My Cousin Vinny Essay

In the movie, My Cousin Vinny, two students from New York, Stan Rothenstein and Bill Gambini decide to drive across the country on a trip to the University of California at Los Angeles, where they study. However, their trip is cut short when they are mistakenly arrested after reaching Alabama. They are charged with murder of a store clerk. The two did not commit the murder although they think that the arrest is as a result of shoplifting. They find themselves facing the death penalty if they cannot afford a decent lawyer. The underlying problem is the wrongful arrest, of which they must get themselves free.

To solve the problem Stan and Bill find themselves, they decide to contract Bill’s cousin, Vinny. Vinny travels to Alabama to represent them in court.

He resolves to associate with his unemployed hairdresser girlfriend, Lisa, as an expert witness in auto mechanics. He then decides to place more weight on his arguments on the story instead of law. Lisa thus saves Bill and Stan by providing an analysis of the vehicle’s tires, which prove the car does not belong to Bill and Stan, from which they are released.

Organizations are not without conflict. I faced conflict with one of my team members on who was supposed to make a presentation to some clients. We had subdivided the work equitably, but one of the team members decided that they could not replace a colleague who had gone to meet a crucial client for the company, even though they had not contributed anything on the whole presentation. According to Chaffee (2003), there are five steps of problem-solving.

The first step involves identifying the problem. To solve a problem, one must understand that there is a problem and try to find it. During the incident involving conflict in the team, I took the initiative to pinpoint the problem, which was that the team member was lazy and he just wanted the rest of us to do all the work while he just sat