At the time of writing the first draft, I am a legal aid solicitor specialising in community care law. My clients are usually either children in the care system (or fighting to get into it) or disabled adults needing support. In essence, this is “pie law”: who deserves a slice of the increasingly meagre public offering, and how big? Community care often requires protracted negotiation, but the Ministry of Justice disincentivises us from doing that work through the structure of legal aid funding. I suspect that this is feeding a growing morass of trauma and resentment across the country.

My employer is a classic shit-show legal aid firm. Demand for our services far outstrips supply, so the boss piles as much responsibility as possible onto an army of poorly paid paralegals – often recent graduates from well-off families – and we all clean up the inevitable mess later. After having trained in the hand-wringing charity sector - where the same dynamic between employer and employee is rife, but there are more pointless meetings and the profit motive is obscured by shit liberal rhetoric - this approach is refreshing.

Nonetheless, in the course of writing this piece, I had to be signed off work. Without going into the details and specific triggers, my workload and work environment – particularly a lack of management and supervision – landed me on the edge of my seat, in the seat of my pants, reaching for alcohol at asocial times of day to suppress suicidal thoughts.

Instead of continuing to help unionise my current workplace, I have decided to leave it. I might try my hand at a related, but different type of law, or pack it all in for greener pastures. Such is the mobility of a solicitor in my position. We are a dying breed: it’s a shit job, shittily paid, getting shitter thanks to the political-economic cesspit neoliberalism and austerity have left us in; so fewer and fewer people are doing it. As a result, employers are on the lookout. Part of me is disappointed in this, because the firm is ripe for organising in many ways. The workers, who have shared values, are suffering. Clients are being let down and the external image is poor. This is good for no one involved, including the boss. Nonetheless, I don’t have the energy to carry on, swimming against a tide of ineptitude (my own included) that will likely one day wash the firm into the rocks. At the time of the final draft, I am a deserter!

Training as a solicitor

A solicitor learns their trade, initially, with an apprenticeship. This system has undergone many iterations of reform and is now being supplanted by a truncated, nominally cheaper, and more informal version. I became a solicitor through a “training contract.”: This is a two-year contract of employment split into periods of at least three different “seats” in different areas of law. My second seat was in criminal defence and started the week before Britain’s first lockdown, in March 2020.

I learnt a lot: the penal system is devastating; I want to defund the police; I am liable to panic attacks when left with complicated work without leadership. Most of the first and second lockdown was spent at the foot of my bed in my underpants, negotiating with police, court clerks, and trying (usually in vain) to mollify clients. This is an example of what the work involved:

The client lives in a hostel for homeless young adults. He is being investigated for a drug-related crime. He hasn’t been interviewed yet but he knows the police are looking for him.

A friend of his recommends our firm. He is nervous and unsure how the process is supposed to work. After obtaining his details, I get on the phone with the police to arrange an interview. We won’t be paid until the interview happens: this stage is unremunerated.

After a long time on the phone, I get through to the station that’s after him. A message is placed on the cops’ computer system explaining the time and place the interview is to take place.

Between then and the interview, I get a frantic, panicked call from the client. He says a van load of policemen arrived at his hostel to arrest him. He was out at the time and told by a friend. I’m confused: the interview has been arranged and I was given assurances that this wouldn’t happen. He’s angry and scared.

After a long time on the phone, I’m told by a softly spoken cop that this was a mistake, that the client has a “red flag” against his name and that the note explaining the time and place of his interview wouldn’t have been clear to the cops in the van because you had to “click through.”

The context is that there’s a glut of policemen on the streets. In the absence of adequate PPE or enough hospital beds, the government had upped the number of bobbies on the beat. The assumption being we could punish our way out of a public health crisis.

When I ask why they would just see his name and go for it without clicking through to the note, the softly spoken copper apologises and I’m told, by way of defence, “there are a lot of bored police out there at the moment.”

This phone call shaped me profoundly. The point is that legal aid work – like a lot else – is a slog, and it provides good reasons to be radicalised against the status quo. As opposed to continuing with criminal defence, I decided to use my experience to specialise in community care.

Community Care Law for Careless Communities

The care system in the UK is an exclusionary, poorly thought-out zero-sum game between the vulnerable and local authorities (the economic basis of this analogy is contentious, but the logic is how services operate). Hence, “pie law” becomes “shite law.” If the case ends, the context persists. Any one success could mean a larger slice, but the quality and size of the pie keeps diminishing as austerity and neoliberalism linger on like a hungry fungus.

In the interests of brevity, I define “law” as glorified bureaucracy. The formula for understanding how “legal need” arises is “Welfare = Law = Paperwork”. Dressed up in the language of humanity and liberalism, the paperwork piles up at every juncture where lives meet the state and capital. In the absence of an actual historical inquiry, I assume this law/paperwork is primarily the result of Labour’s victory following the world wars. In the end, a century of class and inter-imperial struggle gave rise to a generally palatable, heavily bureaucratised capitalism.

The lawyer is distinguished from other bureaucrats by dispute. As opposed to causing arguments and fights, we manage them, and help participants engage in an emotionally wrought and often harmful process within the boundary of the paperwork.

The British legal aid lawyer, unlike the other lawyers who focus on businesses and rich people, is ridden by their boss to mitigate the pain of those ridden by the cop, the landlord, the border wall, the abuser, and the social worker. The legal aid worker struggles - albeit at arm’s length - within the same network of oppression as the protagonists of socialist concern, participating in their fights, sometimes helpfully, often impotently.

The community care lawyer is the product of the disability rights movement, social work practice, and the post-asylum era of mental health treatment. We deal with the paperwork of care that happens outside of the hospital, orbiting the care home and in place of the gothic orphanage. As opposed to the claims for compensation arising from abuse or injury whilst being cared for, our remit is the plans, practices and services that should stop harm from happening. For example, this could involve the following:

A child is forced to sell drugs and is caught. He can’t go back home because the neighbourhood isn’t safe. The local authority says they don’t have anywhere to house him so he’s remanded to prison. We sue the local authority, get him released into their care and they agree to pay him compensation for the time he spent in prison.

Unlike NHS healthcare, adult social care provided by the local authority isn’t free. A man with a debilitating disability is taken to the County Court for social care debt of over £20k for care costs they allege he is liable for. He can’t read the paperwork. He doesn’t attend court and the judge makes an automatic judgement in the local authority’s favour. They can now attach this to his benefits, which they apply to do. At this point, a friend of his refers him to a community care solicitor. I look into his records and note that all the paperwork is shit. After much back and forth, the debt is written off.

A blind woman has no care at night-time. She instructs a community care solicitor and we negotiate an increase in her care package, after much back and forth about the way in which her needs should be assessed.

Technical composition

The activities

Gatekeep who can and can’t get legal advice: In very broad terms, you must first pass a means test (i.e. be poor enough), unless it doesn’t apply (e.g. you’re locked up in a care home for your own good). Then, there is a “merits test”, i.e. there must be a good reason for spending taxpayers’ cash on your legal problem. More generally, you need to find a lawyer in a country covered in “advice deserts”.¹

More fundamentally, in the context of the undersupply of community care advice, you need to have a problem which will be economically beneficial for a lawyer to take on. The structure of legal aid means that the only economically incentivising cases are those that go to court. A lot of community care work requires negotiation, not litigation. Because of the funding structure, not a lot of this work gets done. The bigger the case at court, the greater the winnings. Therefore cases with no grand legal problem behind them, and therefore little likelihood of a costly dispute at court, are unlikely to be picked up by legal aid firms with tight margins.

Provide advice: What does the law say you can ask for? What might the state have to do in a given circumstance? How best can you achieve your goal?

Formalise arguments: Most people have an intuitive sense of what their rights are, especially when they have suffered injustice. However, this intuition rarely fits the pigeon holes that legislation bestows upon us. Law is a Procrustean bed that we fit people’s problems onto. It is not uncommon that the client’s sense of injustice and intuition as to what is right and what is wrong and what should be done is broken apart by the legal process and, in the end, they are left disappointed. The law and lawyers expect a high degree of formalism for all the messy injustice that passes our desks.

File applications for redress at court: Going to court causes arse pain for pedants, let alone the average person. A lot of labour time goes into formatting documents, collating bundles of paperwork and reviewing forms. I sit at the computer redoing the page numbering for a third time as the deadline for filing a breeze block of paper at court looms closer. I pine for a robot to take my job, it’s 2025 and an AI has been able to do arduous, simple tasks like this for years, yet I click on, hunched at the computer like some troglodyte from the early 2000s.

The money

The lawyer’s time is divided into 6-minute units. The boss’s goal is for us to accumulate as many justifiable chunks of work as possible, so, once a case is wrapped up, we can make a profit. The legal aid firm is contracted by the Ministry of Justice, specifically its departmental arm, the Legal Aid Agency, to provide legal services for the poor (though there are, in fact, specific types of legal aid that are not dependent on one’s means, for example, advice at the police station upon arrest, or if you are deprived of your liberty by social services because of your inability to make decisions). In very broad terms, there are two types of legal aid: the work that arises before going to court, and the work necessitated by going to court. The latter gets you higher fees, and if you win, the other side pays your costs at a further inflated rate.

The fees for legal aid work are set by central government. In 2010, the government’s agenda of punishing public services for the private sector’s fuck up (A.K.A. the “financial crash”) justified an overhaul of the legal aid regime, restricting access to advice in certain areas of law and introducing a reduction in fees. Aversion to increasing fees predates this, so I understand that, in real terms, fees have been shrinking for decades. A thorough leftist industrial analysis of the sector is beyond the scope of this reflection, but suffice to say that everyone knows workers’ willingness to be “do gooders” is a vital resource for bosses, especially in a context where maximising profit is dependent on the public purse.

Human capital is therefore of significant value in this business. The workers’ desire to help people is important. The boss harnesses this desire by educating workers on how to get the most out of these meagre legal aid fees and setting expectations around pay exceedingly low. In many workplaces, skimping on other resources will also help. We have no coherent internal processes which function smoothly. There is no adequate induction process and the result is a constant, puzzled distress as solicitors with too much responsibility manage paralegals that also have too much responsibility.

My experience is that this business model is fairly consistent across the sector but on a sliding scale of revulsion. Some firms have nailed a system where they might pay comparatively little, but the internal processes are well-oiled and the work-life balance is stable. Others, like my current employer, are much shoddier. Wherever they are on the scrum, they’re capitalists accumulating money through “doing good”.

The subject

As explained to some extent above, “community care” refers to the paperwork that arises in the course of dealing with “social services.” Simply put, my job is to get embroiled in individuals’ fights with social workers.

English children and adults have two completely different legal regimes. The Children Act 1989 governs community care law for children and family law. The latter focuses on social services intervening in family life to forcibly take a child into care. The part that I do, community care law, focuses on the rights of children in care, or who want to be in care of their own or their family’s volition, and who transition out of care as they turn 18. In this context, “social care” is easy to define: we need to give children and young people the best we can.

The Care Act 2014 governs the support that disabled adults and their carers get from social services. This includes care homes and “domicillary care”, i.e. help at home. I find “social care” in this context much harder to define. It is often, but should not always be, limited to practical help in cleaning one’s home, oneself, getting to the shops, etc. It can and should also be broader, but the scope of what it encompasses is usually bounded by professionals’ imagination, which in turn is walled in by shrinking budgets. It is also largely and unclearly defined by its distinction from healthcare, though the distinction between the two often collapses.

A further zone of community care revolves around “mental capacity.” That is, people’s decision-making. This is a fascinating collision of jurisprudence and psychology centring on the moment when the collective decides whether or not to let individual agency take its course. A mother suffering from dementia is no longer allowed to take care of her own affairs. A young man with learning difficulties wants to have children but it seems he doesn’t understand that he’s being taken advantage of.

From my experience, a significant proportion of people’s legal problems regarding their community care revolve around disputes concerning their “needs for care and support.” Unlike criminal defence or housing law, where the goal is simply to keep someone out of jail, get the shortest sentence possible, or to keep a roof over someone’s head, “needs” can be amorphous and expansive. That is to say, it is difficult to keep the work to open and shut cases, or clear legal challenges that get to court and create big bills.

The instruments

…there is a second way of ensuring that one has access to rights others do not have: the control of information.²

I often find it hard to imagine how different my job was before the advent of the computer. Navigating the enormous pile of legislation, regulations, and guidance documents that make up the law is difficult. Without a computer (and deft tricks of the trade such as “Ctrl F”), the process would feel immeasurably more difficult to me.

Nonetheless, the goals are the same; understand and articulate complicated information, communicate it to your client in a way they understand, trim and fit their grievances and injustices onto the procrustean bed of a claim form. A key instrument is therefore information. As the quote above alludes to, David Graeber considers this an important component of statecraft. Alongside violence and competition, the ability to navigate the labyrinths of the state is itself kept under lock and key behind database paywalls and university fees. The existence of my profession depends on and reinforces an obscure hierarchy of knowledge, which in turn props up the more blatant imbalance of forces between the working class, the disabled, etc. and the state.

Technical legal knowledge, which at most amounts to training in how to read the arduous syntax of legislation and case law and how to formulate a coherent argument, forms the core instrument of work. In addition to this, there are oft-neglected zones of expertise in how information is conveyed and vulnerability is dealt with. Lawyers are part of the constellation of professionals orbiting the misery of poverty, alongside psychiatrists, psychologists, probation workers, and social workers. Yet lawyers are the only ones who have no formal introduction to the theory and reality of mental illness or disability, despite having had a profound historical impact on how these social categories have evolved. Hence, another helpful tool of the trade is sensitivity to, if not a granular understanding of, the meaning and consequences of “vulnerability.”

Relatedly, the ability to react coolly to ghastly stories and file away the images of others’ misfortunes so they don’t intrude on your daily routine too much is important. Lawyers were late to the workplace wellness discourse but that changed recently. Whilst I don’t have supervision or active management, nor a coherent internal administrative system, I did once find a folder on Microsoft Teams called “Stress Management.” This was home to one lonely PDF entitled “Moments for Mindfulness.” Inwardly focused wellbeing culture is part of the legal aid industry now, like polish on a turd.

Social composition of solicitors

The legal sector has, of course, been historically dominated by the affluent. My anecdotal experience with older colleagues suggests that there was relief from this trend in the latter half of the 20th century, when a variety of factors led to more social mobility and a consequent increase in diversity in the solicitors’ profession.³ Unlike their corporate counterparts, legal aid firms choose not to sponsor legal studies. Until recently, this meant that if you wished to qualify in a legal aid firm, you would need to foot a huge bill yourself. Therefore, the profession selects for people like me: white, posh, and left-wing (or at least liberal).

My workplace is very young. As alluded to in the introduction, the business model relies on paralegals – i.e. people without professional qualifications – to take on huge amounts of responsibility. By no means is all of the workforce is like me, but I guess the majority is. Those who aren’t tend to have a very hard time.

The firm’s induction method, most of the time, seems to be to shove these young law graduates into the deep end, without having really taught them how to swim. Many learn quickly, and this gives them a huge sense of experience and confidence - although it is not always deserved. The office is loud with their confidence and stress, and I find it cloying.

I rarely attend the office, preferring to stay home, avoid the commute and talk to my goldfish in breaks between work. Recently, I also started reaching for a bottle of alcohol at times of stress. My thoughts began to darken and, like previous times in my life, I began to contemplate the relief that suicide might bring. Regarding the deplorable situation of my clients with despair, those feelings felt incongruous given the luxury of my sofa, TV, and goldfish.

New political compositions

The day-to-day grind of representing clients and taking responsibility for their problems was quite relentless. … I had an underlying feeling that what my clients really needed was more money to be able to live their lives in peace. All I was doing was exploiting their problems for a few shillings in my pocket.⁴

By gutting the legal aid sector of funding, neoliberal policy has left left-wing and liberal lawyers pleading. Many write screeds in their journals and Twitter posts to keep the system functioning as it is. By all accounts, this is necessary to keep the courts open, people out of prison, the roofs over their heads, and in my work, the social worker listening.

Beyond this immediate goal, though, the horizon is confusing: do we want a world where everyone has a lawyer? Or are we asking for something else? It feels like there’s no time or inclination to question whether an army of well-meaning capitalists are the right people to meet the legal needs of the oppressed. However, the only institutional alternative we’ve found is the law centre movement, which itself is dependent on local authority funding and philanthropic capital. The former benefactors are the ones we often need to sue, hence a conflict of interest arises. The latter are - at best - capricious and unreliable.

More fundamentally, I sense irony in the phrase social justice law, often touted by the legal aid sector. Legal cases can sometimes be collectivised, for instance in large-scale claims against shitty corporations, such as ongoing proceedings against Shell for pollution abroad. They may sometimes have a systemic impact, such as a successful appeal which modified the criminal law on “joint enterprise”, or a claim against a local authority’s social care charging policy which deemed it (and by inference, many others) discriminatory. But they can never be socialised, in the sense that the relations which law governs will move out of the private sphere.

Whilst law is shaped by politics, race, class, economics, patriarchy, etc., it only exists in the real world in distinction to any of these things. Although its impartiality is a façade, often crumbling, the edifice persists. That is to say, like Kafka’s fable of the starving man at the gate of the law, legal rights and their enforcement are only ever for each person, one at a time.⁵ Making law actually work for social justice is, on my forecast, a dismal project.

Solicitors and paralegals, if they are managed appropriately or have wells of energy to draw on, can be significantly helpful in improving individuals’ lot, or mitigating the hazards and oppressions of Britain. In doing so, they can be allies and comrades of the people they represent. But the law is a conservative force in society, providing stability for a rapacious economy. Given ours is a social system designed to facilitate competitive enterprise between capitalists, society needs to change before the law can serve social justice.

Perhaps I’m bursting with optimism, or perhaps it’s a sober prediction based on experience, but I believe that the odds are positive for widespread unionisation of the legal aid sector in the coming years. From experience, workers have either been too comfy, too stressed or too busy to organise. Along with the liberal tendencies and affluent background of most of the profession, a strong union movement has been unlikely to flourish in such a demographic.

But whilst density at present appears to be low, it is climbing. I think this arises as a consequence of the declining number of legal aid firms, a trend that looks set to continue despite recent announcements that legal aid fees will rise. So the bosses continue to squeeze the juniors and workplace tensions rise. There are only two viable solutions: leave or fight. As more people do the former, the ones left simply have to do the latter.
As long as homelessness and poverty and the average age of the population rise, so will demand for legal aid lawyers and the chance to turn a profit. The pertinent question isn’t whether we should join a union, it’s what kind of service we want to fight for.