What you should know about these guys...

Bobby Donnell (Dylan McDermott): The founder of the firm and far and away the best-looking lawyer in Boston. It used to be Donnell & Associates until Lindsay forced the partnership issue, and now everyone has a percentage except Jimmy, and his will undoubtedly be coming this season. Had a history of sleeping with clients until Helen snagged him for a while. He broke it off with her to go back to Lindsay, although viewers didn't know they had ever been together until after the fact. His mother is dead, and his father (played by Charles Durning, not a regular) works as a janitor at a blue-chip law firm, which presents all kinds of issues for Bobby. Proposed to Lindsay in last season's finale.

Jimmy Berluti (Michael Badalucco): Jimmy "the Grunt" joined the firm in the 96/97 season, after he was fired from a job at the bank for falsifying loan documents on Bobby's behalf. Bobby feld bad for getting him fired and agreed to hire him. [several people wrote to correct what I had initially written, because I wasn't a regular viewer when Jimmy was brought on, so I'll thank the first person who caught it... thank you, Diana!] He wasn't made a partner when Bobby divided up the firm, and he was kind of burned by that. His big case in the 97/98 season was a class action suit against the government on behalf of a group of people with cancer they believed was caused by proximity to power lines. He got a huge jury verdict but was overturned by the judge. Last season, he represented the firm when it was sued by the brother of the victim in George's trial, who Eugene had accused of killing his sister in order to get reasonable doubt for George. No one thought Jimmy could win it, but he did. He also started an affair with Judge Kittleson, a middle-aged, oversexed judge that Bobby represented in a harrassment suit brought by a former clerk. The affair ended when Jimmy implicated her as Lindsay's attacker in the finale.

Lindsay Dole (Kelli Williams): Scrappy little thing. She used to defend all the drug dealers until the 97/98 season, after she told Bobby she didn't want to do it anymore. Still the go-to girl when it comes to constitutional issues. Last season's arc focused on her defense of a former law school professor who shot a man who had been stalking his family. Had an affair with Bobby without telling the viewers, slept with him "one last time" in his office before he started dating Helen, then got back together with him after he and Helen broke up, but they took their time about it. Accepted his proposal from a hospital bed in the season finale. She was in the hospital after being stabbed by George Vogelman (a former client of Ellenor's) while he was dressed as a nun. (As of the season finale, however, no one at the firm knows it was George, only us viewers.)

Ellenor Frutt (Camryn Manheim): Ellenor is tough on the outside, which is good because her life tends to be quite hellish. In the 97/98 season, for example, she fell in love with a chiropractor who was running insurance scams, and she and Lindsay were almost disbarred for jury tampering. This season, she was almost disbarred again for advising her client to drink after he hit someone (Bobby, actually) because he told her he had been drinking before. (Note of trivia: David Kelley also used this plot device in an episode of Picket Fences.) Then she defended a man who, in the season before, sued her for not dating him after they met through the personals. This man -- George Vogelman -- showed up at the office with a medical bag containing the severed head of a girl he had slept with the night before. No one believed he was innocent -- there was quite a moving scene where he assured her he was -- but she got him off. Then she was arrested after a long-time client helped the police set her up. She and Lindsay were clawing each other's eyes out for a while in the wake of Lindsay and Bobby's relationship becoming public and the fact that Lindsay makes quite a bit more money than she does, but they made up after the firm rallied around her to clear her name after the police set-up.

Helen Gamble (Lara Flynn Boyle): Assistant district attorney who does very little but cause problems for Bobby and the gang. She started out as a one-shot guest appearance on a euthanasia case against a doctor Bobby was representing, but she did well and they decided to bring her on full time. They made her an old law school friend of Lindsay's and she started taking cases against the firm. In the 97/98 season she had a fling with Bobby, but it ended after she accepted a phone call while in the shower with him and mistakenly told him that one of his drug-dealer clients was about to be raided. He passed the info to his client and two police officers were killed. (Surprisingly, they never really got over that romantically, but they're friends now.) She and Lindsay became roommates at the end of the 97/98 season.

Lucy Hatcher (Marla Sokoloff): Replacement secretary when Rebecca snapped her fingers and became a lawyer, she was added to the permanent cast mid-season. She's a feisty girl with some problems at home that we haven't fully discovered. She kissed Bobby under some mistletoe hanging from her head at Christmas. She used to say a lot of inappropriate things, but Bobby sat her down once and now she's a little better, but still tells it like it is. On one episode last season, Jimmy found pictures of her taking a shower on the internet, and Bobby and the gang busted the landlord for installing a camera in her apartment. Otherwise, she's mostly there for comic relief. It's a rare episode that someone doesn't yell "Lucy!" in a disapproving tone. Most of the time all the lawyers do it in unison.

Rebecca Washington (Lisa Gay Hamilton): In a really heavy-handed, "Dallas Dream Season" move, Rebecca the office manager became Rebecca the lawyer last season when she found out she passed the bar exam after having told NO ONE that she was in law school for the past five years. (Whatever. Not that I don't want her to be a lawyer, but really.) She faced a serious ethical dilemma in one of her first cases, representing someone she discovered might be a serial killer, and struggled with the fact that there wasn't anything she could do about it. She often acts as Bobby's conscience, whipping him into shape when he can't see the forest for the trees.

Eugene Young (Steve Harris): Big tough guy who hardly ever has moments of light-heartedness. Has done a lot of visible wrestling with the moral issues of defense lawyering. Divorced with a young son who hit on Lucy once and was busted at school for trying to sell drugs. Doesn't have much of a personal life.

Plotlines that will probably be referred to from time to time:

George Vogelman's murder trial. A couple of years ago, Ellenor met a podiatrist named George through a personal ad. She decided not to date him and he sued her but eventually dropped the case. Then last year, he came to her with a severed head in his medical bag. He told Ellenor that he met the girl, Susan Robbin, in a bar and went to a motel with her, and when he woke up she was gone. He then discovered her head in his bag. They arrested him and he went on trial for her murder. The prosecution didn't have much in evidence (no murder weapon, no other evidence linking him to the crime) and he was acquitted. There was a very touching scene after closing arguments where George establishes with Ellenor that because the jury was deliberating, nothing he said now will make any difference, so he was going to tell her the truth: he was innocent. During the trial, Eugene put the victim's brother on the stand and "Plan B"ed him, which meant he accused the brother of killing her in order to cast doubt on George's guilt. A lawyer named Tommy Silva (excellently played by Tony Danza) represented the brother in a defamation suit against the firm, but he lost because Jimmy is awesome.

Joey Heric. Joey (played by John Larroquette) first appeared in the 96/97 season as a man accused of killing his lover by stabbing him in the chest. At first he said it was another man who wanted him and was jealous of his lover. He finagled an immunity deal with the naive prosecutor and then got on the stand and calmly stated that he was in fact the one who killed him. In the 97/98 season, he called the firm in a panic, and Ellenor and Eugene went to his apartment and find the other man sitting at Joey's kitchen table with a knife in his chest. After a couple of episodes where we discover that Joey is in fact insane, he represented himself in the trial and gets off again, though I can't remember how.

The chopped-up nun. Police were called to an apartment by a woman who says the guy she went home with locked her in there. They came to rescue her, and she told them there were guns in the closet. They pried open the closet and found the body of a mutilated nun. Helen prosecuted the case and Lindsay was assigned to represent the killer. She didn't want to argue on his behalf, but the fact was that the police search was illegal, and thus the guy was released. He told Lindsay he would "see her soon," which is why they thought he was the one who stabbed her.

Lindsay's stabbing. At the beginning of the season finale, Lindsay is at the office and someone in a nun suit comes in and stabs her. She spends the rest of the episode in the hospital while Helen and the others run around trying to find the attacker. First they round up all the nuns from the convent where the dead nun lived. Then Jimmy tells Bobby that he saw a picture of Bobby and Lindsay in Judge Kittleson's office with Lindsey's face all scratched out. They search the judge's house and find a nun costume, so they arrest her. Then Lindsay wakes up and tells Bobby that she was sure it was a man. They go to the apartment where the nun killer lived and shoot him to death, but then find out that the girl he was with says he never left the apartment the night Lindsay was stabbed, but they're still pretty sure it's him. Then Lindsay gets a sarcastic video message from Joey Heric, but nobody really thinks it's him, although he messes with their heads by intimating that he killed Susan Robbin. Then Bobby proposes to Lindsay and she says yes. Then we follow a nun down the street and when she turns around to look behind her, we realize it's a him, and it's George Vogelman.