APPENDICES i. Biography of John Grisham
John Ray Grisham, Jr. or popular with John Grisham is an American lawyer, politician, and author, best known for his popular Jonesboro, Arkansas (on February 8, 1955) to Wanda Skidmore Grisham and John Grisham. His father worked as a construction worker and a cotton farmer, while his mother was a housewife. When Grisham was child, his family started travelling around the South, until they finally settled i fact that Grisham's parents lacked formal education, his mother encouraged her son to read and prepare for college. Grisham changed colleges three times before completing a degree. He graduated from receiving adegree in accounting. He later enrolled in the shifted to general
Grisham married Renee Jones on May 8, 1981, and they have two children, they are Shea and Ty. Grisham practiced law for about a decade and also won election as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990. Grisham represented the seventh district, which included DeSoto County.
book, A Time to Kill that took three years to complete it. But no one who wants published his book, and it was rejected by 28 publishers until Wynwood Press, an unknown publisher, agreed to give it a modest 5,000 copy printing. It was published in June 1988.
The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on another novel, The Firm, the story of a hotshot young attorney lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what it appeared. Spending 47 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, The Firm became the bestselling novel of 1991.
Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, Grisham has written one novel a year that is The Firm, and many of Grisham’s books have become international bestsellers. There are currently over 275 million John Grisham books in print worldwide, which have been translated into 40 languages. Nine of his novels have been turned into films (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, A Painted House, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas), as was an original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man. The Innocent Man (October 2006) marked his first foray into non-fiction, and Ford County (November 2009) was his first short story collection. In 2005, Grisham received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
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iii. Summary of The Street Lawyer novel
The main character in this novel is Michael Brock, a lawyer working for Drake & Sweeney, a giant D.C. law firm with eight hundred lawyers. Michael was in a hurry. He was struggling up the ladder of success at Drake & Sweeney. The money was good and getting better; a partnership was three years away. He was a rising star who did not waste his time to throw a few coins into the cups of beggar, no time to relax, and no time for a conscience.
Green, an advocate for the homeless, who asks him to help one night at a homeless shelter.
Later, Michael know that this “Mister” had been evicted from a building where he live, where he was paying rent and Drake & Sweeney was responsible for the eviction. Michael feels compelled to investigate further and found a dirty secret and the secret involved Drake & Sweeney, the law firm where he work. And the result of Michael’s investigation say that his own employer was complicit in an illegal eviction, which eventually resulted in the death of a young homeless family.
Michael started helping Mordecai Green, a lawyer for the homeless, and soon Michael left Drake & Sweeny and became a lawyer for the homeless, a street lawyer. But just before he officially left his firm, he take the eviction file that he wanted to see. Immediately he copied the data and surely to return the data to its place. But the firm found out about the missing file and it is quickly suspected of its theft.
From this file, Michael began to find out more about the eviction and realized it was illegal and his ex-firm, Drake & Sweeney, was responsible for wrongful deaths of some homeless people, who had died after being evicted. Shocked by what he has found, Brock leaves his firm to take a poorly paid position with the 14th Street Legal Clinic, which works to protect the rights of the homeless. This leads to his wife divorcing him. He admits one of his clients, Ruby, to a therapy class for drug-addicted women, and in the process meets Megan.
Green to settle on an agreement without a jury. They were offering Mordecai and Michael $770,000 and two-year suspension for Michael for stealing the file. Mordecai made an offer of $5 million and a one-year suspension for Michael. If Drake & Sweeney agreed everything would be over without the public hearing about it but if they disagreed, Mordecai would bring in a jury and was confident of winning and humiliating Drake & Sweeney. But they do not reach an agreement and finally this case was bring in a jury and reach the deal that is Drake & Sweeney give $5 million as compensation coast and the clinic receives a large payout to be shared with the victims of the eviction. For the first the 14th Street Legal Clinic will take two million up front. The balance of three million can be spread over the next ten years by installments three hundred thousand a year, and nine month suspension for Michael.
