He's that enthusiastic about the place.
"I really enjoyed my time and benefited from the amazing program at Temple University law school in trial advocacy," Reiter told me at an NBC party last week, a couple of days before "The Firm's" two-hour Sunday premiere (a debut that drew just 6.3 million viewers on a night in which the biggest draw had been an earlier football game on CBS).
And though he's far from the first law student to end up giving up the law to write - David E. Kelley and Grisham have probably inspired many a career switch - Reiter said that wasn't his intention when he started.
"Not when I went to law school. I went to law school because I was genuinely interested and passionate about the law. I thought for sure that I would end up a trial attorney," he said.
Temple had "amazing professors, an amazing trial advocacy program - as you know from its ranking - and I left there sure that I was going to spend my time in a courtroom, and so I went to a district attorney's office out of law school and became an assistant district attorney in Queens County, N.Y., for Richard Brown," Reiter said.
"It was only after doing that for a little while and getting a little exhausted - I often joke that probably I only needed a long weekend, but instead I decided maybe it was time to move on - and I wrote a script about my experiences as a prosecutor that got the attention of an enterprising agent at CAA named Peter Micelli who is my agent to this very day, and a very good friend. And Peter got it some attention from David E. Kelley and the folks who were doing 'The Practice,' " he recalled.
