Not to be confused with one of its subgenres, the court show, also known as a legal/courtroom show.

A legal drama or a courtroom drama is a subgenre of drama and crime fiction. Law enforcement, crime, detective-based mystery solving, lawyer work, civil litigation, etc., are all possible focuses of legal dramas. Common subgenres of legal dramas include detective dramas, police dramas, courtroom dramas, legal thrillers, etc. Legal dramas appear in many forms of media, including novels, plays, television shows, and films. Legal drama sometimes overlap with crime drama, most notably in the case of Law & Order. Most crime drama focus on crime investigation and does not feature the court room. An early example of this overlapping form was Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason, in which the eponymous trial lawyer would usually defend his clients from their murder charges by investigating the crime before the trial, and dramatically revealing the actual perpetrator during the closing courtroom scene, by calling some other person to the stand and interrogating him or her into confessing in open court:

1. either of having committed the crime
2. or of having witnessed the crime being perpetrated by someone other than Mason's client, the defendant.