Amy gears up for the custody battle over Lauren; Vincent takes a job at the local newspaper to help him overcome a severe case of writer's block; Amy suffers from a bad bout of insomnia that's coupled with some interesting dreams in the few hours that she's able to sleep; Maxine investigates why a boy from a loving family persists in sleepwalking far from home; Amy decides the fate of a teenaged athlete when her parents disagree on how her gymnastics training is affecting her life; Lauren and Amy have an ongoing battle over bedtime; Amy must decide if she'll allow the children of combative parents to be represented by their own attorney.

Amy must decide if a brain-injured woman is fit to be a mother; Maxine discovers that a teenaged client is being abused by his therapist; Leisha meets Amy, and faces her ire for piercing Lauren's ears without permission; Vincent and Maxine clash over his journalism career; Amy faces a class of insufferable law students when she's asked to teach a seminar at Yale; Donna takes modeling herself after Amy a bit too far when she begins to show up for work dressed and coiffed exactly like her mentor; it's all bark and no bite when Amy decides to dismiss the case of a drug dealer sniffed out by a four-legged member of the neighborhood watch.

Vincent returns to work; Gillian nervously agrees to allow Donna to babysit for Ned so that she and Peter can have a romantic wedding anniversary celebration; Amy takes an instant dislike to Lolly's husband when she accepts an invitation to dinner; after Russell's mother begs him to recall her son's last moments, Vincent pores over the police tapes, struggling to remember; Amy decides the fate of a teenager found guilty of accidentally killing a classmate; Maxine incurs Sean's displeasure when she hands out a condom during the birth control class she volunteers to teach on her own time; Amy is distraught when she realizes that she was greatly mistaken in dismissing a stalking claim as frivolous.

Amy contends with a high profile attorney who attempts to bully her during a paternity case; Maxine struggles over mending fences with a neighbor; Vincent's near-death experience gives him a sense of fearlessness that gets him into trouble with Len; Peter questions his ability to raise a biracial child after he ignores a collegue's racist remarks; Maxine continues her investigation into sexual abuse at a preschool; Amy and Lolly take a self-defense course together.

Amy must decide whether to remove an eleven year old girl from the custody of her Wanderer parents; Vincent writes an article criticizing the foster care system which gets a frosty reception from his mother and siblings; Maxine is forced to testify for the prosecution during Jodi Larson's trial; Gillian's proposal that the entire Gray family take a formal Christmas portrait is met with a resounding lack of enthusiasm; Bruce mediates a custody modification dispute between a contentious couple.

Evie walks back into Ned's life just as Peter and Gillian are set to adopt him; Maxine deals with a young girl who wants to be adopted before her 18th birthday, and a 12-year-old boy who refuses to be adopted because he believes his birth mother will come back one day.

At the request of Vincent's editor, Amy picks up where her brother left off in his investigation of Judge Keeler; Kyle gets off to a rocky start in his new job as a counselor at Teen Harbor; Maxine helps a mother suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder retain custody of her children; Bruce meets an attractive young mother when he tries to set up a play date for Rebecca; Amy's sentencing a teenager guilty of multiple counts of disturbing the peace to listen to thirty hours of Broadway show tunes under Donna's supervision backfires loudly; Judge Keeler retaliates by setting Amy up for impeachment when she refuses his intimidation to drop her investigation.