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• Shubham Anand

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Ethics Values and Dilemma in Suits 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 Page 2 of 5

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!

Mike Ross’s previous life


Mike, before he was hired by Harvey Spectre, was pretty shady. When he was in school, preparing for LSAT’s, he and his friend Trevor used to help people cheat in exams by providing question papers and what not. One day, Trevor was caught handing out papers to the principal’s daughter and would have faced sure expulsion. However, Mike took the fall for him and as a result, his principal refused to give him a good character certificate to help his admission in Harvard Law. This destroyed all his dreams of ever becoming a lawyer in his life and he had to drop out from his college. Mike used to have no parents and he had an old grandmother that was in elderly care which was pretty expensive for Mike’s pocket. This forced Mike to indulge in shady business with his friend Trevor for quick cash so as he could take care of his grandmother and help end meets. He used to consume drugs, once even dealt with them and primarily, used to help people pass their LSAT’s by appearing in place of them. This was the unique selling point of Mike-Trevor enterprise and they earned around $1000 USD per exam. He was pretty much wasting his life being a lowkey junkie, with a lot of responsibilities and very little time to handle them. The character certificate didn’t make it possible for him to seek jobs outside the law domain. This scenario posed a severe ethical dilemma on minds of viewers, whether Mike is a good person or bad person? Whether Mike is doing right or wrong? To be honest, it’s pretty hard to say. We never saw Mike in the show as a bad person, he did what he had to do to make ends meets. Having no parents in his life, his foundation of life was pretty weak and he had to figure all of it out on his own. Whether we talk about his choices of life in an ethical way or a moral way, we have nothing concrete to analyse his choices. His circumstances were many a times not in his favour and to someone like him, all of these feelings coming out together can be pretty overwhelming. Yes maybe he could have made better choices, maybe he could have turned out better but again there are a lot of maybes and sometimes it’s extremely hard to judge why a person did what he did. Standing in someone’s shoes is not an easy task and hence any opinion we may have of Mike, is pretty much always gonna be inaccurate/biased. Later on when Mike became a lawyer working for “Pearson Hardman”, he would go on to forge documents, eliciting false alibis and even hacking into the bar association Page 3 of 5

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.

Mike Ross’s redemption

Mike’s redemption arc was one of the most beautifully written arcs of Suits. Mike’s cover that he went to Harvard or for that matter any law school was blown away and raised serious ethical questions about practices of the form itself. All the cases that Mike Ross was ever on, were to be reopened and reinvestigated by the state’s defence attorney’s. “Pearson Spectre Litt”; the name of firm then, after many buyouts and change of name partners, came under heavy fire from every corner by rivalling firms. It literally became a sinking boat as it’s associates and lawyers were getting poached, all the senior partners were selling themselves out and it was total chaos. Mike was given two choices by the Defence Attorney Anita Gibbs during his trial, to either sell Harvey out, i.e. Harvey knowingly hired Mike Ross even though he wasn’t a law graduate, which would result in Harvey’s practising license getting canceled and possibly jail time OR serve federal prison himself for 3 years. Harvey pleaded Mike to take the first deal but in the end, Mike surrendered himself and taking the 2nd deal instead, hence saving Harvey, and all the members who’s shared Mike’s secret as well as Pearson Spectre Litt. After getting out of Prison; way early from his actual sentence, started his life from ground 0 and eventually getting himself legally admitted in bar and passing the bar character fitness test (which in itself would be another big case study for ethics and morals but as much as I would love to, I cannot cite every case of ethical dilemma occurring in this mammoth of a series xD) and eventually becoming a full fledged lawyer. He goes on to work at a law clinic where he takes pro bono cases with his now wife Rachel Zane, and in the process starts helping thousands of unheard people, and fighting for jobs of hundreds of unemployed people. To me this arc was beautiful in the concept as it set all ethical violations as undertaken by Mike Ross in his whole life undone. Viewers may even call Mike’s actions unnecessary (Given Jury would have given him a not-guilty verdict as found by Harvey Spectre after the trials concluded), nevertheless, Mike did that was right and had to be done. He faced himself and questioned his values, his ethics and did something which looked just to him along with his clients. Another valuable aspect to this arc was his show of friendship and respect to his mentor and friend Harvey Spectre and his allegiance to the firm “Pearson Spectre Litt” who helped him in his formative years at law. Maybe this was all what Mike needed to be the lawyer he wanted to be, to face adversities and come out on top of them.

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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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