Lawyers’ Self-image and the Legal Profession
The social agenda did not appear to carry much weight within the wider legal profession, a field that Goriely (1996: 48-49) shows to have historically denigrated legally aided criminal defence.
Indeed, this has been captured by a survey of lawyers' perceptions of relative professional prestige (Sandefur, 2001: 386-87); criminal defence ranked thirty-first out of 42 areas of practice. That research was conducted in the United States (where legal aid rates are worse still), locating criminal defence behind branches like personal injury and labour law while only ahead of areas such as immigration and juvenile. This situation is reflected by White (1975: 233) who identifies the ‘element of distaste, sometimes even of disdain which is to be found amongst some solicitors of standing for those who do legal aid work'. These attitudes existed prior to legal aid as we know it and back to its roots in the Poor Prisoners Defence Act 1903. This would be the impression provided by one clerk to the Old Bailey (cited Goriely, 1996: 48) who, in 1904, was said to have contemptuously professed that these lawyers would become the ‘lowest class of professional'.There can be little doubt that the aforementioned financial considerations played their part in these circumstances. It has also been suggested that there operated an ‘ideology of triviality' (McBarnet, 1981: 143) where the problems presented were dull, ordinary and tedious: beneath the expertise of a qualified lawyer (Bottoms and McClean, 1976: 226). This reflects the ‘professional purity thesis' of professional prestige (Sandefur, 2001: 391-94). However, McConville et al (1994: 128-30) problematise this contention, suggesting that lawyers themselves choose to make the work routine.
As such, a third possibility can be entertained: lawyers were denigrated through association with their clients.
In this vein, Larson (1977: 221) highlights the role that a client's socio-economic status has on the ranking of the profession, meaning, as Eraut (1994: 5) articulates, ‘the importance of the clients affects the status of the professional providing the service'. Accordingly, for these lawyers, Sommerlad (1996: 298) posits that low status among peers indicates a ‘clear reflection of the connection between the status of the client and the lawyer'. The association between lawyers and clients, then, leads to the former being tainted along the ‘client-type thesis' of professional prestige when the latter are considered somewhat lowly and undesirable (Sandefur, 2001: 391). This is a judgement of relative levels of ‘honour' which lawyers dealing in areas concerned with ‘prestige clients' are particularly want to make of those supposed inferior to them (Heinz and Laumann, 1982: 61-65). The contact lawyers had with their clients, then, degraded them, and here a parallel can be drawn between two of the original professions: legal and medical. When the post-war Labour Government outlined plans for the National Health Service, there was vehement hostility from within the profession, primarily channelled through the British Medical Association (Rintala, 2003: 59-60). This opposition seems to have been, at least partly, premised upon class; medical practitioners feared the degradation of association with the masses, the great unwashed. This would counteract their high status as a gentlemanly profession.The introduction of legal aid, of course, meant lawyers dealing with clients who could not afford representation from their own funds. As a result, there was a shift from predominantly middle-class patronage to a working-class cadre, a move which Sommerlad (2001: 359-60) links to a ‘discursive shift'. These lower class clients were demonised and, concomitantly, so were the lawyers who worked with them. It seems self-evident that this would reflect a sharper decline than that anticipated by the medical profession, as these legal professionals would not simply be working with the proletariat but their most ostensibly unpleasant element: the criminal classes.
Any class distinctions, then, would be exacerbated. So it is that the social agenda of these lawyers involved their perpetuating the low status accrued through lesser remuneration. It does not seem to have been enough to earn them the rank of professional; thus, McDonald (1982: 273) is able to characterise the English legal profession as:A core of high status practitioners, concerned chiefly with the functions of capital, surrounded by a peripheral majority who deal in personal services for private clients... they [criminal lawyers] represent a lower form of legal practice somewhat similar to social work.
Studies of such peripheral lawyers have documented an awareness of this position (McConville et al, 1994: 24-26; Sommerlad, 2001: 355-60; Mungham and Thomas, 1979: 174). There were comments made throughout my own participant observation to the same effect, such as the following:
I don’t know how Harold [partner, Radford Hope] must feel: someone of his stature and experience, having to deal with cases down here [Magistrates’ Court].
(Shelly, solicitor, Radcliffe and Musk, IC)
I hate having to come down here and work in the Magistrates’ Court; it’s so depressing. This isn’t lawyering, it’s social work; you’re just dealing with people’s little everyday problems. That’s not what I want to do. I’m a lawyer; I should be using my brain and actually having to work through legal problems. I just feel like this is all a big waste of my time.
(Teresa, solicitor, Radcliffe and Musk, IC)
[Lawyer One] Are you down the Mags [Magistrates’ Court]?
[Lawyer Two] Yep. Worse luck. No one wants to do that!
[Lawyer One] I wouldn’t do it. I’m better than that you know?!
[Lawyer Two] I wouldn’t do it unless I had to. Don’t have a choice though.
(Gordon and Harry, solicitors, Radford Hope, OR - Gordon had recently left criminal defence for a civil department in the firm)
It can be said, then, that the lawyers’ attempts to realise the perfection demanded by their ego-ideals was again faced with failure.
The social agenda would not allow them to be recognised as the high status professionals they thought themselves to be. However, just as rationalisation protected them from the realities of financialremuneration, lawyers needed to utilise another Freudian defence mechanism to shield them from the consequences of the social agenda's reality: this time, displacement.
Displacement is a ‘neurotic defence', entailing the redirecting of pain and displeasure caused by a dangerous object and onto a safer one (Vaillant, 1992: 257). This process of transference prevents the ego from having to deal with the real trauma, reducing the anxiety experienced. The recipient can be understood as a scapegoat. These lawyers avoided facing the pain and displeasure of their social agenda failing to attain them the self-image they sought and instead transferred these feelings onto the lawyer-client relationship.
Before turning to that displacement effect, however, it is important to note that at an intellectual level the lawyers identified several other factors underpinning challenges to their claims to be high status professionals. Many criticised the media and the government for the populist line both followed, and which the public consumed unquestioningly, ensuring the legitimisation of their devaluation. A flavour of this can be gleaned from these examples:
Part of the problem has to be that, I think, the government would like us to be public servants that, in a way, we are as we are dependent on the public purse. But they do not want the expense ofhaving to treat us like civil servants - give us that status and having to give us flexitime, pension, all the benefits that go with being a civil servant. They won't give us that respect.
(Leo, senior partner, Radcliffe and Musk, INT)
The public doesn't appreciate our public service role, in the wider sense - getting all these people off, having them found not guilty when they're guilty, or whatever. But I do - it's a necessary part of society that people are represented through a well-manned criminal justice system and part of that are solicitors provided through legal aid.
We're a part of that, so I think that for the greater good, it is part of the system. People don't. If you did a poll in The Sun, they would bring back hanging and would also get rid of us, because it's not perceived to be good.(Shelly, solicitor, Radcliffe and Musk, INT)
Similarly, some lawyers displayed frustration for lawyers from other branches of the profession. In particular, this involved indignation at their, supposedly underserved, inflated remuneration casting the profession as a whole in a bad light, as in this quote:
Despite what the public are led to believe, we are not the fat cat lawyers that the government go on about. And the government know we're not. Alright, that greedy so and so might be taking the piss but okay, do something about him then. If they think the QC is paid too much, don't pay him so much but no, no, no: ‘We'll keep paying top end and keep chipping away at the bottom because you're earning bugger all anyway'.
(Mike, senior partner, Radison and Muddle, INT)
As such, there were lawyers from both Radical and Sausage Factory firms who recognised the role that all these groups played in ensuring that they were not high status professionals. In addition to these, I have suggested that the lawyers' own, largely unacknowledged, shortcomings contributed to their presence in this branch of the profession. All these factors seem to have contributed to the position the lawyers faced; their self-image was threatened and they faced pain and discomfort from failing to meet their ego-ideals. None of the above, though, became the targets for the displacement that the lawyers engaged in to protect their egos. All were either too dangerous to attack (antagonising their peer groups, hating themselves) or simply beyond effective reach (the media, government and public opinion). In their place, then, the lawyers seem to have directed this pain and displeasure onto their clients.
Their clients presented a safe and accessible target. They were the proverbial dogs to be kicked.
Further, social psychological research has suggested that commitment to a cause among such professionals wanes without social validation (Parker, 1999: 229-31). The lack of status afforded to lawyers facilitated their moving, seamlessly, from seeing the clients in a positive light to something altogether darker. Accordingly, the particular form this displacement seems to have taken was embittered resentment of their clients. The lawyers had convinced themselves that these clients were the reason they practised and, therefore, they were also the reason for all the pain and discomfort they so encountered. This resentment was commonplace as the lawyers went about their business in the participant observation, evinced most clearly in conversations such as the following:After you do this job a while, you don’t feel like you’re serving justice anymore. Not helping people. What about helping the victims? Prosecuting seems more appealing, to help someone. You just realise that our clients are usually guilty, most ofthe time you’re working to protect scumbags. It gets to you.
(Harry, solicitor, Radford Hope, IC)
Do you know what horrifies me most, about all of this? Between you and me, parting shots and everything; it’s the horror of how seriously everyone has to take everything about the main criminal players. They all bow down to them, the more serious the criminal. And I’m not into that at all. And actually, it’s just a job. It makes me so sad. I feel kind of quite sorry for them. I see someone that, in terms oflike the criminal world, it’s like the more criminal you are, the more status you’re given. That’s not me, not what I wanted to do. I can’t wait to leave. Do something worthwhile, you know?
(Audrey, solicitor, Swining MacSage, IC)
I guess I should do Watson [client], shouldn’t I? He’s such a pain in the arse, keeps whing- ing and bending my ear. I almost don’t want to, but at least it’ll get rid of him. But then there’ll be another one biting my ear. They always want something.
(Denise, solicitor, Radcliffe and Musk, OR - to a colleague)
Displacement allowed lawyers to proceed with their valorisation of the social agenda, and to believe that it entitled them to be considered high status professionals. Their egos were unaware that they were being shielded from the reality that it actually degraded them in the eyes of their peers as the pain and displeasure that would ensue were removed and targeted upon their clients. Through a combination of both rationalisation and displacement, these lawyers were able to, effectively, delude themselves and maintain their self-image as high status professionals in the face of external challenges.