His wife Julie Webster feeling that he is unappreciated and undervalued by the partners working as a lawyer at the firm of Jethrow, Bowker and Clay in Rock City, Montana, mild mannered and somewhat meek Maxwell Webster, partly out of circumstance, decides to uproot his family - Julie and their three adolescent to infant children - to Los Angeles to start life anew, which, if he is to practice law, means preparing for and taking the California bar exam. A combination of items lead to life in California being even more complicated for Max. The only house they are able to rent is not only much smaller and run down than they were hoping or expecting, but that it used to be rented by a bookie, with the plethora of telephone calls they receiving by people wanting to make bets getting Max into hot water with some criminal elements, who, luckily for the Websters, do not know the location tied to the telephone numbers. Joyce Laramie, an attractive young woman in Max's bar exam prep class, she who has already failed the exam twice, wants Max as a study partner, their platonic relationship which may look otherwise from the outside, as well as from the inside at times. While Joyce is able to get Max a temporary part-time job to tide him over, it is one to which he is ill-suited: bill collector. And in this job, he meets voluptuous Frenchwoman Dorianne Gray, an aspiring nightclub singer who gets him tied up in some dodgy situations. The question becomes whether Max can overcome all these issues to eke out the life he and Julie want, especially under the pressure by Julie when the going gets rough to go back to Montana and have him grovel to Jethrow for his old job back.