Can solicitors be heroes?

Every year the Law Society hands out awards to people it calls ‘legal heroes’. This year’s winners all seem to be terrific people, devoted to causes from special educational needs to Asian elephants. Yet one hesitates at the word ‘hero’. The Law Society defines a legal hero as a solicitor (naturally) who has ‘made a demonstrative, lasting and tangible difference to the life or lives of others’. That is not a high bar. I reckon I cleared it every time I drafted a will.

One feels that the Law Society is using that word precisely because it knows that solicitors are not seen as heroic. It reminds me of when I was part of a meagre crowd, singing ‘Bristol City, Bristol City FC, is by FAR the greatest team, the WORLD has ever seen’. Methinks we did protest too much.

Barristers

Annoyingly, barristers are considered heroic. Every educated person has heard of Lord Jonathan Sumption, Lord David Pannick, Baroness Shami Chakrabarti and Michael Mansfield. Can you name one famous solicitor? Yet, there are ten times as many solicitors as barristers.

British fiction is likewise full of barristers like Horace Rumpole, Mark Darcy and Judge John Deed. Dull they ain’t. John Deed for example was not only a barrister but also a High Court judge, but he didn’t let that stop him investigating cases and making love to sundry female characters. Why should it be impossible to imagine a series entitled ‘Solicitor John Deed’? But it is.

America

American attorneys are more heroic still. There are movies about real ones, like Clarence Darrow, Alan Dershowitz and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. No fewer than three major movies have been made about attorneys who won cases about polluted drinking water (Erin Brockovich, Dark Waters and A Civil Action).

American fictional lawyers include Atticus Finch, Perry Mason and Ally McBeal. They make entire series about attorneys, like LA Law and Suits. They sing songs about lawyers, notably ‘My Attorney Bernie’, ‘Will Your Lawyer Talk to God’, ‘Lawyers in Love’ and ‘Talk to My Lawyer’. To be fair, not all the songs are positive. Mojo Nixon has a song that starts ‘There's a plague on the planet, and they went to law school’. He sings ‘They got their own bar, where they drink pints of greed. Let's spay and neuter 'em, so that they can't breed’. But it is better to be insulted than ignored.

Solicitors in fiction

When solicitors appear in British fiction it is always as boring, minor characters. Mark Hebden of The Archers and Matthew Crawley of Downton Abbey were both solicitors, and were so dreary that their creators killed them off in car crashes. In John Mortimer’s Rumpole stories, solicitors are dullards like Mr Morse ‘a grey-haired solicitor who did a lot of work for the Church Commissioners’ and Mr Bernard ‘a thirtyish, perpetually smiling man in a pinstriped suit’ (what did you expect Mortimer, sequins?).

To be fair, one British movie did feature a solicitor in a leading role. This was In the Name of the Father, which showed solicitor Gareth Peirce and her inspiring work overturning the wrongful conviction of the Guildford Four. She was played by Emma Thompson. Hooray! But then they dressed Ms Thompson up in a wig and gown, and showed her arguing the case before the Court of Appeal, like a barrister. Boo!

It was not always like this

Dickens had some terrific solicitor characters. In Great Expectations there is Jaggers. Or there is Tulkinghorn, the villain of Bleak House, not to mention Uriah Heep, the treacherous solicitor’s clerk in David Copperfield. But the last truly interesting solicitor in British fiction was Soames Forsyte, the austere central character of the Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. Soames’ ‘soul abhorred an abundance of feeling’. Restraint and reserve were ‘qualities more dear to him almost than life’. His work was ‘the only soother of the nerves that he knew’.

Galsworthy was a barrister and he gave his barrister characters virile names like Waterbuck and Ram. Soames deferred to them. The Forsyte novels won Galsworthy the Nobel Prize in Literature, and they seem to have set in our collective consciousness a conception of solicitors which was summed up in this poem by HDC Pepler:

The law the lawyers know about
Is property and land;
But why the leaves are on the trees,
And why the winds disturb the seas,
Why honey is the food of bees,
Why horses have such tender knees,
Why winters come and rivers freeze,
Why Faith is more than what one sees,
And Hope survives the worst disease,
And Charity is more than these,
They do not understand.

He wrote ‘lawyers’ but he obviously meant ‘solicitors’.

Shysters

While British fictional solicitors are usually honest, American fictional lawyers are often shysters. In 1930, Sylvester Shyster schemed to deprive Minnie Mouse of her inheritance and in 1933 Groucho Marx played Waldorf T. Flywheel of the firm Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel. Then there was Billy Flynn in Chicago and Lionel Hutz in The Simpsons. Hutz’s practice is called ‘I Can't Believe It’s a Law Firm!’ and also offers shoe repairs. In Bee Movie, the part of the lawyer is taken by a mosquito, who says ‘I was already a blood sucking parasite. All I needed was a briefcase’.

Saul Goodman was such an interesting shyster in Breaking Bad that they gave him his own series, Better Call Saul. His bon mots include ‘Money is the point’ and ‘If you’re committed enough you can make any story work. I once convinced a woman I was Kevin Costner’.

Shysters redeemed

Often in American fiction a shyster finds redemption through winning an apparently doomed case. In A Few Good Men, a lazy lawyer played by Tom Cruise wins the case and has Jack Nicholson arrested. In The Verdict, a shambolic drunk played by Paul Newman wins the case and dries out. In Philadelphia, a homophobe played by Denzel Washington wins the case and develops liberal values. In My Cousin Vinny, a loudmouth played by Joe Pesci wins the case and marries the girl.

In Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon’s character is told by her father ‘Oh, sweetheart, you don’t need law school. Law school is for people who are boring and ugly and serious. And you, button, are none of those things’. But she presses on, wins the case and gains depth and a nicer boyfriend.

This is a glorious tradition of which we have no equivalent.

Conclusion

Of course there are inspiring solicitors. One thinks of Sir Henry Hodge and Sir Geoffrey Bindman who devoted their lives to social justice. One thinks of Stanley Berwin, who created not one but two front-rank commercial firms (Berwin & Co, now part of Berwin Leighton Paisner, and S.J. Berwin). Before Bob Mortimer became a comedian he laboured as a Peckham legal aid lawyer, doing so many cases about infested housing that he was hailed in his local paper as ‘the cockroach king’. But one has to admit that solicitors’ work normally requires you to be conscientious rather than heroic. So, do we really need to depict our best solicitors as heroes? Perhaps the word is noble.

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