The story was supposedly based on the life of defense attorney William J. Fallon, who successfully defended 126 homicide cases. Warner Brothers beat RKO to the box office by a couple of weeks with The Mouthpiece (1932), also supposedly based on Fallon's life.
The trial of Nora Dean is loosely based on the famous trial of Ruth Snyder who was convicted along with her lover, Henry Judd Gray, of killing Ruth's husband Albert. Mrs. Snyder was electrocuted for the crime. A picture of the execution was posted on the front page of the New York Daily News.
According to Carol Stein Hoffman, a biographer of the Barrymores, this film took only two weeks to shoot, and John Barrymore's salary was $100,000 ($1,731,000 in 2016).