Anatomy of an endangered species

The Kākāpō (pictured above) is an unglamorous creature, and easily ignored. A tubby, nocturnal, dull-green and flightless parrot, it roams a few islands off New Zealand and was for many years in grave danger of extinction. One became famous for trying to have his wicked way with a BBC cameraman during the filming of a nature documentary. This book’s title carries hints of a David Attenborough film, and it has the feel of studying a rare species. 

Developed out of her PhD thesis, Cooke’s work is an ethnographic study of legal aid lawyers. As a former legal aid lawyer, to me much of what she says is wearyingly familiar. Her finding that many go into legal aid out of a sense of justice or social solidarity is not necessarily a surprise. As Cooke acknowledges, a profession where you are often required to be the client’s comforter, counsellor and confessor, as well as their lawyer, is more vocation than job. 

She presents a positive and recognisable account of the collaborative and collegiate nature of legal aid work, and the challenging environment in which it has had to survive since the LASPO 2012 reforms. She also provides a good account of its contradictions. There is the tension between the need to minimise cost and maximise financial return by standardising work, against the desire to do the best possible job for the client. Also considered are public perceptions of ‘fat cats’ troughing on legal aid, against the reality of a hand-to-mouth existence. 

This is a branch of a supposedly elite profession that dedicates itself to the vulnerable.

Though this eminently readable work is perhaps of more interest to those with specific connections to legal aid, I nevertheless hope that it will find the right readership and be the profession’s equivalent of the Kākāpō trying to mate with a cameraman, putting the survival of the species back on the agenda. 

James E Hurford is a solicitor at the Government Legal Department, London