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IT’S HARD TO think of any other professionals who attract the kind of jokes that lawyers do. Here’s one of the milder ones.

There’s an island in the middle of the ocean. A doctor, a dentist and a lawyer are marooned there. They see an abandoned lifeboat floating beyond the island’s reef and out to sea. One of them must swim to it and bring it back to the island so that they can escape to civilisation. But the island is surrounded by sharks. The doctor and dentist say they can’t swim. Seeing through their lie, the lawyer says ‘I’ll go’, and he dives into the water. Instantly, the sharks part before him and the lawyer swims unharmed to the lifeboat and returns with it to the island. The doctor and dentist look at the lawyer in awe. ‘How did you manage that? Why did the sharks let you pass?’ asks the dentist. The lawyer smiles and replies ‘Professional courtesy, my dear chap, professional courtesy.’

Lawyers don’t generally have a good reputation in Britain, at least not in the public imagination. The vitriol directed at the legal profession may not be quite as bad as in the USA, but sometimes it comes close. Occasionally movies or TV shows depict the crusading lawyer as a heroic figure. Gareth Peirce, a British solicitor, achieved sympathetic fame when she was played by the actress Emma Thompson in In the Name of the Father about the fight against the miscarriage of justice of several people falsely accused of IRA bombings in the 1970s. But there are as many, if not more, portrayals of the devious and shady lawyer, the lawyer willing to compromise any ethical code for the sake of winning a case or pocketing a large fee. The philosopher Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not, evoked much of the revulsion for the profession when he wrote about ‘moral disgust’. He gave three examples: ‘Nazis, people who steal from beggars, and lawyers who chase ambulances to acquire new clients.’¹ Another writer, an American law professor called William Miller, called lawyers ‘moral menials’, akin to people in the ‘system’ who collect garbage or butcher meat. They exhibit the vices of hypocrisy or betrayal or even cruelty. They are contemptible because they work with ‘moral dirt’.²

Media stories often play on these negative images and the perceived popular disgruntlement directed at the profession in general. A sort of phantasm is adopted, a collectively induced thought which is difficult to shake off. Maybe it has something to do with the association between the lawyer and trauma. When else are they needed except during rage-fuelled litigation or stressed house sales? And so the jokes about greedy, duplicitous, self-seeking, unethical, unsympathetic lawyers feed off and repeat the image in an ever-replicating cycle.

Some of the more hysterical newspapers like to repeat this offensive stereotype (or perhaps, more appropriately, ‘trope’) whenever they get the chance. ‘Fatcat lawyer’ is a common headline, applied with particular relish to those paid by legal aid, but invariably used whenever a well-heeled solicitor or barrister appears in the news.

Phil Shiner earns his living mostly from legal aid. His practice, Public Interest Lawyers, based in Birmingham, is largely funded by legal aid. It has been awarded a Legal Services contract to practise in public law matters. That is what it does on behalf of the legal system, along with many other firms of solicitors. The cases he brought on behalf of Daoud Mousa and the detainees at Battle Group Main were all officially approved for funding by the body dispensing legal aid. Did that make him a ‘fatcat lawyer’?

In the eyes of the Daily Mail, there was no doubt that it did. But there are few signs of wealth and ostentation at Shiner’s offices in the old and rather run-down Jewellery Quarter of Birmingham. There are no expensive brand-name shops here, no coffee-chain outlets or chic bars. Turning into the street where Shiner’s office is located, the sight is of a row of dour and dishevelled buildings, anonymous and seedy, most in need of refurbishment. Scaffolding appears regularly along the street accompanied by the ubiquitous skip. One of the converted properties in this street houses the legal practice of the small team of lawyers over which Shiner presides.

If the outside is austere, what about the inside? There’s no lavish wealth evident here either. The office is remarkably quiet, the phone ringing only infrequently. All the walls are full of shelving carrying meticulously ordered files and neatly printed papers. The order and attention to detail is profound. Everything is labelled in clear print; documents are numbered and tagged and filed with almost religious concentration. It’s hard to believe any important paper would be lost amidst this shrine to order. But there’s nothing brazen, nothing extraneous to the work that might be called a ‘luxury’, a trapping of the ‘fatcat’. If anything, it has a monastic smell and feel about it; an ascetic environment where work is the devotion.

A few minutes spent in these surroundings confirms that everyone there knows very well who has the ultimate responsibility for all that happens within this building. Perhaps it’s this individual burden which explains the absolute necessity for maintaining professional and meticulous order. It’s a matter of survival. For by now Shiner knows that if he or his colleagues make mistakes, they will attract the attention of a merciless media. It’s become that personal since he brought the Baha Mousa case to court.

If none of this reflects the ‘fatcat’ image now, what was it like in early 2004?

When Shiner first received instructions from Baha Mousa’s father he was based in an even smaller, more unadorned and less salubrious office. It was on the top floor of a converted warehouse on one side of St Paul’s Square in Birmingham. He was renting one big loft room that was served by a kitchenette in the corner and a small toilet outside. The chairs were uncomfortable and cheap. He was a sole practitioner, with only a secretary and an occasional assistant to help him, struggling to develop his human rights and environment law work. The state of the office was of little concern to him. What mattered more was the pursuit of the kind of cases which matched his convictions.

If all this was true, why was Shiner targeted as the epitome of all that was bad about lawyers? What made him such a figure of opprobrium for the Daily Mail? Perhaps he embodied the paper’s hatred for supposed hypocrisy. Perhaps the Mail couldn’t reconcile its perception of those legal beneficiaries of the years of City expansion and multimillion pound corporate deals with that of a radical campaigning lawyer. Perhaps he embodied for the paper the betrayal of ‘our boys’ sent out to fight a dirty little war with little preparation or protection and expected to behave with honour when faced by an unscrupulous enemy. Or perhaps the Mail just couldn’t see beyond the simplistic myth of the ‘shyster’, the person who used the law for impure and self-satisfying reasons. Whatever the cause, the paper’s portrayal helped construct a further barrier to finding the truth in the Baha Mousa case. It fouled the ground, at least for a time.

¹ See Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2001).

² W. I. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Harvard University Press, 1997).