One night, Michael leaves a poker game to attend to a client who struck a pedestrian with his vehicle in Westchester County.

Edens had been conducting the defense of U-North, an agricultural conglomerate, in a six-year-long multi-billion-dollar class action lawsuit.

Marty suggests Michael will be rewarded if he can get Arthur back on track but warns the firm will be finished if he fails.

U-North CEO Don Jeffries, whose signature is on the memo, puts Crowder in contact with two operatives, who follow Arthur and bug his apartment and phone.

Informed of this, Karen then calls in the operatives, who break into Arthur's apartment, murder him by means of lethal injection, and make it look like suicide by drug overdose.

With help from his brother Gene, a police officer, Michael breaks into Arthur's apartment, which had been sealed as a crime scene.

On the night of the poker game, the hit men rig Michael's car with a bomb and follow him through Westchester.

The website's critical consensus reads: "Michael Clayton is one of the most sharply scripted films of 2007, with an engrossing premise and faultless acting.

"[6] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 82 out of 100, based on 36 critics indicating "universal acclaim".

[10] It was also Richard Schickel's top film of 2007, and he called it "a morally alert, persuasively realistic and increasingly suspenseful melodrama, impeccably acted and handsomely staged by Tony Gilroy".

[11] Time wrote, "Michael Clayton is not an exercise in high-tension energy; you'll never confuse its eponymous protagonist with Jason Bourne.

[11] Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote that "Gilroy's film is distinguished beyond its components by its purpose, its compassion, its interest—increasingly manifest—in the soul".

[14] Original Motion Picture Soundtrack: Michael Clayton was composed by James Newton Howard and released on September 25, 2007, on the Varèse Sarabande label.