Spin-off series Better Call Saul tells Goodman’s back story from when he practised law under his real name, James ‘Jimmy’ McGill. Despite a dodgy past, McGill is trying hard to do the right thing and establish his public defender practice. A scene in the first episode must feel close to reality for legal aid lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic, as he remonstrates with a clerk when he receives a fixed fee of only $700 for representing three defendants in a jury trial. Many lawyers will also identify with McGill’s struggles to establish his firm against the competition; his audacious ruse to obtain media coverage for his fledgling legal practice, while turning the tables on a rival firm, is one of the comic highlights of the series.

Mike Ehrmantraut is McGill’s henchman, who, with his cool understated manner, is a brilliant foil to the lubricious lawyer. Ehrmantraut and McGill hatch a plan to save some delusional clients from themselves. Despite this good deed, sparked by a shocking betrayal, by the end of the first series, McGill has returned to his conman roots of ‘slipping Jimmy’ and embarked on a career path to serve the criminal classes firmly on the wrong side of the law. This, of course, rules him out as a potential role model for aspiring criminal lawyers, but makes Saul Goodman one of the most entertaining fictional lawyer characters since Rumpole.