Who's responsible for the obnoxious phrase "lawyer up"?

[BurtWorm]

And why are all the media parroting it so automatically?

[ArkDem]

1. NYPD Blue

[HootieMcBoob]

2. The first time I ever heard it was on Law and Order

You know that everybody watches Law and Order don't you?

[BurtWorm]

4. Everyone but me.

I never watch NYPD Blue either. :spank:

[AspenRose]

7. Pizzicatto please!

*doink doink*!!

Hasn't it been mentioned on The Practice too?

[RamboLiberal]

3. Don't know - but first time I heard it was years ago

when NYPD Blue first came on the air.

[Hepburn]

5. Nancy Grace, on CTV, uses that term. UGH - what a witch she is!! n/t

[RamboLiberal]

6. Goggled it and here's what I got

lawyer up. To retain counsel. The term was popularized by the fictional detectives of ABC's NYPD Blue, who lament when suspects ruin the fun of an interrogation by "lawyering up." The phrase has recently entered journalistic usage as well. Last April, John Derbyshire of National Review worried that John Walker Lindh would be difficult to prosecute because he was "well lawyered up." (Lindh eventually copped a plea.) In October, The Boston Herald called Bernard Law, the embattled leader of the Catholic archdiocese, the "lawyered-up Cardinal."

http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2003/scene_hanft_janfeb2003.html

And I wonder if the NYPD writers got it from the real detectives who consulted on the show?

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

8. I gotta go with NYPD Blue also. I only remember Det. Andy

Sipowicz (sp?) saying this, when they were trying to sweat someone in the interrogation room.

[gratuitous]

9. Actually, I kind of like it

It makes Bush reminiscent of those low-life skels (now where did THAT word come from?) on NYPD Blue, and that's all to the good in my opinion. If it gets other members of the public thinking that way about Dopey, I'm okay with that.

[markses]

10. OED doesn't know the origin of "skell" either

In New York, a homeless person or derelict, esp. one who sleeps in the subway system.

1982 N.Y. Times Mag. 31 Jan. 21/3 Other New Yorkers live there ..eating yesterday's bagels and sleeping on benches. The police in New York call such people ‘skells’. Ibid., These ‘skells’ are not merely down and out. Many are insane, chucked out of New York hospitals. 1988 Newsday (N.Y.) 22 Feb. 6 The delirious, crazy people whom cops call ‘skells’, the down-and-outs, the grungy and hopeless, garbage-heads who use any foreign substance known to man to alter reality.

[LibertyorDeath]

11. Allen Dershowitz just a guess