%%LAW1% JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY VOLUME 28, NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2001 ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 335–360 ‘I’ve lost the plot’: an everyday story of legal aid lawyers HILARY SOMMERLAD* This paper examines the impact on a specific group of solicitors in the United Kingdom of recent changes in the delivery of legal services. These changes are seen as a form of the New Public Management (NPM), and the paper explores the proposition that NPM is producing a public sector characterized by high output but low morale, through an analysis of qualitative data from a group of ‘political’ legal aid practitioners. The data is seen to support the high-output/low-morale thesis, and the paper argues that one effect therefore of legal aid reform may be to damage the ‘ political’ lawyer’s project of empowering the client and countering social injustice. INTRODUCTION It would be nice if just once in a while someone spoke up for the lawyers (and there are some) who do a very good job, who are conscientious and work way beyond the call of duty, who might even be invested with the comically anachronistic sense of ‘public service’. 1 The demoralized tenor of this plea by a ‘political’ solicitor is echoed in research into other parts of the United Kingdom public sector restructured in response (in part) to the global economic crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. 2 Such studies support Hoggett’s analysis that whilst the restructuring (summed up by Hood in the phrase New Public Management, 3 hereafter 335 ß Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA * 1 L. Clements, ‘In whose interests?’ Legal Action, October 1994, 6 (a ‘political’ solicitor discussing legal aid franchising.) 2 See, for instance, R. Caplan, ‘Stress, anxiety, and depression in hospital consultants, GPs and senior health service managers’ (1994) 309 Brit. Medical J, 1261; G. Troman, ‘Teacher Stress in the Low-Trust Society’ (2000) 21 Brit. J. of Sociology of Education, 3, 331; B. Dimond, ‘Stress and the midwife’ ( 2001) 7 Brit. J. of Midwifery, 10, 1. 3 C. Hood, ‘A public management for all Season’ (1991) 69 Public Administration 3– 19; and ‘Contemporary public management: a new global paradigm?’ in Policy Process: A Reader , ed. M. Hill (1997).