The Lincoln Lawyer convinces the jury that there’s enough reasonable doubt to acquit his ex-lover client. However, in the course of working on the case he discovers that her husband, who was a co-owner of the restaurant and who impulsively, his client says, ran off without ever getting a divorce (“I’m not easy to live with sometimes,” she tells Mickey) really was murdered. By her. And he’s buried in her herb garden. (No, his name wasn’t Herb.)

She begs him to understand, but Mickey has standards, and tells her off, and goodbye. No, he can’t report the killing. He only knows she did it because of what he learned while representing her in the murder trial. He is barred from using that confidential information against her. (Sorry: sending anonymous messages to the police is just as unethical as putting up a billboard saying, “She did it!”)

But as Mickey returns to his Lincoln where his paralegal is waiting, after having the showdown with the lovely murderess, police cars converge on her home. “You couldn’t call the police, but I could,” his paralegal (also his ex-wife) tells him, smirking.

No, she can’t. Non-lawyer employees of a lawyer are bound, as agents of the lawyer employing them, to fulfill the lawyer’s ethical obligations on his behalf, confidentiality prime among them along with honesty. His paralegal’s misuse of a confidence is Mickey’s misuse; the rule (5.3 in the ABA version of the rules) also requires lawyers to drum it into the heads of their assistants and contractors what the legal ethics requirements are.

This one could get a lawyer disbarred, and the paralegal, who is aspiring to be a lawyer, might be permanently blocked from getting a law license because she pulled this stunt. Ah, but the bad lady was caught, Mickey won his case and escaped the clutches of a femme fatale, so this qualifies for most viewers as a satisfying ending.

It drives legal ethicists crazy, however.