While Alicia tries to protect her apartment building's property manager from being deported, Will gets roped into playing the judge in a mock trial at the DePaul University law school.
This episode includes the first appearance of Elsbeth Tascioni.
This episode provides examples of the following tropes:
- Blackmail: A word which is never brought up, but seems to be on everyone's minds in the A-plot. Alicia's building manager Simran is discovered to be undocumented, and the feds use the threat of deportation as leverage to force her American-born children to cooperate with an investigation of an identity theft ring run out of the travel agency in Little India where Amal works.
- Commonality Connection: Defied. Even though she's also from an immigrant family, Kalinda doesn't have much sympathy for the Varmas' predicament since her own parents entered the country legally, and she's slightly annoyed at Alicia for assuming she would.
- Dating What Daddy Hates: Downplayed: Zach tells Alicia that he and Becca are officially dating. Alicia replies that she doesn't like Becca, but is willing to give her a shot if Zach brings her over for dinner so they can more formally meet.
- Fantastic Legal Weirdness: Conversed, as the fictitious case over which Will presides is "Hansel and Gretel". Will notes to a deeply amused Diane that the story actually raises a lot of interesting legal issues such as self-defense and property rights.
- Hide the Evidence: Not wanting his father sent back to prison, Zach covers up Peter breaking the electronic monitoring perimeter to go after Alicia by smashing the base unit with his skateboard and then deliberately injuring himself to make it look like he set the system off by mistake skateboarding in the house. Grace and Amal back him up, but Amal's name coming up in the investigation gets ICE's attention on his mother.
- Language Barrier: The shopkeeper in Little India that Cary and Kalinda suspect is involved in the crime ring insists on talking to her in Hindi, which the American-born Kalinda never learned.
- Loophole Abuse: Played for laughs. One of Peter's law students, whom he repeatedly ruled against, comes to him after class to ask for advice, which he supplies. She then uses this conversation as leverage to force him to recuse himself from the mock trial.
- Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: The episode starts with the Florricks covering up Peter breaching his electronic monitoring perimeter, which would just result in revocation of his pretrial release. The building manager's son is a witness, and his name coming up leads to his mother getting arrested by ICE to force him to help them in an organized crime case against his employers.
