Our cinema has a long and illustrious tradition of courtroom dramas and even more dramatic lawyers taking over the courtrooms.With Akshay Kumar playing a lawyer for the first time in Jolly LLB 2, it’s time to rewind to the best legal performances in Bollywood. Order order!

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1. Sunny Deol in Damini (1993): Mid-way through Raj Kumar Santoshi’s powerful film about justice for a rape victim, Sunny Deol stumbled in as a washed-out lawyer determined to fight for that one cause he believes in. The role was modelled on Paul Newman’s lawyer-act in The Verdict. But you know what? Deol was more heartwarmingly honest than Newman. His best performance to date.

2. Rajkummar Rao in Shahid (2013): What do you do when the law fails you? You become a lawyer. Grappling with insubstantial charges of terrorism, real-life lawyer Shahid Azmi spends his abbreviated life fighting cases against people wrongfully imprisoned for terrorism. Hansal Mehta’s film gave us perhaps the single-most compelling lawyer-hero of Indian cinema. Rao, take a bow.

3. Amitabh Bachchan in Pink (2016):Then there is Mr Bachchan playing a weather-beaten bi-polar lawyer who decides to help three single girls in a sexual assault case.This was the first lawyer I’ve seen in a Hindi film who didn’t shriek his lines. And yet every word he uttered in the courtroom remains emblazoned in the audiences’ hearts and souls. Yes ,a No means a NO. This is a performance that made us say a collective YESSSSS.

4. Paresh Rawal in Oh My God (2012):The most ironical thing about this performance was that Paresh was not a  lawyer. But he knew what he wanted to prove: that God doesn’t exist.So he steps into the courtroom risking imprisonment for blasphemy, to fight it out against the State. It was a terrific show of audacity for Rawal. Arguably his best performance to date.

5. Simi Garewal in Insaaf Ka Tarazu (1980):We don’t get too many powerful female lawyers in Hindi cinema  like Geetanjali Kulkarni in Mahesh Tamhane’s Marathi masterpiece Court. Simi in this crude rip off of the super-crude rape-revenge thriller Lipstick, modelled her performance on the legendary Anne Bancroft in Lipstick. She was stylish and suave.Quite a charming anomaly in the courtroom.