This final substantive chapter follows lawyers' attitudes and behaviour to their logical end-point: the outcomes obtained for clients.
It is intuitive to suppose that justice should be judged on what happens to a case: the verdict of guilty or not guilty. Due to my lack of legal training, it would not be appropriate for me to draw such conclusions meaning that, in this book, outcomes would be better suited by the development of an alternative evaluative criterion.
To these ends, the somewhat superficial focus on matters of truth can be disregarded in favour of understanding the practice of law as essentially one of language, wherein lawyers are engaged as ‘translators' (Cain, 1983: 110-13). From this perspective, clients do not understand the language of the courts and require lawyers to change their wants into a form that constitutes comprehensible legal discourse. This role attributes great responsibility to lawyers, trusted to even-handedly transmit the views of their clients. This chapter, then, is concerned with outcomes but, in particular, the role clients played in deciding the direction of their own cases.As with the two previous chapters, though, the ethnographic data collected has not allowed one, straightforward, means of understanding the issue. Instead, it has produced two perspectives, somewhat at odds with one another. In the formal interviews, lawyers presented a healthy lawyer-client relationship. They talked of giving voice to the clients, allowing clients to have their say in what happened to their cases. The participant observation suggested that the reality was quite different. There seemed a strained lawyer-client relationship, as lawyers moved beyond translation, Speakingover their clients. In so doing, lawyers appeared to subordinate the client's voice with the result that lawyers tended to tell the clients what to do.
This chapter explores each position individually before bringing them together. The first two sections are designed to allow an appreciation of key themes that emerged from the research. Specific examples of opinions and events are presented with minimal critical engagement, so that the everyday reality of the situation becomes clear. The third section sees a change of gear, with a more rigorous analysis, considering the impact of the foregoing on the lawyer-client relationship. I conclude by suggesting that the data provided on the issue of outcomes offered a strained relationship. To begin, I offer data from the formal interviews.
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