Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
HU-301
SHUBHAM ANAND
DTU/2K17/CO/336
Prologue
Suits is an American legal television series created and written by Aaron Korsh,
produced by Universal Cable Productions. It’s final season came to conclusion
on September 25th, 2019. Suits is set at a fictional law firm “Pearson Hardman”
in New York city. It follows the story of a prodigy Mike Ross who eventually
comes to work under one of the most influential lawyers Harvey Spectre, in the
aforementioned firm as well as the New York City as a law associate. However,
the thing is Mike never actually attended any law school! The show focuses on
Harvey and Mike closing cases together, while maintaining Mike’s secret. A lot of
ethical dilemma’s and values have been raised throughout the 9 seasons of suits
and it was ever amusing to witness the decisions undertaken by the characters
when presented with these choices and situations.
The show kicks off with the introduction of the main protagonists of the show,
Harvey Spectre and Mike Ross. Harvey is a critically accomplished lawyer and is
regarded as one of the best closers of the New York City and is a newly
appointed equity holder (senior partner) at his law firm “Pearson Hardman”. Mike
Ross is a degenerate college dropout who spends most of his days high on
drugs and helps people clear their LSAT’s by taking the exam in their place. He
and his friend Trevor ran this business to meet daily ends. Mike is a gifted
prodigy who earlier in his life himself studied for law, got into Harvard law but
wasn’t given the letter of recommendation from his school’s principal; his friend
Trevor was caught doing the same thing that Mike would do later in his life but
Mike took the fall for Trevor. Mike is not only proficient with law, he also has an
eidetic memory, i.e once he sees something, understands it, he learns it forever.
Now let’s one by one discuss the three main ethical dilemma’s made suits what
it is today:
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Harvey hiring Mike Ross
When Harvey is promoted to senior partner at his firm, he’s required to hire an
associate for himself. He’s agonised by the whole ordeal because he thinks
there’s no one who’ like him and whoever he choses will only slow him down.
But his protests are turned down by his mentor, Jessica Pearson, one of the
name partner at Pearson Hardman. So he sets up a date and invites a lot of
possible candidates for a personal interview with him. A thing to note about
Pearson Hardman is that, this firm only hires law graduates from Harvard Law,
which is the top law undergraduate college in the whole world. As expected,
Harvey is getting bored of every candidate he his having an interview with, uncle
to find in any of them what could potentially intrigue him on a mental level.
Somehow, he comes face to face with Mike Ross in the interview room. Mike is
with a bag full of weed and is trying to hide from the Police. Harvey is pretty
impressed how Mike was able to figure out the guy he was dealing with was an
actual cop and liked his presence of mind on how Mike was able to evade the
police officer. They start discussing law and Harvey is blown away by the
command Mike has over law. Harvey realises, not only is that kid good, but
someday could even surpass him. At that moment he makes a decision that will
shape the whole upcoming series and come back to bite back both Harvey and
Mike; Harvey hired Mike as a first year associate at Pearson Hardman even
though he didn’t go to Harvard law or for that matter no law school at all! Harvey
sends Mike to Harvard to get aquatinted to the college environment, gets him a
fake degree and some documents that could cover up for Mike going to Harvard
Law. This scene raises a lot of ethical questions on part of Harvey as well as
Mike. It was showed later on in the series that Mike would go on to become a
kind hearted lawyer that would help people who are in need even if there’s no
one there to help them. The motivation for Mike becoming a lawyer is explained
by the fact that when his parents died in a road accident, another lawyer took
advantage of his innocent grandmother and lurked her into signing a weak
spirited compensation for their death. This fact haunted Mike his whole
childhood, never wanting for another child to go through what he had to go
through. Not only he went on to become an excellent lawyer, even surpassing
the fabled Harvey Spectre, his practice changed the lives of thousands of
people and gave them hope when there was none. One one hand, had Harvey
never hired Mike, all of those people’s lives would have remained the same and
they would have been exploited by the multinational companies and many
would have even lost their jobs. However, by hiring Mike, Harvey broke a
number of laws, endangering his firm - it’s reputation and it’s credibility, his own
credibility as well as Mike’s credibility and moreover risks both his and Mike’s
law career on the line too. This becomes an extensive area of debate whether
Harvey’s decision of hiring talent over book knowledge was right or wrong.
Ethically speaking, it was a disaster but when you look at it with a moral point of
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view, it wouldn’t look like any crime or wrongdoing on Harvey’s part as he hired
someone who deemed the best for that job. One thing we can takeaway from
the incident, no matter how meritorious an entity may look like, or how innocent
a decision may sound from a moral point of view, one should try to avoid it and
stick to an ethically sound solution. Here, Harvey could definitely had done it
and saved a lot of trouble on the way of Mike. Maybe he could have helped Mike
become a full-fledged lawyer the proper way, maybe he couldn’t. There are a lot
of maybe’s that might have lead to a Suits 2.0!
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to get his name registered, so no one can ever find out about his secrets. He
also involved Rachel Zane, who’s a paralegal at aforementioned law firm, his
love interest in his secret and then later on including even Jessica Pearson that
put everyone including even the firm itself in a very tight position. Mike however,
redeemed himself later in the series and started afresh which we will look up in
the next section.
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Take-aways
Suits is a well written and dynamic face-off between ethics and values. Many of
the characters, specially Mike Ross have taken decisions that we would often
find very conflicting and would make someone question, whether it’s good to be
ethically correct or morally correct? To me, it depends. Depends on what you’re
doing, what your profession is. To a profession like law, credibility is all what
matters that distinguishes a good lawyer from a good lawyer. But when you find
out that the same lawyer has lied about even the minuscule of things, they lose
credibility and they clientele lose trust in them. But the same thing in lets say
Production, isn’t that frowned upon. More importance is given to skills and
punctuality of an individual. What could be ethically correct in one profession
could be ethically wrong in another profession. However values of a person
remain intact, they do not change like professions and are result of rigorous life
experiences of the individual condensed into a set of principles. We’re always
gonna face a situation where there would be conflict with our morals and the
“deemed right/ethical thing” that we’re supposed to do, and we would always
chose one above the other. What’s important while taking such decisions is that,
you seem comfortable being able to live with yourself without regrets. For a life
with regrets only leads to a particularly shallow lifestyle where more such
dilemma’s you face, deeper you go into this circle of restitution. Mike and
Harvey, both mostly went with their morals instead of critically thinking over the
ethical components of their decisions. In a way, this show encourages us to
stick more to the moral side of ours instead of being ethical.
References
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suits_(American_TV_series)
• https://www.netflix.com/title/70195800
• http://prandsuits.blogspot.com/2014/04/suits-episode-1-part-2.html
• http://prandsuits.blogspot.com/
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