Source:Variety

December 2, 2008

Paramount Pictures has set Shia LaBeouf to play the title role in the big screen version of John Grisham's upcoming legal thriller "The Associate," which the studio has just acquired rights to. Lorenzo di Bonaventura is producing.

Variety says LaBeouf will play a student who's about to graduate from Yale Law School when he's manipulated into accepting a job at a prestige law firm and given privileged information about a multibillion-dollar lawsuit.

The novel, Grisham's first legal thriller since 2005's "The Broker," will be published in January by Random House.

Paramount-based Di Bonaventura, who as an executive worked on the Grisham films A Time to Kill and The Client, received the book in the Middle East, where he and LaBeouf were shooting Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. There, they agreed to do it together.