Colette Hughes, a lawyer championing patients' rights, represents Eleanor Riese, a psychiatric patient who unexpectedly impacts Colette's workaholic tendencies.

When patients' rights lawyer Colette Hughes goes to meet her new client, Eleanor Riese, a patient in the psychiatric unit of a San Francisco hospital, she has no idea that besides taking on an uphill legal battle to improve treatment for mental patients in hospitals, she is meeting a woman who will make it her mission to transform Colette's workaholic life.

Based a the inspiring true story of Eleanor Riese (Carter), a mental illness patient herself, who brings a class action suit to give competent mental patients the right to have a say in their medication while they're in a hospital, and Colette Hughes (Swank), the lawyer appointed to her case.