Blair Berk grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the daughter of two lawyers. Her father was a criminal defense attorney who began as a prosecutor, and her mother was an attorney at the University of North Carolina who started one of the first legal services programs for students in the country. In this conversation with Sonya Pfeiffer, she describes clients who paid her father with fresh-picked corn, leaving for Harvard Law School over her parents' wish that she attend Carolina, and arriving in Los Angeles without knowing anyone. She went straight into criminal defense and joined Barry Tarlow's boutique firm, where he made her a partner and put her name on the door. She also talks about how few women practiced criminal defense when she started, and a recent proceeding in which the judge, the prosecutor, the defense lawyers, and the court staff were all women.

Blair's practice includes high-profile cases involving Me Too allegations. She explains why she believes social intelligence matters more than IQ in a defense lawyer and what a woman's experience brings to the work. She says the Me Too movement created a public misperception about how the criminal justice system had handled sexual assault cases, and that accusers should not be treated differently from the victims of other violent crimes. She compares the current climate to the McMartin preschool case in California and the Little Rascals case in North Carolina, and she describes a civil bar that markets historical claims and sends demand letters to high-profile people. She discusses the pressure those cases put on prosecutors. She says she has dealt with threats and hate mail and does not want to go into detail about them.

Blair and Sonya talk about how victims' rights laws, including Marsy's laws, changed the balance of the criminal justice system, and why Blair objects to calling an accuser a victim before any adjudication of the evidence. She tells the story of Clarence Chance, a habeas case she worked on early in her career with Barry Tarlow. Clarence spent seventeen and a half years in prison for the murder of a deputy sheriff while records showed he was in county jail when it happened. She and Sonya discuss tunnel vision, noble cause corruption, and the discomfort the system has with revisiting convictions. Blair says about 75 percent of her practice is pre-charging work aimed at keeping charges from being filed, and she explains why she keeps a low public profile for her clients' sake. She closes by encouraging young lawyers, men and women, to go into criminal defense.