Law students go rogue in Grisham’s latest

‘Rooster Bar’ pecks at law school elitism

Ever hear of The Great Law School Scam?

John Grisham cherry-picks a couple of humdinger, real-life scandals for his latest legal thriller, and one is the little-known racket of third-tier, for-profit law schools.

In the entertaining The Rooster Bar (Doubleday, 352 pp., eeeE out of four), the aptly named Foggy Bottom Law School in D.C. makes its dough by churning out grads of dubious pedigree with even worse job prospects, all saddled with mountains of debt, much of which is likely to end up in taxpayers’ laps.

Pals Mark Frazier, Todd Lucero and Zola Maal are in their 20s and in their final year at (fictional) FBLS, each facing the bar exam, a bleak job market and around $200K in student debt.

The action kicks off when their bipolar classmate Gordy Tanner (who’s having a fling with Zola) goes all Carrie Ma- thison on them, complete with a Homeland-style wall chart of conspiracies linking a shady Wall Street investor to their lousy law school.

After Gordy leaps off the Arlington Memorial Bridge, the shaken trio decide to punt their classes, evade their loan officers and figure out a way to prove their dead friend’s theories.

For three kids whose grades couldn’t get them into a first-rate institution, these wannabe lawyers are pretty savvy. (Maybe they’ve read a few John Grisham novels?)

The fairly interchangeable Mark and Todd adopt new last names, create a fake firm above a dive bar (The Rooster Bar) and start trolling for cash-only DUItype clients in District Court. They enlist a reluctant Zola to join them as an ambulance chaser at city hospitals.

What could possibly go wrong?

Somehow we root for this trio even when they’re buying fake IDs, breaking every rule in the book and venturing into territory that could land them in jail, like signing on to a class-action lawsuit inspired by the Wells Fargo customerfraud settlement, which could earn them millions.

Grisham, who’s at his best when he brings his sardonic sense of humor to the sometimes questionable ethics of law and banking, also takes aim at the politics of immigration.

Zola was born in the U.S. shortly after her undocumented parents and older brother arrived from Senegal 26 years earlier. After her family members are suddenly rounded up, placed in a detention center and then sent back to Africa, Zola worries for her own safety as well.

It’s clear where Grisham stands. “(Her parents) had worked like dogs in a country they were proud of, with the dream of one day belonging. How, exactly, would their removal benefit this great nation of immigrants? It made no sense and seemed unjustly cruel.”

As the tension mounts and the walls close in on our naughty young heroes (a few rookie mistakes are inevitable), Grisham plays a card from his most famous novel, The Firm. Lazy recycling or an intentional homage to an early classic, the one that got the lawyer-turned-writer started on his remarkable string of courtroom victories?

We’ll let his jury of readers weigh the evidence and decide.

John Grisham