Shia LaBeouf is The Associate

Shia LaBeouf has landed the title role in the big screen version of John Grisham’s upcoming legal thriller The Associate, which Paramount Pictures has just acquired the rights to.

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.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who was involved with the Grisham films A Time to Kill and The Client, is producing. Apparently he 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.

Di Bonaventura also worked with LaBeouf on Constantine.