The subject of this book is the everyday working life of a firm of criminal lawyers in one of the inner city areas of a city in northern England. To collect information for this sociological research the author spent four months following the lawyers, interviewing them, sitting in on client interviews, and watching people getting through their daily paperwork. The two main objectives of the research are, firstly to explore the nature of day-to-day legal practice, and to contribute to the growing number of ethnographic and discourse analytic studies which are beginning to describe different aspects of law and the legal process, and secondly to explore how a particular line of sociological reasoning, or a particular variety of the sociological imagination, can be applied to the case of lawyers and legal work.
