggs. It turns out that she wasn't his only victim, and thus the firm sues him for everything he's worth.
• Off the Wagon: At the end of "Addicted To Love," after being cut out from her family and Daniel's engagement announcement, Abby ends up indulging in some bottles of champagne. Harry walks into the office the next morning to find her passed out on the couch with empty bottles and can only give a look that he sadly expected this.
• Omnidisciplinary Lawyer: Abby spent her entire legal career as a personal injury lawyer, after only one year in family law she's a rival to Daniel, who spent his entire career in family law. Slightly downplayed, there are a few times when she admits she needs his help because he's more experienced.
• Open Relationship Failure: In "Three's Company", Abby and David take on the case of a young artist who was in a three-way relationship with a married couple. While he and the husband got on quite well, his relationship with the wife turned exploitative, as she increasingly used him for free labor for her blog, which got in the way of his career as an artist, making him increasingly dependent upon the couple.
• Overly Generous Fool: Bryan Beasley, the mail-delivery guy for the Svensson & Svensson offices, is one of the most generous characters on the show. This gets him in a lot trouble in "A River in Egypt", where he's conned by his new fiancee and loses almost everything because she convinced him to put almost all of his property jointly in their names.
• Parental Sexuality Squick: Abigail gets an epic helping of this when Harry enlists her to help him settle a personal injury lawsuit brought by an ex-girlfriend who accuses him of giving her an STI. The same episode also opens with her being woken up by the sound of her mother having sex in the next room.
• Parents as People:
  • A recurring theme of the series is that even the best parents struggle to live up to their kids' expectations, with womanizer Harry and alcoholic Abigail being particular examples.
  • In "Until Death Do Us Part", Daniel takes on the case of Ira, a former neighbor of his who served as his surrogate father figure when he was growing up, as Ira fights to move his wife out of a nursing home, convinced that lack of care has caused her to forget that she's even married. As the case progresses, it becomes clear that Ira is blinded by his desire to preserve a marriage that is for all intents and purposes over, but Danny struggles to realize that Ira's in the wrong here because he sees Ira's influence as the main thing that's made him the "stable" Svensson sibling.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Harry can be a bit too "old school" in his attitudes toward modern cases. A good example is when he sees two people with Down's Syndrome, talks of how "those two are obviously..." and everyone has to cut him off before he actually says a slur in public.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Meeting her rather young therapist, Abby makes a crack about the woman "going to the same school as Doogie Howser." The woman seriously states she's never heard of the guy and maybe he was a year ahead of her.
• Really Gets Around: Harry Svensson has been married three times, and each marriage produced one kid, with Abby being the oldest, Daniel being the middle child, and Lucy being the youngest. Since the death of Lucy's mother, Harry has been seeing a string of other women; at one point, he is seeing two women simultaneously, but one of them only learns of it after he gives her chlamydia that he contracted from the other woman.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The Season 2 premiere has Lucy trying to apologize to Ali for cheating on her with "that's not me" only for Ali to fire back Lucy was dating someone else when they met and knows this is her. "You are a deeply damaged human being incapable of honesty or love. You're not a good person, Lucy. You're rotten to the core."
• Relieved Failure: In "Truthiness", Abigail is only too happy to take a loss when she's hired by a friend who turns out to be a nutty anti-vaxxer... and whose ex-husband hires Frank to represent him, forcing her to face off against her own husband in court. She's somewhat less relieved when the friend responds to the setback by trying to kidnap her daughter.
• Revenge Porn Blackmail: In episode "Under the Influence", the firm represents a woman who's trying to escape from a cult, but who is being blackmailed by the cult leader, who taped her having sex with him.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!:
  • In the first episode, Abby and Harry have a solid case to force a wealthy man to pay almost half a million dollars in retroactive child support for a daughter that he sired anonymously, but Abby has a sudden pang of conscience after seeing how much the case is upsetting the daughter in question, and arranges for a significantly smaller settlement that lays the groundwork for the man to have some kind of relationship with his daughter.
  • In "Mama Don't Preach", Harry knows he is legally required to report Abby's relapse, but elects to help her cover it up because he knows that she'd be permanently disbarred if anyone found out.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the penultimate episode of season 1, Daniel quits the firm, incensed that Harry continues to deny him a partnership and pissed that Harry has been secretly dating Crystal Steele. He comes back after Abby threatens to hand an extremely lucrative case over to her old firm unless Harry gives Daniel the partnership.
• Secret Other Family: When Abby inadvertently causes Judge Chip Crombie to have a heart attack in a confrontation, she comes to his hospital to "apologize." Enter a woman gushing on her husband being so ill...just as Crombie's other wife comes in, causing the man to have another heart attack. It turns out Crombie forged divorce papers from his first wife to convince the mistress to marry him, rendering that marriage void. The second wife is more devastated as she truly loved Crombie and stunned he used her like this. Eventually, the two women realize the only person to blame for this mess is Chip and gleefully divorce him.
• Shipper on Deck: In "Fifty Shades of Judginess", Jojo forces Abby and Lucy to go on dates, because she's gotten tired of them spending every night moping around her apartment.
• Shout-Out: In "Mama Don't Preach", Abigail introduces herself as "Mrs. Offred" when she poses as a concerned mother to send Cecil undercover in a conversion-therapy camp.
• Shower of Angst: In the opening of "Mama Don't Preach", Abigail cries in the shower as she tries to wash away the evidence of her relapse, realizing that she's really screwed up.
• Something Only They Would Say: When she finds out her husband was married to another woman for years, Veronica Crombie is at first angry with the other woman and ready to dismiss this "imposter." Until Jeanie reads the poem Chip wrote for their wedding day...which is the exact same poem Chip wrote for him and Veronica's wedding day. That has the two women finally realizing it's Chip they should be pissed at, not each other.
• Spotting the Thread: Abigail has a knack for spotting when there's a hole in the case, and either sealing or exploiting those holes in order to win. In "Blame It on the Mother", for instance, she notices that the plaintiff claims to be a war widow, but can't find any records of the woman receiving a widow's pension, which leads her to discover that the plaintiff lied about the circumstances of her husband's death, allowing her and Daniel to discredit the rest of her complaint and force her into a settlement with their clients.
• Stay in the Kitchen: In "Return to Sender", Abby and Daniel represent a mail-order bride whose husband is a sexist creep who imports women from overseas in the hopes that they'll be more submissive than women from Canada.
• Sucksessor: After Nina leaves the firm, they try replacing her with a temp, but end up with mousy young woman who's too terrified of Abby to do her job.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • In the first episode, Harry has a solid case to force a wealthy man to pay almost half a million dollars in retroactive child support for a daughter that he fathered anonymously, but Abigail undercuts him to arrange a settlement that pays out significantly less money but allows the daughter to build a relationship with her dad. It's a very fair settlement that both parties are happy with, but Harry is infuriated, both because Abby went behind his back and because she effectively left millions of dollars in legal fees on the table.
  • After Abigail makes a snarky remark about her well-known dad in court, the judge warns her that badmouthing another lawyer in family court, let alone one who also happens to be her boss, will get her held in contempt, which would violate the terms of her probation.
    • This is a recurring problem for her as she adjusts to working in family court, where judges mostly rely on reports and data and aren't especially fond of the kind of grandstanding that Abby used to do at her old firm.
  • Abigail stands up against a bully threatening her son, which has her banned from school property.
  • Abby actually goes to her old boss to talk about coming back to the firm once her probation is done. He informs her that the guy she vomited on is suing the firm, every one of her clients wonders if she was drunk handling their cases, and there's no way in hell he's ever going to welcome her back.
  • In "Mama Don't Preach", as much as Abby, Daniel, and Lucy sympathize with teenage Aaron's desire to be emancipated from his homophobic mother, they note that he doesn't have a very strong case, as they can't prove abuse or neglect. On the other hand, when Aaron's parents try to fire Daniel and Abigail, they are able to point to the pro-bono contract that they signed with Aaron, which his parents have no standing to discharge, thus allowing them to continue working for Aaron, even after his parents send him away to a conversion-therapy camp.
  • In "Baby Off Board", Daniel gets tired of his inability to curb Abigail's behavior (and Harry's seeming indifference to it) and tries to petition Harry to make him a partner, pointing to all of his recent successful cases. Harry bluntly tells him his record isn't enough, because most of his cases are pro-bono and thus cost the firm more money than they bring in.
  • In "Under the Influence", Lucy's hopes of preserving her social life after her divorce are stymied when she realizes that most of her and Maggie's friends now know that she cheated on Maggie and thus they're all rallying around Maggie and shunning her.
  • In the third season, Harry's affair with Crystal comes back to bite him when the bar association discovers they were having an affair when Crystal was his client and suspend Harry's law license for a month. Harry then compounds the problem by blatantly lying to a client, telling her that he needs to postpone her case by one month, ostensibly because her soon-to-be ex-husband has been hiding financial assets. When Daniel finds out about this, he's horrified, as Harry effectively put the entire firm in legal jeopardy.
  • Chip Crombie may have gotten a lot of support in the "old boys network" of the legal community to the point of becoming a judge. But when it gets out he faked divorce papers from his first wife to trick his mistress into marrying him, he's kicked off the bench, his firm goes under and both women are ready to take him through an ugly divorce battle.
• Take a Third Option: This is how a lot of the cases get solved, because the priority of any good family-law attorney should be making sure the client's family isn't destroyed.
  • In "Parenthood", caught between a pair of questionably-prepared parents with Down syndrome and an ableist social worker determined to keep their child away from them, Abby convinces the child's aunt to agree to a "kith and kin" arrangement whereby she raises the child while the parents work to gain custody.
  • In "Mama Don't Preach", faced with a gay teenage client who wants to be legally emancipated from his parents in order to get away from his fanatical mother, but who doesn't have a strong case for emancipation (or the means to survive on his own for an extended period), Abby convinces the boy's more reasonable father to separate from his wife and take custody of the son.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Abby's co-workers (who also happen to be her half-siblings) are less-than-pleased about having to work with a half-sibling who's only there because she's their boss' daughter.
• Token Evil Teammate: "Evil" might be an exaggeration, but Abigail is more willing than Daniel to bend the rules in order to win a case. In "Parenthood", for instance, she figures out that her clients' custody case is being sabotaged by the sister of the prospective mother, and uses this knowledge to blackmail the sister into a "kith and kin" custody agreement, and in "Until Death Do Us Part", she takes advantage of bank statements to falsely paint an innocent woman as an embezzler in order to take away her power of attorney over her mother. This comes back to bite her in the ass in "Three's Company" and "Truthiness" when her growing reputation for hardball tactics causes Harry to recruit her for Crystal Steele's divorce case and one of her nuttier friends to hire her to defend her anti-vaccination stance.
• Tropaholics Anonymous: Abby attends AA meetings as one of the conditions for getting her kids back.
• Twofer Token Minority: Lucy, the youngest of the Svensson siblings, is a biracial lesbian.
• The Unfavorite:
  • Interestingly, all three of Harry's kids think they're this to him and act in jealousy over what they see as him favoring one over the other. It does seem he's more supportive of Lucy than he was with Abby and Daniel yet she can feel ignored at times and that he sees the other two as better. That he basically treats them all the same (which is to say that none live up to his expectations for them) doesn't occur to them.
  • This comes up a few times in cases. A good example is "When There's A Will" as a pair of siblings are stunned to learn the son is getting $7 million while the daughter, who's the elder child, is given only $800,000. The two each argue on how their father favored the other with the son claiming his sister was given more freedom than he was. However, Abby wins the case when she reveals that the father was blatantly sexist to the point that he wrote a will giving everything to his son...when the boy was two days old.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: A key problem for Abigail as she expects more praise and respect from people, despite her problems. She brags about her one-month sober chip at AA and "I'm doing the work" when she just sits at meetings and looks down at the people speaking. She expects to be given important cases, ignoring she's on probation and complains about being put on "minor" duties like filing paperwork. She somehow thinks sharing a pamphlet on health with her daughter means all is forgiven between them and often complains over not being credited for solving a problem on a case that she created in the first place.
  • As with many of her problems, this seems to be inherited from her dad. When Harry complains to Jerri that Abby is ungrateful for his saving her career, Jerri points out that giving her a job only earns him so many brownie points when he caused a lot of her issues in the first place and regularly treats her worse than any of his other employees.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Daniel has spent seven years faithfully working at his dad's law firm, but he's never really managed to escape his dad's shadow and now has to escape from Abby's shadow as well.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: At the end of "Under the Influence", Daniel is demoralized, as his first big case as a partner ended with Harry jumping in at the last minute and delivering the closing remarks, and Daniel fears that he will never escape being the "Svensson son". Abigail points out that Harry's grandstanding would not have worked without Daniel doing all the work to prepare their case, and he managed to find the necessary evidence for the case with only a small hint from her.