As a defense counsel, Rogers handled 77 murder trials and lost only three,[3] out of 183 acquittals over his career with fewer than 20 convictions, even though most of his clients were actually guilty.

One tactic after particularly damaging testimony by a prosecution witness, was to rise and create a scene, inevitably being warned of contempt by the court, but making the jury forget the point of evidence that had been made minutes earlier.

[2] At the time he was retained by Clarence Darrow at the peak of his career, he was earning $100,000 per year, but had begun heavy drinking, sobering up in Turkish baths in order to get back to the courtroom for his next case.

[2] Another well-known defense attorney, New Yorker William Fallen (who defended gangster Arnold Rothstein during the Black Sox Scandal after the 1919 World Series), was quoted as saying "Even when he's drunk, Earl Rogers is better than any other stone-sober lawyer in the whole damned country".

[2] His daughter Adela Rogers St. Johns was his assistant during his early career, and she later became a well-known correspondent for William Randolph Hearst (a friend of her father), and a writer for Photoplay.

The book had appeared in serial form from September 1926 to February 1927 in Hearst's International with Cosmopolitan magazine, and also resulted in a 1928 play and a 1931 movie of the same name, starring Lionel Barrymore with Clark Gable as a gangster.

Although Alford insisted that he had fired in self-defense only after the attorney had beaten him to the ground, the coroner testified that the bullet had driven downward through Hunter’s body.

[2] The trial was not going well when Rogers insisted upon a tactic to give his expert witness a more dramatic presentation: he asked that Hunter’s intestines to be brought into the court.

The prosecution of course objected, but eventually the exhibit was produced, and the expert was able to argue that the bullet had actually traveled upward, in which case Hunter would have had to be bending over (wielding his cane) just as Alford had claimed.

[citation needed] Perhaps the most famous lawyer–client disagreements recorded in legal history were those which developed between Clarence Darrow, indicted for attempted jury bribery in Los Angeles in 1912, and Earl Rogers.

According to the account of Adela Rogers St. Johns, much of her father's energy during the trial was given over to trying to persuade Darrow and his wife to accept his position on how to try the case.

Rogers was successful in getting Darrow, the great champion of organized labor, to refrain from making an argument essentially condoning the dynamiting of the Times building and the killing of 21 people.

"[11] The actor Robert Vaughn played Rogers in the episode, "Defendant: Clarence Darrow" (January 13, 1963), of the CBS anthology series, GE True, hosted by Jack Webb.

[12] Rogers defended boxer Jess Willard on charges of second-degree murder stemming from the death of his opponent, John "Bull" Young, from a blow to the head in the eleventh round of a boxing match on August 22, 1913.

[citation needed] Rogers successfully defended Los Angeles Police Chief Charles E. Sebastian against a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, the 16-year-old sister of his mistress, while he was running for mayor.