Guess who just signed on with OC....
Denis Leary
Not sure if this will also be in time for the Mercy Killers arc, although this link seemed to imply it would be.
The fly-by-night production of Organized Crime continues to bother me. It takes them nine to ten days to shoot a single episode, roughly the same amount of time for post-production (longer if the episode has special effects) and they've been on production hiatus for a while. They still have twelve more episodes to crank out before the May finale, though we know the February 24 episode is at least partially in the can because there's been a 15-second promo for it. But they're still racing against time.
Although, I suppose that isn't anything particularly new for Law & Order. NBC canceled Vanilla literally ten days before the airing of the season 20 finale, Rubber Room, which was in the middle of editing and other post-production. So Rene Balcer and company literally had no time to re-shoot, re-edit or re-structure the episode to make it a proper series finale. It's a miracle that it turned out as well as a series finale as it did, honestly (although I've always had a hunch that, despite Dick Wolf claiming NBC had promised him a shortened season 21 that would have led directly into the launch of L&O: Los Angeles, he had told Balcer to write a season finale that would have worked as a series-ender).