In the criminal justice system, sexually-based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.

While running from a drug deal gone bad, Mike Ross, a brilliant young college-dropout, slips into a job interview with one of New York City's best legal closers, Harvey Specter. Tired of cookie-cutter law school grads, Harvey takes a gamble by hiring Mike on the spot after he recognizes his raw talent and photographic memory.

Follows a crime (usually a murder), usually adapted from current headlines, from two separate vantage points, the police investigation and the prosecution in court.

Harmon "Harm" Rabb Jr. is a former pilot turned lawyer working for the military's JAG (Judge Advocate General) division, the elite legal wing of officers that prosecutes and defends those accused of military-related crimes. He works closely with Lt. Col. Sarah Mackenzie, and together they do what needs to be done to find the truth.

Dr. Jason Bull is the brilliant, brash, and charming founder of a hugely successful trial consulting firm.

A sexy, suspense-driven legal thriller about a group of ambitious law students and their brilliant, mysterious criminal defense professor. They become entangled in a murder plot and will shake the entire university and change the course of their lives.

The cases of master criminal defense attorney Perry Mason and his staff who handled the most difficult of cases in the aid of the innocent.

Ein Fall für zwei is a German television series, which premiered on September 11, 1981 on ZDF. The series, located in Frankfurt am Main, features two main characters who solve crimes: a defense attorney and a private investigator.

Josef Matula, a former German police officer, has gone into private business. His method of investigation is very effective and direct, and he sometimes even resorts to dirty tricks. Claus Theo Gärtner has portrayed the role since the start of the series.

In contrast, the attorney character has changed several times. The first attorney was Dr. Dieter Renz. Dr. Renz retired in episode #60 and was replaced by Dr. Rainer Franck. In episode #149, Dr. Franck took a job as a law school teacher, and was replaced by Dr. Johannes Voss. In episode #182, Dr. Voss was shot dead by an escaping criminal, and was in turn replaced by Dr. Markus Lessing.

Most of the episodes follow a simple pattern. Someone is murdered, and the police arrest the most likely suspect. The suspect, claiming to be innocent, hires the attorney in the series as his lawyer. The attorney does all the paperwork, talks with the police and attends court. Meanwhile, Matula does all the actual research and detective work - "gets his hands dirty", so to speak. Matula often gets into fights, and even though he is in his early sixties, he often knocks out the bad guys. In the end, the original suspect usually turns out to be innocent after all, and the real culprit is found.

Alicia Florrick boldly assumes full responsibility for her family and re-enters the workforce after her husband's very public sex and political corruption scandal lands him in jail.

L.A. Law is an American television legal drama series that ran for eight seasons on NBC from September 15, 1986, to May 19, 1994.

Created by Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher, it contained many of Bochco's trademark features including a large number of parallel storylines, social drama and off-the-wall humor. It reflected the social and cultural ideologies of the 1980s and early 1990s, and many of the cases featured on the show dealt with hot-topic issues such as abortion, racism, gay rights, homophobia, sexual harassment, AIDS, and domestic violence. The series often also reflected social tensions between the wealthy senior lawyer protagonists and their less well-paid junior staff.

The show was popular with audiences and critics, and won 15 Emmy Awards throughout its run, four of which were for Outstanding Drama Series.

Alan Shore and Denny Crane lead a brigade of high-priced civil litigators in an upscale Boston law firm in a series focusing on the professional and personal lives of brilliant but often emotionally challenged attorneys. A spin-off of long-running series The Practice.

Picking up one year after the events of the final broadcast episode of "The Good Wife", an enormous financial scam has destroyed the reputation of a young lawyer, Maia Rindell, while simultaneously wiping out her mentor and godmother Diane Lockhart's savings. Forced out of her law firm, now called "Lockhart, Deckler, Gussman, Lee, Lyman, Gilbert, Lurie, Kagan, Tannebaum & Associates", they join Lucca Quinn at one of Chicago's preeminent law firms.

A provocative legal drama focused on young associates at a bare-bones Boston firm and their scrappy boss, Bobby Donnell. The show's forte is its storylines about “people who walk a moral tightrope.”

A shallow model suddenly dies in an accident only to find her soul resurfacing in the body of a brilliant, plus-sized attorney.

An anthology series centered around some of history's most famous criminals.

The Defenders is an American courtroom drama series . It starred E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed as father-and-son defense attorneys who specialized in legally complex cases, with defendants such as neo-Nazis, conscientious objectors, civil rights demonstrators, a schoolteacher fired for being an atheist, an author accused of pornography, and a physician charged in a mercy killing.

A prisoner becomes a lawyer, litigating cases for other inmates while fighting to overturn his own life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit.

Set in 1932 Los Angeles, the series focuses on the origin story of famed defense lawyer Perry Mason. Living check-to-check as a low-rent private investigator, Mason is haunted by his wartime experiences in France and suffering the effects of a broken marriage. L.A. is booming while the rest of the country recovers from the Great Depression — but a kidnapping gone very wrong leads to Mason exposing a fractured city as he uncovers the truth of the crime.

Damages is an American legal thriller television series created by the writing and production trio of Daniel Zelman and brothers Glenn and Todd A. Kessler. The plot revolves around the brilliant, ruthless lawyer Patty Hewes and her protégée, recent law school graduate Ellen Parsons. Each season features a major case that Hewes and her firm take on, while also examining a chapter of the complicated relationship between Ellen and Patty. The first two seasons center around the law firm Hewes & Associates. Later seasons center more on Patty and Ellen's relationship as Ellen begins to distance herself from Hewes & Associates and begins an independent career.

Matlock is an American television legal drama, starring Andy Griffith in the title role of criminal defense attorney Ben Matlock. The show, produced by The Fred Silverman Company, Dean Hargrove Productions, Viacom Productions and Paramount Television originally aired from September 23, 1986 to May 8, 1992 on NBC; and from November 5, 1992 until May 7, 1995 on ABC.

The show's format is similar to that of CBS's Perry Mason, with Matlock identifying the perpetrators and then confronting them in dramatic courtroom scenes. One difference, however, was that whereas Mason usually exculpated his clients at a pretrial hearing, Matlock usually secured an acquittal at trial, from the jury.