L.A. Law

Becker begins the day dealing with some irate clients and finds himself at the wrong end of a gun; Melman discovers a dead partner; Kuzak finds a creative way to see that justice is done when he defends an unsavory client accused of rape and assault on a terminally ill woman; Brackman challenges Kelsey about taking on an insurance case; the firm takes on a new associate; a Chaney eulogy takes a shocking turn; Becker opens the eyes of a woman who mistakenly thinks she has a good divorce settlement; Perkins's marital problems become public knowledge; Kuzak encounters a judge who takes traffic violations seriously; Kelsey propositions Markowitz.

Kuzak pursues a very attractive deputy district attorney, Grace Van Owen, even though she's engaged to marry the man managing her campaign for a seat on the bench; Perkins is beaten by her drunken husband after she files for divorce and sole custody of their son; Kelsey continues to clash with Brackman, as well as McKenzie, over the insurance case until her hardball tactics succeed in earning a windfall fee for the firm; Sifuentes comes to regret the plea agreement he negotiates for a man who took justice into his own hands after watching his son's killer freed on a technicality; Weston is infuriated when Becker sandbags her chance to be offered a position as an associate after he tires of their affair; Markowitz courts a hesitant Kelsey; feeling passed over for promotion by Sifuentes's hiring, Taylor quits; Perkins becomes the default winner of an associate position; Chaney's will brings out the beast in Brackman.

Sifuentes is outraged when he learns that the motive behind an invitation to dinner at the Brackman house was to enlist his aid in perpetrating an immigration fraud; Kuzak continues to pursue Van Owen; Perkins is devastated when her ex-husband kidnaps their son, and quickly becomes frantic when it appears that the police cannot help her find him; Kuzak discovers that his client's suit against an amusement park for injuries his son suffered is based on a fraudulent claim; Markowitz fears that he will lose his job when he declines to run a scam on an alcoholic I.R.S. agent to mitigate his client's tax bill, but luck is on his side when the adverse I.R.S. ruling turns into a financial coup after his client's wife sues for divorce.

McKenzie's disappointment in the greedy law school students whose class he addresses leads him to offer a clerkship to a student who appears to be more socially responsible; in defending a young teenager who murdered her abusive brother, Sifuentes suspects that the abuse may have begun with the girl's father; Kelsey forces Perkins to realize that she may never see Eric again; Van Owen is furious when she discovers that Kuzak has arranged a lunch date with her fiance to scope out his competition; Kelsey finds out about Markowitz's secret life; McKenzie suggests a course of action after Hubbard expresses her frustration with their business and personal relationship; a lovesick Lewis fights to keep his princess, despite Becker's advice; Van Owen pays Kuzak a late night visit and reveals her true feelings.

Kuzak fights for his terminally ill client's right to be cryogenically preserved after death; Becker whets his appetite for entertainment law when he brokers an extremely favorable divorce settlement for his movie producer client; Markowitz and Kelsey are offered partnerships in the firm; Melman takes Becker to task over his romantic entanglements with clients; Kelsey represents a man fighting to keep his toy company from being taken over by a corporate giant; refusing to give up on the woman he loves, Kuzak goes ape and disrupts Van Owen's wedding.

Van Owen faces hairy jokes from her colleagues and the anger of her ex-fiance after bailing out on her wedding; Kuzak represents a television news anchor suing for sex discrimination and wrongful termination when her employer fires her after having second thoughts about the series of reports on her breast cancer surgery that they assigned her to produce; Sullivan is busted for dealing drugs out of the office; Taylor successfully represents a tenant's association suing Brackman for being a slumlord, and gives his former boss a taste of his own medicine when Brackman threatens to prolong the case with a series of appeals to avoid paying the judgment levied against him; Hubbard applies to law school; Kelsey does business with a very agreeable banker offering excellent terms on her partnership buy-in loan; Brackman faces a stunning and humiliating defeat when he foolishly decides to take on McKenzie in the partners' meeting.

Kuzak slyly sticks Sifuentes with a dog of a case, but it's Sifuentes who's sitting pretty after he discovers the teeth in the matter, and pulls out an unexpected win; Abby rebuffs an admirer; Becker's gamble on the Mishkin fee agreement pays off financially but dooms the relationship; after Kuzak wins the discrimination case, he discovers that his client had an ulterior motive for not accepting a generous settlement offer; Brackman takes a new approach to life and dealing with people in the wake of his double barreled defeats in the court room and the partners' meeting; Becker is oblivious to Melman's feelings for him.

Van Owen's ex-fiance gets his revenge by humiliating her during a campaign appearance, thus sabotaging her race for the bench; when Kelsey shakes a trust's money tree to benefit the homeless, she also creates a windfall for the firm and herself; an ugly divorce case hits too close to home when Abby tries her hand at marital law; Sifuentes adds to his chair collection as he settles a slander case against a prosecutor who took losing the Sullivan drug case on a technicality too personally and too publicly; Van Owen experiences an extremely embarrassing case of mistaken simian identity.

Becker, Markowitz and Kelsey bicker over who will inherit Chaney's office; Van Owen prosecutes a man charged with the mercy killing of his terminally ill lover; to Kelsey's undying gratitude, Markowitz learns the secret of a serial bigamist's success with women as Becker and Markowitz represent the man's eleven wives in their divorce actions; Abby is devastated when a dead boy matching Eric's description is mistakenly cremated before he can be identified.

Kuzak gets nightmares over handling an appeal for a man sentenced to death; Van Owen helps Gilliam get a reprieve for Appleton; Melman comforts Becker when his parents try to put him in the middle of their divorce dispute; Sifuentes resigns after McKenzie sandbags his representation of a woman who could potentially embarrass one of McKenzie's clients; Perkins rescues a stray dog who wins over Brackman's heart; Van Owen intercedes for an inebriated Kuzak who's about to be arrested for disrespecting the police.

An increasingly unstable Hershberg asks Kuzak to take over the case of a woman who shot a police officer; Rogoff reassigns Van Owen to night court as punishment for helping Appleton; Perkins makes a deal with the devil to have her son returned to her safely; things get heated in another court when the men of McKenzie, Brackman engage in a contentious basketball game with a rival firm; Markowitz redecorates Chaney's office and gives it to Kelsey as a Christmas present; after McKenzie apologizes, Sifuentes agrees to return to the firm.

La Rosa digs up the ammunition Kelsey needs to succeed in representing an inventor in a contract dispute over patent royalties; Kuzak is horrified as he witnesses a severely depressed Hershberg commit suicide in court; Becker gets caught in a compromising position when he's propositioned by a client's soon-to-be ex-wife; Perkins spends Christmas with her son; when his pre-trial depositions reveal that the Emmons case is a winner, Kuzak is able to negotiate a favorable settlement for his client.