NOTE: this post contains spoilers for The Lincoln Lawyer season 2 episode 3, "Conflicts."
Having successfully neutralized his threat in Russell Lawson (David Clayton Rogers), Mickey (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) now faces off with a formidable legal opponent in prosecutor Andrea Freemann (Yaya DaCosta) and Lisa’s (Lana Parrilla) associate Henry Dahl (Matt Angel). Additionally, he and Maggie (Neve Campbell) have another heated argument.
Here’s what happened.
Lisa initially looks guilty
Mickey manages to get his hands on the video of the interrogation of Lisa while in police custody. In the clip, Lisa admits to going to a coffee shop that was not far from Mitchell Bondurant’s office. She eventually adds that she abruptly left the coffee shop after seeing the wealthy developer because she did not want to be in violation of the active restraining order to stay away from him.
Also in the recording, she mentions that she hated Bondurant and could understand someone wanting to harm him, although she at that point wasn’t told by the interrogating officer that Bondurant was dead.
In light of this footage, the fact that Mickey and Lisa were recently romantically involved (which borderlines conflict of interest) and the objections from Lorna (Becki Newton), Mickey is unsure about representing Lisa in a full trial.
Eventually, he lets Andrea bait him into officially signing on to be Lisa’s legal counsel for the murder trial. Unfortunately, shortly after agreeing to take on the job, he gets news that Margo Schaefer, a receptionist at Bondurnat’s firm, claims she saw Lisa walking away from the victim’s office around the time of the homicide.
Cisco confesses to Lorna
Lorna gets two fraud alerts from her bank about charges made on a card she shares with Cisco (Angus Sampson) at a gas station in Sunland. Confused by the location of the gas station, she googles it and realizes it's a hangout of Cisco’s former biker gang, The Road Saints. Upon confronting Cisco with her revelation, he breaks down the mystery that’s been surrounding him so far this season.
He confesses that when he first got to LA, he followed his friend Kaz (Douglas Bennett) into The Road Saints. Then came a day when he and Kaz were supposed to make some kind of delivery on behalf of the gang. However, Kaz purposefully told Cisco the wrong address, which turned out to be a great thing for Cisco as Kaz was arrested at the correct dropoff point. At this moment in history, Cisco decided to put some distance between him and the gang.
Kaz managed to serve only a fraction of his prison stint for his crime, which has led to Road Saints boss Teddy (Chris Browning) becoming suspicious that Kaz snitched to get a lighter sentence, and is furthermore now working to gain information on the biker gang. Following this logic, Teddy has tasked Cisco with monitoring Kaz to make sure he’s not working with law enforcement.
After hearing the truth, Lorna appreciates Cisco finally sharing why he’s been acting strange. However, she cautions him that if he lies to her again, they’re over as a couple.
Mickey faces off with Andrea
After taking Andrea’s bait in representing Lisa, Mickey is back in his office talking strategy with Lorna. He shares that Andrea likes to dance around the line of legal ethics to win cases and he’s worried she’ll hold discovery from him in Lisa’s case until the last minute, hoping he doesn’t have enough time to prepare. With that in mind, he asks Lorna to draft several motions to petition the court.
When Mickey and Andrea meet in the courtroom, she confronts him about the number of motions, claiming there is no way the judge will grant them. He brags about the fact that if that turns out to be true, he has one motion that the judge would likely grant, and it’s a motion to have Andrea dismissed from the case.
Earlier in the episode, Mickey was talking with his daughter Hayley (Krista Warner) and she let it slip that she overheard Andrea talking about the murder trial with Maggie. Mickey finds this conversation to be enough to warrant the judge removing Andrea as the leading prosecutor.
Andrea asks what Mickey really wants, and he says he wants all the discovery in the murder trial as soon as possible, and he doesn’t want to have to jump through hoops to get it, to which Andrea agrees.
Mickey and Maggie argue about his latest legal stunt
While watching their daughter take horse-riding lessons, things start to look promising for the friendship between Mickey and his ex-wife Maggie. They even manage to laugh about the fact that he played her a bit to carry out his plot against Russell (she didn’t mind as the plan yielded justice for all involved in the case and it helped her get her career back on track). Things between the exes even appear flirtatious as they run into each other at a food truck later.
Then Mickey and Maggie’s relationship is once again derailed when Andrea relays what he did to her in court. Maggie confronts her ex in his office, and berates him for using her and their daughter to get a one-up on Adrea before storming off. She also comes to realize he had a sexual relationship with Lisa.
Henry busts Mickey
Since Lisa has a problem raising her $2 million bail, Mickey convinces her to raise the capital by signing over her life rights to a potential entertainment studio, which may be interested in her story as a murder suspect of a high-profile victim. Furthermore, Mickey gets her to sign over her power of attorney to him so he can negotiate the deal.
In a shocking turn of events, before Mickey can negotiate such a deal, Lisa strolls into his office with an associate named Henry. Apparently, Henry previously interviewed Lisa for a podcast about gentrification, and he has an interest in following Lisa’s case to turn it into a true crime production, hence him giving her the bail money. Unfortunately for Henry, Mickey quickly shuts down that idea with Lisa’s power of attorney and makes it clear that he doesn’t trust Henry.
Then in a plot twist, by the end of the episode, Henry is seen sitting outside of Mickey’s house, watching as Lisa leaves late at night. Although nothing happened between Lisa and Mickey on this occasion, despite her desire that it would have.
The Lincoln Lawyer season 2 part 1 is now streaming on Netflix.
