Camaraderie and conflict: developing an occupational culture typology of publicly funded criminal defence lawyers in England and Wales

Renewed interest in the working lives of publicly funded lawyers has resulted in a growing body of research that has analysed factors which might affect how criminal defence lawyers envisage their role.1 Much of that work has adopted an ethnographic approach, producing important data that can tell us much about the occupational culture of publicly funded defence lawyers in England and Wales. This paper synthesises and integrates the findings of recent ethnographic work on publicly funded defence lawyers, adopting a broadly Bourdieusian approach to theories of occupational culture to draw out commonalities across the findings of various recent studies. We take these findings further, arguing that they can together allow us to develop a working typology or schema for the occupational culture of English and Welsh publicly funded criminal defence lawyers. We also draw on some lessons learned from key studies of “cop culture” to identify seven apparently pervasive yet fluid characteristics of the working culture of this occupational group, before suggesting areas for further development. The seven characteristics that we identify in this article are camaraderie; expertise; economisation; standardisation; conflict, social justice and adversarialism, and pessimism.