The Lincoln Lawyer ended its third season with a major cliffhanger, one that leaves its main character, Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), in a very precarious position.
The series premiered on Netflix in 2022, following Mickey; he doesn’t exactly run his practice out of the back of his town car (he has an office), though his vehicle is an important aspect of his life. But will there be a fourth season? Below, we take a look at what we know about the drama’s future.
Has The Lincoln Lawyer been renewed for Season 4?
Not yet! And that’s especially unfortunate because…
How did the Season 3 finale end?
The show left off on a major cliffhanger! Mickey, just as he was planning to head off on vacation, was pulled over by a cop for a missing license plate. The officer then, during the stop, found the body of one of his clients, Sam Scales (Christopher Thornton), in his trunk!
Which book would The Lincoln Lawyer Season 4 adapt?
Should the series be renewed, yes, you’re right to think Season 4 would adapt Michael Connelly’s The Law of Innocence.
The synopsis of that book reads as follows: “Defense attorney Mickey Haller is pulled over by police, who find the body of a client in the trunk of his Lincoln. Haller is charged with murder and can’t make the exorbitant $5 million bail slapped on him by a vindictive judge. Mickey elects to defend himself and must strategize and build his defense from his jail cell in the Twin Towers Correctional Center in downtown Los Angeles, all the while looking over his shoulder–as an officer of the court he is an instant target. Mickey knows he’s been framed. Now, with the help of his trusted team, including Harry Bosch, he has to figure out who has plotted to destroy his life and why. Then he has to go before a judge and jury and prove his innocence.”
Bosch is in the book, but would he appear on The Lincoln Lawyer?
Right now, the answer is no to seeing the half-brothers together; that character (played by Titus Welliver) belongs to another streaming service (Prime Video), which makes a crossover pretty close to impossible. But the show has made changes from the books—characters like Izzy (Jazz Raycole)—and can easily do so again.
“Just like what we did in Season 3 with the character of Neil Bishop, who is, as you point out, Lankford in the books, Michael has given us in his books, and we have then expanded in the show this panoply of characters and situations for Mickey and it gives us a lot of different wells to draw from,” co-showrunner Ted Humphrey told TV Insider. “And they do this, I’ve noticed, in Bosch as well—there are so many Bosch books. We only have, I think there’s seven now Lincoln Lawyer books, but there are, I don’t know, 20 something Bosch books. And so they have so many books to work with that they’ve had seasons where they’ve combined two and even three different books into one season and they’ve mixed characters around and Mickey Haller and those books has become somebody else. So there are always ways to do that.”
Should they ever be able to introduce the character of Bosch into the show, the co-showrunner went on to note, “we’d have to somehow backfill the relationship between the two of them.”
Who could be in The Lincoln Lawyer Season 4 cast?
Garcia-Rulfo would obviously have to return, and we expect that Becki Newton (Lorna), Angus Sampson (Cisco), and Raycole would be back as well. Yaya DaCosta could also easily return as Andrea Freeman. And it’s probably a safe bet to assume that Thornton would play Sam Scales in some capacity for flashbacks. Plus, given how Season 3 left Mickey, we have a feeling we could see Neve Campbell and Krista Warner again as his first ex-wife, Maggie, and their daughter, Hayley.
What else do we know about The Lincoln Lawyer Season 4 plot?
If the series does continue, they left Mickey in the position they did because it’s how they top a season they were proud of.
And so we just thought, ‘What could top this?’ Well, what tops it is obviously Mickey is now the client, the jeopardy that his clients have been in up until now, now he’s in, and it’s truly the toughest case of all,” explained Humphrey to TV Insider. “And if you think back over the course of three seasons, what is the mantra that his father taught him and that Legal Siegel [Elliott Gould] has reminded him of? There’s no worse client than an innocent man. Well, what happens when you’re that innocent man and how do you handle that? And how do you deal with the fact that traditionally a lawyer who represents himself is a fool for a client?”
Plus, Lorna is now a lawyer, and for Humphrey, “everything” about that excites him. “It just enables us to have this whole other dimension to play with Lorna,” he shared with us. “It enables us to potentially in the future have other cases that we—I mean, we even did this to some extent in this season, but we’ll do it much more hopefully in future seasons if we get them, have other cases that we can play with that are Lorna’s cases and just make that whole thing a more well-rounded enterprise.”
When could The Lincoln Lawyer Season 4 drop?
The first season dropped in May 2022 (then renewed that June), the second (in two parts) in July and August 2023 (and renewed that August), and the third in October 2024. Should the series be renewed soon, a (late) fall 2025 premiere date does seem possible, but that’s purely speculation.
