Best legal movies of all time

With another Academy Award season behind us, it is interesting to reflect on all of the great legal movies that have either won, or been snubbed, for an Oscar in the past. Still regardless of awards and accolades, how does one really measure a great film? I know I've seen plenty of Academy Award winning movies that didn't quite impress me. Obviously awards alone are not enough to weigh the balance, so what else should one consider when we try and compile the qualities that make up great legal cinema?

 Here at the Oklahoma Legal Group, when we initially set out to create a list of the greatest legal movies of all time, we ran into these same questions. What criteria should we consider? What aspects truly separate one highly-acclaimed legal movie from the next? Does a “legal movie” have to focus solely on the judicial process, or can some courtroom scenes be so iconic that they transcend the rest of the film? Honestly we couldn't come up with our own answer, so naturally we looked to the work of others before us.

 When we set down to create our own "top ten" list of the greatest legal movies of all time, the task became a bit daunting. With so much amazing courtroom cinema crafted throughout the decades, we quickly realized that we were doing the genre an injustice by relying solely on our own subjective tastes. For every film that we felt earned a place on the list, there was another that equally deserved to be there, if only for different reasons.

 Ultimately, we didn't feel that creating our own "top ten" list would be sufficient. For one, that whole song and dance has been played out. There are too many top ten lists across the web to count, and we wanted to find a way to distinguish our list from all the masses. In a sense, we wanted to create a "super-list" of sorts. So, we gathered information from across the internet and compiled the results of various top ten lists and ranked the legal films by the number of votes they received from the other authorities as a whole.

 

The resulting infographic lists what we believe to be the definitive list of the top ten greatest legal movies of all time. In total, fifty-four movies received votes. Some of the films are giants in the cinematic landscape, while others are lesser known gems. Some of the movies which received votes might not be considered “legal movies” by everyone due to the fact that they aren’t entirely set in a courtroom, or may only contain one legal-like scene or legal undertones; regardless, you must remember our methodology here: we compiled respected lists from across the internet to form an unbiased account of the greatest legal films of all time.

 You can review the blog post and infographic here. What are your thoughts on the top ten? Do you think that some movies should have received more or less votes?

 

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