The Firm

The Firm is a legal thriller by the American writer John Grisham, published in 1991. It was his second novel and the first to reach a wide audience, and it was adapted into a film in 1993.

Mitch McDeere is the best law student in his year, and instead of the big-city offers he takes a job at a small tax firm in Memphis that pays more than it should and treats its new associate and his wife like family. The partners take a quiet pride in the fact that no one has ever resigned.

When the FBI approaches Mitch, he learns why: the firm's clients are not only the wealthy individuals it claims to serve, and the agents want his help. Staying and leaving both carry a price, and the novel follows his attempts to find a way out of the arrangement before it closes over him.

Grisham was a lawyer before he wrote fiction, and the book helped establish his name as a writer of legal thrillers. A sequel, The Exchange, was published in 2023, long after the original.