Turow worked as a lawyer for a decade before writing full-time, and has written 13 fiction and three nonfiction books, which have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 30 million copies.

"[5] He attended New Trier High School and graduated from Amherst College in 1970, as a brother of the Alpha Delta Phi Literary Society.

After leaving the U.S. Attorney's Office, Turow became a novelist and wrote the legal thrillers Presumed Innocent (1987), The Burden of Proof (1990), Pleading Guilty (1993), and Personal Injuries, which Time magazine named as the Best Fiction Novel of 1999.

In the 1990s, a British publisher bracketed Turow’s work with that of Margaret Atwood and John Irving, republished in the series Bloomsbury Modern Library.

In 2011, Turow met with Harvard Law School professor, Lawrence Lessig, to discuss political reform, including a possible Second Constitutional Convention of the United States.

According to one source, Turow saw risks with having such a convention, but he believed that it may be the "only alternative", given his stance that campaign money can undermine the one man, one vote principle of democracy.

Much of Turow's caseload work is pro bono, including a 1995 case, in which he won the release of Alejandro Hernandez, a man who spent 11 years on death row for a murder he did not commit.

His non-fiction work Ultimate Punishment also received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 2003 Book award given annually to a novelist who "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes – his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.