Interview with Lori B. Duff, author of Devil’s Defense (Fischer at Law Series, Book 1)

 

Today it gives the Indie Crime Scene great pleasure to interview Lori B. Duff, author of Devil’s Defense (Fischer at Law Series, Book 1), which has its debut on November 12^th.

We’re here to discuss your novel Devil’s Defense, which is published today. What inspired you to write a series of novels centred on a courtroom?

Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”  I think everyone wants to be ‘seen’ in the media they consume—that’s why it’s important to have diverse offerings in school libraries. I have read a lot of books with female protagonists or other characters who were lawyers, but none of them rang true to me. They’re either too perfect or their clients are 100% deserving of justice or both. Life and death situations crop up every other week. In real life? We’re just normal looking people with desk jobs, our clients lie to us and are wrong at least 50% of the time, and very few people die in our presence. That said, what we do is a good summary of the human condition. Families are torn apart. Fortunes are won and lost and futures are radically altered. It’s interesting without all the over-the-top drama. I wanted to read that book, I couldn’t find it, so I wrote it.

Your protagonist, Jessica Fischer, is a young attorney serving at the Georgia Bar. As a Judge and attorney, how much did you draw on personal experience?

The plot is entirely fictional and not based on any of my clients or their situations. I wouldn’t expose a client like that. That said, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t draw on my personal experience. I’ve been a lawyer since 1994, and I’ve done almost everything there is to do in a courtroom. I’ve spent literal decades observing how people act and react in real life legal situations. I know what would and wouldn’t happen in a courtroom. The inter-personal dynamics of lawyers and judges and clients is familiar to me. Whenever I get a new case, I always tell my assistant how I think it will shake out, and then as it goes I see if I was right. The longer I do this, the more accurate my predictions. I used all of that insider information to craft my courtroom drama. I was able to create a situation and guess how it would play out based on my experience.

What can you tell us about Jessica and the case in which she appears?

Jessica went to law school for the right reasons. She wanted to see justice be done, wanted to help battered women and children in foster care. And lawyers can do those things. Unfortunately, to pay the rent, we have to do other things, too, especially in the beginning when we are establishing ourselves. Reality is crashing into her ideals. In Devil’s Defense she’s representing someone she thought she’d be fighting against. She needs the money, needs the prestige doing a good job for her popular client will earn her, but the essential struggle in the book is her figuring out how to do this while keeping her own moral compass pointing towards true north.

Her client, a local hero and football coach, is sexist and odious. How does she deal with representing him?

Badly, at first. Part of her problem is that she’s so invested in her own worldview that she can’t imagine anyone would have a different one. Coach isn’t right, but he does have his reasons (no spoilers!) and she has to learn that he’s not a cartoon-style villain. Even if she disagrees with his reasons, he has them.  People are, generally, complicated. Very few people are all good or all bad.

In Britain, the “cab rank principle” means attorneys must represent anyone who comes to them. Can you tell us about the US equivalent?

In private practice, there is no such thing in the U.S. We are not required to work for anyone we don’t want to. If you are a public defender or other public lawyer, you have to take the cases you’re given. That said, there is a certain ideal that everyone, no matter how right or wrong, good or bad, is entitled to representation. You should never conflate what a lawyer says on behalf of her client with what the lawyer personally believes. In order for the system to work, you need people working just as hard on both sides. I’ve taken any number of cases over the years that I disagree with for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that I think I can help to minimize the chaos that my client wants to cause. Like one of my friends, a public defender, once said, “It isn’t my job to get all my clients off.  It’s my job to make sure the system treats them fairly.”

Why do you think fictional versions of Georgia don’t do it justice, and how do you redress the balance in Devil’s Defense?

Georgia is such a diverse place. We get tarred with the “Gone With the Wind” and “Deliverance” brushes, and it’s not that those things don’t exist, but there’s so much more to it. There’s a scene in Devil’s Defense in which Jessica is talking to Bobby, the reporter for the local paper she has a crush on, and she’s trying to figure out why he’s languishing at this small paper instead of trying to get on with a bigger one. She “assumed ambition in intelligent people” but is surprised when Bobby tells her that he prefers this small community because he can tell stories about real people and not be a nameless, faceless drone. And that’s what it is. People who live in these small towns are not necessarily small people with small lives. They’re not all stereotypical rednecks. It’s not a monolith. They run the gamut of human opinion and ability, same as anywhere else.

What can you tell us about the significance of the title, Devil’s Defense? 

Part of it is the legal ideal—even the devil deserves a defense. But part of it is that even the devil has a defense, and it can behoove you to try and figure out what that is before you get too judgmental.

“Jessica knew that in the town of Ashton, Georgia, the order of worship was first Jesus, second America, and third the high school football coach, with the second two interchangeable if it were a winning season. It was often a winning season.” What does this quotation tell us about the fictional town of Ashton, and how much does Ashton represent small towns in Georgia?

It tells you everything you need to know about Ashton’s values. They’re faithful and trying to do right by their God. They’re patriotic and proud of where they’re from. And they value hard work and success. I live in a small town in Georgia that has a lot of differences from Ashton, but a lot of similarities, too. When I wrote that line—it was one of the first I wrote and it was, in the first draft, the opening sentence—I was describing the town I live in. Ashton hadn’t yet taken its own form.

Jessica faces more than one challenge; she’s having an affair with a local reporter and her client is testing her principles. How can she deal with these?

Well, you’ll have to read the book to find the full answer! She has to figure out how to keep her personal life and her professional life apart when they have some of the same players. She’s also got to learn to trust herself and the people she commits to. Putting up a wall is not always—or even usually—the best solution.

Devil’s Defense is the first in a series, Fischer at Law. Is there a second volume in preparation and what can your readers look forward to?

In fact, as I was working on the responses to these questions I got an email from my editor with the latest (hopefully last) round of suggestions for the sequel. It’s called Devil’s Hand, and in it, Jessica represents a victim of domestic violence who is also the wife of a prominent Ashtonian. It’s scheduled for release on October 7, 2025, which is perfect, because October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

You have written several humorous novels, and your essays have won many awards. What can you tell us about this different aspect of your writing?

I started out writing humorous essays because it felt like an antidote to waging war all day like I do as a lawyer. I felt like if I was going to spew out so much conflict, I needed to balance my influence in the world by giving humour in equal measures. After doing that for a decade, I’ve kind of found my voice there. The plot of Devil’s Defense isn’t funny at all. There’s nothing wacky or screwball about anything that happens in it. But, like in real life, the people all have a sense of humour. My voice is my voice, and it was honed in the land of humour. I’m proud to see that the early reviews all reference the fact that I’ve managed to tackle serious subjects while still being funny—without comic relief, it can get too bogged down.

How much does a career in the law focus your attention on the precision of language and its importance? 

Holy moly, all of it. Or at least it should be. I once called a friend of mine who has a PhD in Rhetoric as an expert witness in a contempt case to talk about the grammatical construction of the sentence at issue and how, if you followed the rules, it could only have one meaning. A few years ago, a federal court went on a rant about the Oxford Comma, and quite literally millions were won and lost because of a lawyer’s failure to use the Oxford Comma to clarify meaning. That said, I read a lot of sloppily drafted legal documents. When everyone gets along it doesn’t much matter, but when things go south it can be an absolute disaster.

How far have you been able to draw on real-life cases in which you have participated?

I don’t use any stories from my real-life clients. I want to make that clear—whatever my clients have told me remains privileged information that I won’t share with the public. That said, “There’s nothing new under the sun” is such an old saw that it’s biblical. (Ecclesiastes 1:9) Certainly nothing new has been created in the thousands of years since that was written. There are only so many stories out there. I’m not so creative as to create something out of whole cloth—bits and pieces of situations I’ve either been a part of or seen are sprinkled in liberally. I’ve thrown in about a thousand Easter Eggs, mainly to entertain myself, but people who know me well may be able to find some of them. Judge Brandywine, for example, is a combination of a couple of judges I know and lawyers who practice in my area may recognize some of his quirks. My real paralegal/assistant/keeper/friend is named Diane, and she is tiny and super-southern and gets on me when I say bad words, but beyond that the similarities end. I’ve taken to calling her “The Real Diane.” My origin story is similar to Jessica’s—I went from Decatur to where I am now, initially sharing space with an older attorney who unfortunately died, and I inherited Diane and a lot of clients from him.

How important was it for you to focus on the role of women in the law, especially in the light of the #MeToo movement?

So important. So very important. So many books in this genre are chock full of testosterone. Even most of the ones with female protagonists tend to masculinize the female lawyers. Or they’re oversexed or frigid. It aggravates me to death when characters are impossibly beautiful or in total control of themselves. That’s not realistic. We work long hours and do a lot of sitting—most of us don’t have perfect bodies. And nearly all of us have imposter syndrome and have faced subtle forms (if not aggressive forms) of sexism. As for the #MeToo movement, I’m old enough to remember when some judges would get on women for not wearing skirts in the courtroom. I’ve had judges say things like, “You know how emotional these women get” and “Oh look, I have two beautiful attorneys in this case, why don’t you come sit in my lap.” And “I think women have a God-given right to motherhood, so unless there’s something really wrong with her, I’m never going to give a father custody.” For real. And it put me in such a horrible position. Because clearly that is inappropriate on a multitude of levels, but if you say something, you could very easily ruin your business and be less effective in representing your clients in the future in front of that judge who isn’t going anywhere. But does not saying something make you complicit in the perpetuation of this nonsense? It’s a tough situation to be in, and I wanted to address that.

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About Lori B. Duff:

Lori B. Duff is a two-time winner of the Georgia Bar Journal’s fiction competition and a popular humor blogger. Her humorous essays have earned multiple awards, including the Foreword Indies Gold Medal for Humor, as well as first place in the National Society for Newspaper Columnists annual contest in the humor category.  In addition to her writing, Duff is a graduate of Duke University and the Emory University School of Law. She serves as the Managing Partner of Jones & Duff, LLC, and is also a municipal court judge. Duff has been president of the Georgia Council of Municipal Court Judges and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and has served in various leadership roles in those and other legal and writing organizations. 

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