Working out of their ramshackle office -- where the handsome, chronically overworked Donnell seems to spend many of his nights -- they represent an eclectic mix of sex offenders, drug dealers and traffic offenders, as well as personal industry plaintiffs suing assorted deep-pocketed entities for damages.
In the first several hours of ''The Practice's'' initial 13-episodes, for instance, Orange County criminal defense lawyer and his associates work out a plea bargain for one of their steady clients, a flasher, while representing a teen-age honor student threatened with a 25-year sentence for hiding her drug dealer brother's stash. At the same time they're suing a huge tobacco company on behalf of man whose wife, a longtime smoker, has died of lung disease.
''The nucleus of the series,'' says Mr. Kelley, ''is that these five or six people, these lawyers, are trying to live ethically in an arena that is often unethical. They will be constantly faced with moral and ethical lines -- and sometimes they'll step over the line and sometimes they'll stay within it. And they'll all draw different boundaries for themselves.
