The O.J. Simpson "Dream Team" of Lawyers Can Still Be Seen on TV Today

Not many teams of lawyers have their own encyclopedia entry. Unless you lived through it, it is impossible to grasp the amount of media coverage The People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson received. Months and months of coverage of the trial turned O.J. Simpson's seven lawyers into household names and helped deliver them famous clients in the future. They also worked for each other time and again.

For the duration of the trial, Simpson’s attorneys were fixtures on television and newsstands. The "dream team" of F. Lee Bailey, Robert Blasier, Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz, Shawn Chapman Holley, Robert Kardashian, and Robert Shapiro changed how the public thinks about the criminal justice system and, oddly, reality television. You can still see some of them appearing as talking heads on cable news. With O.J. Simpson's death, expect to see at least one on TV still defending his former client.

According to the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review paper “Who Is the Lawyer of the Century” published in 2000, the answer is F. Lee Bailey. In 2001 he was disbarred in Florida. In 2003 he was disbarred in Massachusetts. He moved to Maine and sat for the bar exam in 2013. He was denied a law license. Seems like the 20th century was better than the 21st century for Bailey.

Before being part of the "dream team," he made headlines as the defense lawyer for people like Sam Sheppard (the inspiration for The Fugitive TV series and movie), Albert DeSalvo (a suspect in the "Boston Strangler" murders), Patty Hearst, and U.S. Army Captain Ernest Medina for the My Lai Massacre.

Bailey passed away June 3, 2021.

A student of Alan Dershowitz, Blasier graduated from Harvard Law School in 1970, worked as Deputy District Attorney in Martinez, Calif., from 1971 to 1978, moved to the California Fair Political Practices Commission from 1978 to 1984, and has worked in private practice since 1985. In addition to the O.J. criminal case he’s been on the defense in the O.J. civil case, US v. Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), People v. Phil Spector, and Schmierer v. Free Love Ministries (the cult), among others.

The most well known of the O.J. lawyers thanks to a now infamous cross examination (“If it doesn't fit, you must acquit”), Cochran was on both sides of the courtroom in celebrity cases since 1964. That year he prosecuted comedian Lenny Bruce on obscenity charges. The year before the O.J. case he represented Michael Jackson when he was accused of child molestation in 1993. That case was settled out of court.

Following the O.J. criminal trial Cochran represented Sean Combs (Puff Daddy) in a 2001 indictment on bribery and stolen weapons charges. Combs beat the case and it was Cochran’s last as a defense attorney. R. Kelly and Allen Iverson asked Cochran to defend them in separate cases. Cochran declined. He passed away in 2005. Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson attended the funeral.

If you’re following the news of O.J.’s death on cable, you might see his former lawyer continue to defend O.J. The faculty member at Harvard Law has a bio on the school's website that’s anything but modest: “Professor Alan M. Dershowitz is a Brooklyn native who has been called 'the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer' and one of its 'most distinguished defenders of individual rights,' 'the best-known criminal lawyer in the world,' 'the top lawyer of last resort' ..."

Dershowitz's writings have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Harvard Law Review, The Yale Law Journal, Huffington Post, Newsmax, Jerusalem Post, and Ha’aretz. He’s also author of 30 books, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, including the New York Times #1 bestseller Chutzpah. He still says O.J. was framed.

The only woman on the "dream team," Chapman Holley is more well known for who she has defended since the O.J. criminal trial. She's been on the defense teams for Trevor Bauer, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Lindsay Lohan, Danny Masterson, Nicole Richie, Tupac Shakur, and Snoop Dogg. You may also remember her as the chief legal correspondent for the E! Network.

Will Robert Kardashian’s offspring be the real legacy of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial? Probably. The dad of Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and Rob also happened to be O.J.’s BFF and re-earned his law license to be part of the "dream team." Following the acquittal he told Barbara Walters in 1996 on an episode of 20/20, “I have doubts. The blood evidence is the biggest thorn in my side; that causes me the greatest problems. So I struggle with the blood evidence." O.J. and Robert didn’t speak after that.

Robert passed away on Sept. 30, 2003. Kanye West gifted then-wife Kim Kardashian a holograph of her father for Kim’s 40th birthday in 2020. She tweeted, "For my birthday, Kanye got me the most thoughtful gift of a lifetime. A special surprise from heaven. A hologram of my dad. It is so lifelike! We watched it over and over, filled with emotion." In the video, the holograph Robert says how proud he is that Kim is studying to be a lawyer.

In addition to once leading the O.J. "dream team," Shapiro has also represented Johnny Carson, Eva Longoria, F. Lee Bailey (remember him?) and the Kardashian family. Like a lot of the lawyers who worked for Simpson, Shapiro was relatively infamous before O.J.; he was one of the defense lawyers in the case of Lyle and Erik Menéndez. In 2013, The National Law Journal named him on the list of the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.