Kelley was born in Waterville, Maine, raised in Belmont, Massachusetts and attended the Belmont Hill School.

David inherited his father's interest in hockey (his father was captain of the Hartford Whalers pro hockey team and later served as president of the Pittsburgh Penguins) and became captain of the ice hockey team at Princeton University, where he majored in politics, from which he graduated in 1979 with a degree in politics.

Demonstrating early on a creative and quirky bent, in his junior year at Princeton, Kelley submitted a paper for a political science class about John F. Kennedy's plot to kill Fidel Castro as a poem. For his senior thesis, he turned the Bill of Rights into a play.

He graduated with a law degree from Boston University where he wrote comedy sketches for the annual follies.

He began working for a Boston law firm, mostly dealing with real estate and minor criminal cases. In 1983, while considering it only a hobby, Kelley began writing a screenplay, a legal thriller, which was optioned in 1986 and later became the Judd Nelson feature film From the Hip in 1987.

Kelley married actress Michelle Pfeiffer in November 1993. They have two children, an adopted daughter, Claudia Rose, and a biological son, John Henry. Kelley is known for leaving work in time to be home in the evenings and weekends.

It's hard to get a grasp on the real David E. Kelley, but one thing is certain, intelligence is part of his resume as well as talent.

In 1986, Steven Bochco was searching for writers with a law background for his new NBC legal series, L.A. Law. His agent sent him Kelley's movie script for From the Hip. Enthusiastic, Bochco made him a writer and story editor for the show.

During this first year, Kelley kept his law office in Boston as a hedge. However, his involvement in the show only expanded. In the second year, he became executive story editor and co-producer. Finally, in 1989, Bochco stepped away from the series making Kelley the executive producer.

While executive producer, Kelley received two Emmys for Outstanding Writing in a Dramatic Series and the show received the award for Outstanding Drama Series for both years. For the first five seasons he was involved with the show, he wrote or co-wrote two out of three episodes.

Kelley left after the fifth season in 1991 and ratings began to fall. As Newsday's TV critic wrote, "The difference between good and bad L.A. Law ... was David Kelley."

Midway through the sixth season, both Bochco and Kelley were brought in as creative consultants after the show received bad press about its decline in quality.

By 1992, after co-creating Doogie Howser, M.D. with his mentor Bochco, Kelley formed his own production company, David E Kelley Productions, making a three-series deal with CBS.

Its first creation, Picket Fences, airing in 1992 and influenced by Twin Peaks and Northern Exposure, focused on the police department in the quirky town of Rome, Wisconsin.

Kelley took on the role of writing most of the episodes for the first three years. The show was critically acclaimed but never found a sizable audience. Picket Fences went on for four years, receiving a total of 14 Emmy awards including back-to-back Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series for its first and second seasons.

In 1995, the fourth and final season, Kelley stopped writing episodes. "We had almost 10 writers try to come in and take over for this one man," said Holly Marie Combs who played a character on the show. "The quality was not nearly what it was."

Under pressure from CBS to develop a second series even though Kelley didn't feel ready to produce the two shows simultaneously, Kelley's medical drama, Chicago Hope, starring Mandy Patinkin and Adam Arkin, premiered in 1994. Airing at the same time as the season's other new medical drama, NBC's ER, the ultimate ratings leader, Chicago Hope plotted "upscale medicine in a high-tech world run by high-priced doctors." During its six-year run, it won seven Emmys, generally high critical praise but only middling ratings.

Originally intending to write only the first several episodes in order to return full time to Picket Fences, Kelley eventually wrote most of the material for both shows -- a total of roughly 40 scripts. Expressing a desire to focus more on his production company and upcoming projects, Kelley ceased day-to-day involvement with both series in 1995, allowing others to write and produce. Towards the end of the fifth season in 1999, facing cancellation, Kelley fired all cast members added since he had left the show, brought back Mandy Patinkin and began writing episodes again.

In 1995, Kelley entered into a five year deal with 20th Century Fox Television to produce shows for both the ABC and FOX television networks, each agreeing to take two series. If one network passed on a project, the other got first refusal. Kelley retained full creative control. Ally McBeal on FOX and The Practice on ABC were the first two projects to come from this deal.

Premiering as a midseason replacement for the 1996-1997 season, The Practice was Kelley's chance to write another courtroom drama but one focusing on the less glamorous realities of a small law firm. Receiving critical applause (along with two Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series) but low ratings in its starting seasons, it eventually became a popular top 10 program. The New York Times described the show as "the profoundly realistic, unending battle between soul-searching and ambition".

During the first two years of the series, Kelley was the sole full-time writer. He felt that, at first, the show creator can best flesh out the characters in a "voice-specific show." Later, the writing staff would grow to 10, most with law degrees. By the fifth season, he worked on the final script and was generally not on the set during filming.

In 2003, due to sagging ratings, ABC cut Kelley's budget in half for the eighth and final season. He responded by firing most of the cast and hiring James Spader for the role of Alan Shore, who the New York Times described as "a lecherous, twisted antitrust lawyer with a breezy disregard for ethics." The final episodes of The Practice were focused on introducing the new characters from his next show, Boston Legal.

When Ally McBeal, Kelley's first genuine and influential hit, premiered in 1997 on FOX, Kelley was also shepherding his other two shows, Chicago Hope and The Practice, although he was not actively participating in Chicago Hope at the time. The title character, Ally, is a young, attractive, impulsive, Harvard-educated lawyer, described by a New York Times journalist as "stylish, sexy, smart, opinionated and an emotional wreck." In contrast to The Practice and its idealistic lawyers, the law firm in Ally McBeal was founded to make money.

The New York Times felt that the show uniquely emphasized "character and caricature." The show lasted five seasons, seven Emmys (one for Outstanding Comedy Series for its second season), mostly positive reviews and a barrage of criticism for its portrayal of women, with many journalists saying that the character Ally was a giant step backwards.

Parallel to The Practice, Kelley penned all the scripts for the first season, then brought in other writers in subsequent years.

In 2000, 20th Century Fox Television extended its arrangement with Kelley. The deal, which ran for six years, reportedly made Kelley the highest paid producer in TV history -- up to $40 million a year -- in return for a first-look at his projects.

Premiering on FOX in 2000, Boston Public, which follows the lives of teachers and administrators at a Boston high school, joined The Practice and Ally McBeal for the season meaning Kelley was responsible for writing or overseeing 67 episodes.

The program initially considered a modest hit but received less than glowing reviews. The previous season, Kelley stumbled with both the short lived Snoops, his first attempt at delegating most of the responsibilities to others and with Ally, the experiment with 30 minute shortened episodes of Ally McBeal. The TV critic from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram opined that these failures and the weaknesses he saw in Boston Public were a sign that Kelley had lost the Midas touch. However, the show lasted four seasons, garnering, though, only one minor Emmy.

In addition to Snoops, Kelley continued to have a string of unsuccessful series: girls club in 2002, The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire in 2003, the reality show The Law Firm in 2005. All the while, he continued overseeing Boston Public and The Practice.

Boston Legal on ABC, premiering in 2004, gave continuity and success to the Kelley franchise. It is a spin-off of his long-running legal drama The Practice. It follows attorney Alan Shore (a character introduced during the last season of The Practice, played by James Spader) to his new law firm, Crane, Poole & Schmidt. It also stars veteran television actors Candice Bergen and William Shatner. Critically popular with less than spectacular ratings (ranked 27th for the first season, 46th for the second), the show has received four Emmys.

In 2007, Boston Legal began to see a rise of viewership as a result of it following ABC's extremely popular Dancing with the Stars series, mostly ranking either first or second most watched program of the evening in it's ten o'clock time period, beating out CBS and NBC's shows. The show's third season finale dominated other network's shows.