The Client

Due to money problems, Reggie accepts a job with a prestigious law firm. However, she soon realizes that the firm only wanted her to help defend a congressman, Jim Addison, on a sexual harassment charge. Because the case is politically volatile and the firm had no female attorneys, the firm's partners need Reggie to help win the case. When Reggie learns that the congressman is guilty, and that the firm's attorneys have paid off a witness, she threatens to expose them unless they can get Addison to plead guilty. Meanwhile, Momma Love takes a part-time job in Reggie's building and tries to match her boss up with a date.

While 11-year-old Rafe Collins waits for his father, Eddie Ray, outside a public bathroom, a man gives him a suitcase to hold. The man goes into the bathroom, followed by another man who shoots him. The police arrest Rafe's father, assuming that he committed the murder. The killer tries to get the suitcase from Rafe, who discovers that it's full of money. After hiding it, Rafe gets captured by the police. Judge Roosevelt assigns Reggie Love to Rafe's case and appoints her as his guardian, allowing Rafe to stay in her house. Reggie also harbors an abused woman whose husband, crime boss Burt Halliwell, owns a riverboat casino. Unbeknownst to Reggie, Rafe's money belongs to Halliwell, who tries to sway Foltrigg by appealing to his political goals. When Rafe retrieves the money and goes to the casino to get help from his father's friend, Reggie follows him.

Reggie succeeds in overturning a court ruling that forced her to relinquish parental control of her children. Now she must gain visitation rights. Meanwhile, she defends a despondent, unpopular young girl whose date for a high school dance abandons her. Later, the boy is murdered, and the girl is the prime suspect. Foltrigg wants to try the girl as an adult after she confesses to the crime, but Reggie is convinced that the girl is just trying to protect the real murderer. Reggie questions the girl's family and discovers that her father killed the boy after his daughter told him the boy raped her. Also, Reggie tries to help Lenny Barlow, an old friend from Alcoholics Anonymous, who gets jailed when he starts drinking again and breaks into a car. She bargains with Foltrigg to lessen the charges.

Reggie defends an unwed pregnant African-American teenager, Zora Ward, who wants to keep her baby. However, Zora's mother, Alice Ward, is trying to get her declared incompetent so the baby can be given up for adoption. Despite Reggie's concern, she doubts that Zora is telling the truth about the baby's father. Roosevelt tries to convince Reggie to persuade Zora to allow his rich, longtime friends to adopt her baby because they desperately want a healthy African-American newborn. When Zora is shot outside her own home, Reggie must unravel the mystery. Meanwhile, Gus allows Reggie to visit her children, but tells her that they don't want to see her. Also, she must help Lenny again.

Momma Love enlists Reggie's help when Momma's friend Verna accepts a marriage proposal from a wealthy retiree whose daughter wants to destroy the marriage for her own financial gain. What begins as a simple temporary restraining order request turns deadly when Reggie discovers that all of Buddy's previous girlfriends have mysteriously disappeared. While helping her on the case, Clint puts his probation in jeopardy when he gets in a fight with a nursing home worker whose bedside manner isn't up to par. Meanwhile, Reggie struggles to prepare a speech honoring her late father, a beloved high school football coach, with whom she had a distant at best relationship. At the same time, she anxiously anticipates the first visit from her own estranged children; though her daughter, Alison, gets right back on the plane after arriving, her son, Chris, very much wants to stay with her.

Lenny, Reggie's friend from AA, double-crosses mobster Waldo Gaines by not killing (as he was ordered) a county clerk who threatened to expose a jury-tampering scheme which resulted in Gaines going free. Foltrigg had tried to convict Gaines three times but failed because of the tainted juries. Lenny goes to Reggie for help because he knows Gaines will have him killed when he learns the county clerk is still alive, and she convinces him to testify for the state about the jury tampering to put Gaines behind bars. Unfortunately, while lying in wait for his secret meeting with Reggie and Foltrigg, Lenny sees Foltrigg conversing with the head of the vice squad – the very person, it turns out, who hired him to kill the county clerk and cover up the scheme. Lenny flees to the backwoods, and Reggie and Foltrigg embark on a race to catch him before someone else does. They succeed, placing him in a witness relocation program after Foltrigg prosecutes the corrupt cop.