The class position of legal workers

Tanzil Chowdhury, Senior Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary University of London

Keywords: Workers' Inquiry, Class Composition, Workplace Organizing, Marxist Legal Theory 

John Nicholson, a contributor to the book and former immigration barrister, speaking at a legal aid event. [Notes from Below]

In addition to the critiques levelled at juristocracy and juridification across the world, Government rhetoric in Britain has sought to capitalise on and shape public perception around lawyers. The previous Conservative administration for example, attacked so-called 'lefty lawyers' and their ‘vexatious litigation’ (read as those representing migrants or individuals in countries that Britain had militarily intervened in). Disgraced former Home Secretary Suella Braverman even suggested that those lawyers who help migrants 'cheat the system' should face imprisonment. The possibility then, of understanding lawyers as workers is either minimised or effaced altogether.

In 2023, Jamie Woodcock (KCL) and I co-edited the book Legal Workers Inquiry: Worker Writing from Across the Sector in Britain (developed in collaboration with the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context and Notes from Below) to begin to explore legal workers and their conditions of work. The collection brought together 13 legal sector workers from across the UK, plus two contributors from India, representing a cross-section of solicitors, barristers, paralegals, case workers, trainees, and those working in firms, chambers, third sector organisations, and university law clinics.

Workers' Inquiry from Below

Unlike traditional ethnographies that study workers from the outside, this project employed a workers' inquiry methodology inspired by Marx's Enquête Ouvrière. Rather than researchers observing legal professionals, the workers themselves became the primary producers of knowledge about their workplace. This approach represents a fundamental shift from what Italian workerist Vittorio Rieser terms inquiry from 'above' to inquiry from 'below.' The methodology centres worker voices and experiences, allowing legal professionals to articulate their conditions rather than having them interpreted by external observers.

The workers' inquiry framework examines three crucial dimensions of class composition. Firstly, technical composition explores how legal workers' labour power is organized and controlled. This includes examining time management systems, productivity requirements, working conditions, skill utilization, and the technological and managerial mechanisms that mediate their work. For legal workers, this might involve analysing how billing hour requirements shape their daily routines, how case management software monitors their productivity, or how open-plan offices affect their ability to maintain client confidentiality. The physical and digital infrastructure of legal work reveals much about power relations within the sector.

Social composition examines how legal workers reproduce themselves as a class outside the workplace. Where do they live and in what conditions? What are their family structures and cultural backgrounds? Do they have access to state welfare provisions? This dimension reveals the often-hidden struggles of legal workers, from trainee solicitors living in shared accommodation while working unpaid internships, to experienced barristers facing irregular income streams, to paralegals juggling multiple jobs to make ends meet. Understanding social composition also helps explain why organizing in the legal sector presents unique challenges.

Finally, political composition asks whether legal workers organize collectively for class struggle. Historically, the legal profession has been characterized by individualism and professional hierarchy rather than solidarity-based organizing. However, recent years have seen emerging efforts at workplace organizing within the legal sector, including the recent Legal Sector Workers United set up by the UVW. Indeed, in the North of Ireland, lawyers have taken industrial action over legal aid cuts since November last year.

The Position of Legal Workers Under Capitalism

In addition to examining the class composition of legal work, the book also refers to the relationship between law and capitalism and how that presents particular challenges for understanding legal workers' class position. In its resurgence over the past several years, Marxist legal theory has been able to assert how law functions as a bourgeois form of mediating social antagonism, examine the transformative potentials of law (e.g. is proletarian law an oxymoron?) and, for this inquiry, raise questions about whether legal workers can truly serve working-class interests. Are all lawyers merely functionaries of capital, or can they materially work in the service of workers, migrants, and the dispossessed? Even if one adopts a critical view of law's role under capitalism, there may be strategic value in organizing legal workers to leverage their institutional power to disrupt capital accumulation.

One might argue that legal workers occupy a contradictory class position. While they may serve capitalist interests through corporate law or property transactions, they also defend workers' rights, represent asylum seekers, and challenge state power through judicial review. Indeed, the book recognises how the legal sector often plays a role in the composition of other workers. Legal workers may intervene in the provision of housing or other resources or may mediate between workers and the state in a range of different ways. The importance of understanding class composition is therefore twofold in this collection: what is the class composition of the workers in the legal sector, as well as the role of the legal sector in class composition of other forms of work, the economy, and other parts of society.

Organizing Challenges

As anyone reading the collection of essays will observe, the anonymous nature of many contributions reveals a sobering reality: the dangers of trade union activity within the legal sector. Fear of professional detriment keeps many legal workers from openly discussing workplace conditions or collective action. Moreover, legal workers face unique antagonisms beyond the typical capital-labour conflict. Their relationship with the state is particularly complex, as they simultaneously serve state functions (through prosecution, judicial administration) while also challenging state power (through defence work, immigration law, civil liberties cases).

This dual relationship creates specific organizing challenges. Legal workers may face professional sanctions not just from employers but from regulatory bodies and the state itself. The government's attacks on 'activist lawyers' demonstrate how legal workers advocating for marginalized communities can become targets of state repression.

Fundamentally, as with all workers' inquiries, this book represents more than an academic exercise—it's a tool for building collective understanding and strategic organizing within the legal sector. By centring worker voices and experiences, it reveals both the constraints and possibilities facing legal workers today. Understanding the technical, social, and political composition of legal work provides a foundation for developing effective organizing strategies. While the legal sector presents unique challenges—professional individualism, regulatory constraints, complex class positions—it also offers significant potential for collective action.

Legal workers possess institutional knowledge, professional networks, and symbolic power that could be leveraged for broader social justice struggles. The question is whether they can overcome internal divisions and external pressures to build a sustained collective organization. The workers' inquiry methodology offers a path forward, demonstrating how legal workers can begin to understand their shared conditions and develop strategies for collective action. In doing so, they move beyond popular stereotypes toward a more complex and empowering understanding of their role in contemporary capitalism.

Several questions remain, possibly urging another volume to this book. The working conditions and organisation of legal workers and their role in the composition of other workers warrant further exploration. In addition, what often came up in the discussions in the launching of the book (once in a law centre in Manchester and once in a barrister’s chambers in London), is what it would mean politically to organise legal workers. Recognising the value of lawyers that work in the service of working class and marginalised communities, what would it mean for a socialist labour movement to organise a section of workers who, one may argue, reproduce the very systems they are attempting to overcome? What does it mean to support immigration lawyers organising when we want to replace the very practices of bordering? The 1976 Lucas Plan was a proposal by British aerospace workers to convert their factory from military to socially useful production like medical equipment, demonstrating early worker-led industrial democracy. Might we one day envisage a similar plan for lawyers?

You can read this book for free online or pay for a hard copy here, with all proceeds going to Notes from Below.