Van Owen prosecutes a case of seminal importance; Becker comes to regret pushing a client beyond her limits after confronting her with her husband's infidelity despite her protests; in civil court, Sifuentes and Perkins represent a family nearly destroyed by the death of a child in a car accident; when Perkins can't find an eligible escort for her cousin's wedding, Van Owen fixes her up with Handleman, who eagerly agrees to the date.

Becker is enthralled by the beautiful, but somewhat incompetent, secretary who's temping while Melman is on jury duty until he discovers that their relationship will never be anything but professional; Van Owen contemplates buying a gun after a gangbanger shoots her in the court house hallway in retaliation for her winning a death penalty case against a member of the shooter's gang; Melman stands up to a bully in the deliberation room and turns the tide of the verdict towards justice; Sifuentes hits it off with his new dentist and agrees to represent her in a malpractice suit, but their romance is doomed when she can't leave her work at the office; realizing that he can't survive professionally if Melman quits, Becker finally capitulates to her salary demands.

Kuzak takes a personal interest in representing a terminally ill smoker suing a tobacco company; Sifuentes's bad luck with women continues; Kelsey and Markowitz unsuccessfully seek out professional help to end their communication problems; Becker cozies up to his client's ex-wife to reach a divorce settlement; Sifuentes does the right thing when he turns over information that frees the man convicted of vandalizing his new car.

Perkins and Ringstrom continue their romance and their afternoon trysts; Melman gets arrested and sued after the strains of her diet and her marriage lead her to punch out an obnoxious loud-mouth in her weight loss group; Kuzak is crushed when his failure to perform proper discovery costs his widower client a settlement from the hospital that caused the death of his wife by failing to treat her adequately due to her inability to pay; McKenzie helps a widow retrieve the remains of her late husband after his misidentified body is dissected for research purposes and shipped out to medical facilities across the country; Melman and Meyer visit a marriage counselor; as they leave a restaurant, Kuzak and Van Owen run into Ringstrom -- and his wife.

Five months have passed since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and Brackman becomes his own worst enemy when he sues the city for false arrest on the charge of disturbing the peace; Jonathan begins to compromise his principles as he ramps up his bid for election; Mullaney accepts a position in the District Attorney's office; Markowitz is discharged from the hospital and begins the slow road to recovery; Becker is back from his trip around the world; when a dying man confesses to committing a murder for which Leland successfully prosecuted someone else thirty years earlier, Daniel agrees to represent the man Leland sent to jail in an attempt to win him a new trial; Zoey returns to work, and finds herself unhappy in her new assignment to the asset forfeiture division.

Brackman represents senior citizens threatened with eviction from their retirement community for rambunctious behavior arising from their participation in a clinical study of testosterone patches; Rollins takes on the State Department of Corrections on behalf of an inmate who claims that the conditions in the super maximum security facility in which he is incarcerated violate the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; Becker learns that a kiss is just a kiss, and nothing more, where Halliday is concerned; the partners's choice of a new associate prompts Morales to resign.