Legal workers and the workplaces of law

If one was to guess what the working conditions of lawyers might look like, they may start by rehearsing their popular culture representations. These range from the ambulance-chasing-cum-incompetents (Lionel Hutz) to the wily attorneys of the stock-US crime procedural (Jack McCoy) or the glitzy corporate firms of Manhattan (Harvey Spectre). However, governments have also provided a point of departure in crafting a common sense around who or what lawyers do. So-called ‘lefty lawyers’ were the target of sustained attack by the former Conservative government including their Home Secretary who once said that that lawyers who helped migrants ‘cheat’ should be jailed. But these arguably efface the structure of lawyers’ working conditions, replacing it with an archetype or a vocation. Indeed, one might argue that to even refer to their ‘working conditions’ ascribes a proletarianism that jars with the TV lawyers or government propaganda that inhabit our popular imagination.

In 2023, myself and Jamie Woodcock (KCL) began a book project with the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context and Notes from Below titled Legal Workers Inquiry: Worker Writing from Across the Sector in Britain. The objective of the book was to invite a cross-section of legal workers to write about their working conditions. This collection of essays brought together 13 different legal sector workers across the UK and two writers from India, that included solicitors, barristers, paralegals, case workers, trainees, those working in firms, chambers, third sector organisations, and university law clinics.

My co-editor and I were interested in pursuing this project for two reasons. The first was because of the distinct methodology that the book adopts, inspired by Marx’s Enquête Ouvrière (for further discussion, see here and here) and developed by Notes From Below. The second, as we are both trade unionists and researchers, was to begin to think about the stakes of lawyers organising and their potential social power in worker struggles.

There have been many ethnographies written about lawyers and their place of work. In the 1980s for example, the Research Committee on Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association collated reports from over 20 countries and their respective legal professions. Typically, such types of research are an example of what the Italian workerist Vittorio Rieser calls inquiry from ‘above’.

However, our book adopts a workers inquiry methodology from ‘below’, characterised by two key components. First, rather than conventional ethnographies of labour, in which a researcher goes and spends time in place of work, workers inquiry is an endeavour of co-production where workers themselves lead the production of knowledge about the workplace.

Second, the workers inquiry is underwritten by Notes From Below’s conceptualisation of class composition that has three elements. The first is what is called technical composition or the organisation of labour-power. Here, the kinds of things we are concerned with are how workers’ time is managed or dictated, what must they produce and in what conditions, what talents or skills they must use, what managerial or technological mechanisms mediate their work, and where they might sit in an office. The second is what we call the social composition of the working class. Here, we are concerned with how that class is reproduced day to day. Where do those legal workers live and in what conditions? What are their familial and kin relationships and their cultures like? What access, if any, do they have to state support? The third and final element is what we call political composition. Are workers self-organised as a class for class struggle? The book therefore stands as the first ever workers inquiry of the UK legal sector.

We have both also been interested in thinking about the relationship between law and capitalism (particularly in light of the Marxist resurgence in legal research) and, by extension, the role of legal workers’ organising. Indeed, these questions, along with questions about the class position of lawyers, have been of interest to Socio-Legal scholars and continue to interest us. Some Marxist critiques of the legal form might deride the organisation of legal workers such that it reifies law (as a bourgeois form of mediating social antagonism). Are all lawyers merely functionaries of capital or can they materially work in the service of workers, migrants, and the wretched of the Earth? Even if one might adopt the former position, might it be even more prescient to organise legal workers to leverage their power to disrupt capital?

The contributions to this book (many which are anonymous – a sober reminder of the dangers of trade union detriment) are not primarily a scholarly exercise but are intended to inform thinking and strategies around workplace organising. The essays offer a way of thinking about legal work and the trials and tribulations of trying to organise in an historically difficult sector. Indeed, as some of the contributions reveal, the key social antagonisms of legal workers are not typically between capital and labour, but also against the state.