Abstract
Emotions have traditionally been seen as out of place in law. They are viewed in opposition to many of law’s central values such as efficiency and rationality. Despite this, legal work often involves brushing up against the messy, complex and emotional realities of people’s lives. Those who do this work must occupy a liminal space between the law’s prescribed rationality and decorum and the emotional lives of their clients. Drawing on 27 interviews from people working with the Legal Aid Board in Ireland, this article considers what the social consequences of this might be for the workers. It explores how emotions in this context can be understood as emotional dirt, how legal aid workers are tainted due to their proximity to this dirt and how they engage in practices to deal with the consequences of this. The article highlights how understanding legal aid work as emotionally dirty provides important insights into the role of emotions and stigma in this type of work.
Introduction
Many aspects of legal work involve brushing up against the messy realities of people's lives. Scarduzio (2011: 292–293) suggests that judges are ‘expected to clean up other people's messes’. The belief that emotions are properly and necessarily excluded from the legal sector is pervasive (Spain and Ritchie, 2016). Emotions within law are often seen as distinct objects that can and should be separated from rational thought. Under this view, these objects of emotion can be monitored and kept at bay. The law demands ‘vigilant policing…to keep emotion from creeping in where it does not belong’ (Maroney, 2006: 120). Increasingly, in different areas of the justice system, emotions are being recognised as a ‘natural’, albeit challenging element of the work. In the courtroom, where rationality and professionalism are paramount, barristers are expected to deal with the ‘often irrational feelings and behaviours’ of their clients (Gunby and Carline, 2020: 347) and judges devote time to managing emotions (Barry et al., 2023). However, neither judges nor barristers typically have the same degree of client contact as do solicitors and support staff who are closer to and have more direct contact with their client's ‘messes’. In the words of one research participant, Siobhán, client's lives are ‘circling the drain’. Legal aid workers must learn how to simultaneously acknowledge this painful reality, for the sake of their client, and make it palatable for the legal realm. This article explores what it means to occupy this space and how we might conceptualise it as dirty work.
Dirty work can be understood as work that negatively impacts our sense of personal dignity or occupational identity. Dirty work research typically explores the ‘dirt’ that workers deal with, the way in which the workers are tainted or stigmatised through their work and how workers deal with being associated with this work. Most jobs have elements that can be considered dirty, but it is the unique stigma, intensity, and centrality of the dirtiness that determine the extent to which work may be considered dirty work (Kreiner et al., 2006). A wide range of occupations have been identified as involving elements of dirty work including funeral directors (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999), meat cutters (Meara, 1974), abortion nurses (Chiappetta-Swansin, 2005), people volunteering for the Samaritans (McMurray and Ward, 2014) and criminal barristers (Gunby and Carline, 2020) among others (for overview, see Soral et al., 2022). Dirty work literature also explores processes through which workers construct positive self-identities in the face of stigmatised work (Zulfiqar and Prasad, 2022).
The work of dealing with and managing the emotions of others has been written about in various contexts (Mastracci, 2021; Whiley and Grandy, 2021). The necessity of the ‘highly specialised and complex emotional labour’ performed by immigration lawyers in interactions with clients has also been recognised (Westaby, 2010: 170). While echoes of these tensions are found in many bureaucratic organisations, law is somewhat unique due to the degree to which this is at odds with professional identity. Bandes (2021: 2443) argues that ‘the aversion to emotional awareness is imbedded in our very self-conception’. Unlike other professions, it is not simply uncomfortable or taboo to recognise the role of emotion in legal work; it is a complete contradiction of fundamental elements of the professional identity. Put more succinctly, it’s ‘downright unlawyerlike’ (Bandes,2006: 342).
Although dirty work in law has been explored in relation to the criminal justice system (Gunby and Carline, 2020), it is underexplored in the civil justice system. This is the first empirical paper, to the author's knowledge, that focuses on stigma in legal aid work in the Irish context. The paper explores in what ways and through what processes legal aid work becomes stigmatised by emotions and how legal aid workers manage this. Legal aid work is work that has historically been stigmatised (Brooke, 2016). Both Abel (1985) and Le Saux (2017) briefly reference the ‘dirty’ nature of legal aid. Emotional stigma overlaps with other forms of stigma (Ward and McMurray, 2016). The 'boundaries are...inherently fuzzy' (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999: 415) and emotions are not the only, or perhaps even the primary way, in which legal aid workers are tainted. Along with continued links to poverty and charity, the work is also likely stigmatised in the Irish context due to its focus on family law. The Legal Aid Board is the largest provider of family law services in Ireland (McGowan, 2018) with divorce being the most dominant case type (Legal Aid Board, 2023). The emphasis on divorce cases in legal aid in 1920s and 1930s England led to lawyers turning this work down due to the risk of lowering the prestige of their practice (Alcock, 1976). The challenging emotional labour dynamics for family practitioners have also previously been discussed (Westaby and Subryan, 2020). It is within this context that this paper examines the ways in which legal aid work is tainted with a particular focus on emotions.
The legal profession has taken a ‘wellness turn’ (Collier, 2019), and there is increasing awareness of the mental health problems that may arise from working in law. These challenges have been noted in several jurisdictions including the United States of America (USA), Australia, the United Kingdom (UK) and the Republic of Ireland. Emotional competence has been recognised as a crucial component in lawyer wellbeing, yet this importance is only partially acknowledged within the profession (Jones et al., 2020). In the Irish context, the Law Society of Ireland has specialised psychological services that provide information and support on the psychological aspects of legal practice and workplace culture. The Law Society also facilitates independent and subsidised therapy through the initiative ‘Legal Mind’ (Law Society of Ireland, 2024). These services demonstrate the increasing recognition of the importance of lawyer wellbeing and the need to deepen our understanding of the complexities of working with emotions in the legal profession.
Neoliberal governance has led to increased regulation within the legal profession and eroded access to justice (Sommerlad, 2008). Stigmatising, in all its forms, is fundamentally a social process with political impacts that has intensified in the current neoliberal era (Tyler and Slater, 2018). As a governance tactic, neoliberalism ‘shifts the boundaries between state and economy, production and reproduction and the private and public spheres’ (Penz et al., 2017: 541). For people working in these liminal spaces, there are multiple impacts of these changes. The dirty work framework highlights how legal aid lawyers actively engage in strategies to deal with the stigma and pressures becoming increasingly prevalent within the profession.
Context and Methodology
Context – The Legal Aid Board
Legal aid lawyers have traditionally been researched in the US context, often referred to as ‘poverty’ or ‘cause’ lawyering. Much research tends to examine specific aspects of the lawyering role such as the lawyer–client relationship (Newman, 2013) gendered aspects of lawyering (Sommerlad, 2016) or specific practice areas such as immigration (Wilding, 2021) and criminal defence (Newman and Welsh, 2019). Exploring legal aid lawyering on a wider scale is a new direction in this scholarship. Recently, the broader ‘unique and multi-faceted’ workplaces of legal aid lawyers have begun to be explored (Cooke, 2022: 705). Similarly, other roles in law are often studied alone such as paralegals (Lively, 2001) and legal clerks (Flood, 1983). Increasingly, lawyers are explored along with other associated legal professionals involved in the provision of legal aid (Denvir et al., 2023).
There has been relatively little research on legal aid in the Irish context, but research on the legal profession in Ireland has highlighted lawyer's challenges with wellbeing and mental health (Jones et al., 2020; Law Care, 2021). One difficulty with understanding legal aid work across jurisdictions is that legal aid typically emerged in different jurisdictions in specific historical and social contexts. Legal aid systems operate in a variety of ways (Barendrecht et al., 2014). In terms of the formation and operation, legal aid in Ireland is distinct from legal aid in many other countries. 1 There were no government-funded legal assistance schemes in Ireland until 1980 when the first law centre opened and the Legal Aid Board as an organisation subsequently developed. This contrasts with much of the western world where schemes were established in the post-WW2 climate (Burley, 2000). In Ireland, the scheme was not placed on statutory footing until 1995 with the introduction of the Civil Legal Aid Act 1995.
The Legal Aid Board is a publicly subsidised organisation that provides legal advice and assistance on a means-tested basis. The stated mission of the Board is ‘to deliver timely, effective, inclusive and just resolution of family and civil disputes to those most in need of [our] assistance’ (Legal Aid Board, 2021: 4). The organisation has approximately 566 staff in total, with 33 law centres across the country and 17 meditation offices. This service is primarily provided through a national network of directly employed solicitors, legal clerks and clerical officers, but some work is contracted out to private practitioner solicitor panels and tobarristers. The Legal Aid Board operates under a service model system for legal aid, which means that it supports claims on discrete issues made by individual applicants. Although under the Civil Legal Aid Act 1995 relatively few areas of law are entirely excluded, in practice, most of the work conducted falls into four main categories: divorce, international protection, child care andseparation (Legal Aid Board, 2023). Some participants specifically referred to child care work in the interviews, but these incidents are not identified further to protect the identity of people practising in the area in this small jurisdiction. Thus, much of the work of the Legal Aid Board focuses on areas of law that are recognised as being laden with emotion. It is also worth noting that administrative divorce is not possible in Ireland. A court order is necessary for all divorces (McGowan, 2018). This means that participants are discussing cases where people have limited options in terms of how they engage with law. This context impacts people's experience of engaging with the legal system and their emotional response. Those working within the system must manage the emotions that arise during this experience and ensure that other parts of the legal system, such as courts, do not become contaminated by them (Rivera, 2015).
Methodology
The aim of this research was to explore the experiences of those working for the Legal Aid Board in Ireland and how they deal with clients’ needs, using a constructivist grounded approach. Grounded theory involves simultaneous data collection and analysis. Through this, there is an identification of themes, construction of categories, theoretical sampling and further data collection to refine understandings and develop categories into a theoretical framework (Charmaz, 2014). The constructivist variant of grounded theory is distinct from original grounded theory methods in two key ways. The first way is that abductive reasoning is used. This means that abstract concepts from the data were considered with both extant theory and future data generated to ensure all possible explanations are examined. Secondly, the researcher’s central role in the construction and understanding of the data is acknowledged (Timonen and Conlon, 2015). Constructivist grounded theory considers both the participant’s and the researcher’s own relative positions and standpoints, is sensitive to concepts such as privilege, power and oppression and highlights the importance of reflexivity (Conlon et al., 2015).
This study was conducted as part of a PhD in Sociology funded by the University of Liverpool. Ethics approval was obtained from the Committee of Research Ethics. Data collection for this article occurred between August 2022 and September 2023. The author conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with people working in and around the legal aid system in Ireland. In total, 15 solicitors, 6 clerical officers, 3 legal clerks and 3 barristers were interviewed. The sample comprised 19 women and 8 men. Although the interviews are best described as semi-structured, the researcher allowed considerable scope for developing respondents’ views and priorities. Originally, solicitors working for the Legal Aid Board were the sole focus, but in response to suggestions from participants, the study was expanded to also include staff working within the Legal Aid Board who were not solicitors (legal clerks and clerical officers) and those within the broader legal aid system (private practitioner solicitors and barristers working on temporary contracts for legal aid clients). The participants were recruited through snowball sampling and represent a mix of both urban and rural regions in Ireland. All interviewees were given the option of an online Zoom or in-person interview. The majority chose Zoom with seven interviews taking place in person in law centres where the participants worked. The use of Zoom seemed to aid participants in discussing personal topics, but it also inevitably posed limitations for responding to some body language and emotional cues (Gray et al., 2020). In reporting the results, names have been changed to ensure interviewees are not identifiable and any potentially identifiable references in the quotes have been removed.
Memos were kept throughout data collection and analysis. Interviews were transcribed in full and inductive open coding, followed by more focused coding. Abstract categories were refined through further data collection. While theory and concepts from emotional dirty work are explored, this theory was not the reference point for the original study or referred to in research questions. Instead, emergent from this analysis was the alignment of their experiences with the ‘dirty work’ conceptualisation as described below.
Dirty Work
Central to understanding dirty work is the concept of ‘dirt’. While Hughes (1962) provides the foundational theorising of dirty work concerning its nature and relational impacts, he did not define what is meant by dirt. Hughes suggests that dirty work arises from a desire to address a problem or group of people that threatens the self-conception or solidarity of the wider community. Douglas (2001) notes that there is no such thing as ‘absolute dirt’; rather, dirt is socially constructed through the processes and identity of the system. As Douglas (2001: 37) expands: Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining table; food is not dirty in itself; but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing…our pollution behaviour is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications. Dirt is in the eye of the beholder who, having perceived it, shuns it because it offends against a preferred order…dirt is defined by its context, by its relation to preferred orders, by its perceived threat to those orders and by a desire to keep it at a distance.
Dirty work literature has traditionally focused on work that is stigmatised due to its association with physical dirt or moral dubiousness. In recent years, there has been an increasing body of literature on how emotions in particular contexts may also be viewed as dirt. Some studies exploring work associated with physical dirt acknowledge the dirty nature of emotions. For example, in Sanders’ (2010) study of veterinary workers, participants noted the difficulty they had in navigating both the grieving animal owners’ emotions, along with the physically dirty elements associated with the death of an animal. The workers perceived dealing with the emotional elements as ‘far more worrisome’ than the physically dirty aspects (Sanders, 2010: 246). Emotional dirty work is a type of dirty work that highlights this type of emotional ‘dirt’. McMurray and Ward (2014: 1134) define emotional dirty work as that which involves handling: expressed feelings that threaten the solidarity, self-conception or preferred orders of a given individual or community…a subjective state assigned by either the individual involved or outside observers through which emotions are deemed to be in some sense polluting.
This work requires working with burdensome or out of place emotions. Emotional dirty workers must manage these emotions and produce the correct state of mind in others (Rivera, 2015). At work, emotions are often ‘filtered, marginalised, commodified’ to perform roles appropriately (Gunby and Carline, 2020: 345). Strong emotions such as despair or hate are constructed by outsiders as burdensome due to their ability to potentially disturb or ‘contaminate well-ordered lives’ (McMurray and Ward, 2014: 1136). In emotional dirty work, the challenging nature of dealing with complex emotions is outsourced to others by society yet also deemed necessary for the normal running of society. The sociological consequences of working in ‘emotion-laden’ organisations, such as law firms specialising in divorce,(Boyle and Healy, 2003: 356) are underexplored (McMurray and Ward, 2014).
One of the social consequences of engaging in dirty work is taint. Taint, or stigma, occurs through the attribution of an undesired quality that ultimately reduces the esteem of the profession. Dirty work research explores how and why taint is attributed to particular occupations at certain moments (Stanley and Mackenzie-Davey, 2012: 60). There are four forms of taint within the literature. Firstly, physical taint derived from association with grime, death and unpleasant working conditions. Social taint results from association with stigmatised communities or servility to others (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999). Moral taint arises from proximity to notions of sin or dubiousness (Stanley and Mackenzie-Davey, 2012). Emotional taint refers to ‘emotional displays and emotional labour that are perceived as objectionable’ (Rivera, 2015: 218). Although this theoretical lens overlaps with others such as emotional labour (Mastracci, 2021), what is distinct about emotional dirty work is that the focus is on how and why emotions are considered ‘dirt’ in this context and what the consequences of dealing with this are for the workers. Emotional dirty work can be seen as part of the ‘dark side’ of emotional labour (Ward and McMurray, 2016), It focuses on the stigmatised nature of the emotions – the dirt of the emotions. Through this ‘dirt’ lens, we can both build upon and move beyond understandings of the impact of the work on an individual level and engage with the collective practices that workers develop to deal with the consequences of being stigmatised and the implications of this on their social identities.
Dirty work within the legal system has primarily been applied to people working within the criminal justice system (Huey and Broll, 2015; Mikkelsen, 2021). The work of both American attorneys (Drew, 2007) and English barristers (Gunby and Carline, 2020) working in criminal law has been conceptualised as socially and morally tainted, due to these lawyers’ proximity to stigmatised individuals and morally dubious criminal behaviour. Gunby and Carline (2020) argue that criminal barrister's work is also emotionally tainted as they are expected to manage the burdensome emotions of others. There is sometimes a conflation between emotional labour and the display of positive emotions such as nurture and care. Ward and McMurray (2016: 8) suggest that ‘gendered accounts of emotional labour are casting a long shadow over more traditionally “masculine” requirements to enact less servile emotional performances’. This leads to a tendency to focus on empathetic emotions (such as compassion) over antipathetic emotions (such as intimidation). The legal system requires emotional work that inevitably involves care and understanding, yet it also involves restraint, righteous anger (Maroney, 2012) and being ‘stony-faced’ (Flower, 2020: 178). While organisations are places where class and gender relations are reproduced (Acker, 1990) and these are important lenses for further exploration, the article focuses on emotional dirty work as an alternative lens to understand how emotions operate within legal aid work.
Findings
Emotions as Dirt Within the Legal Aid System
Dirt is not fixed. Instead, dirt is constructed by social processes as it ‘offends against a preferred order’ (McMurray and Ward, 2014: 1125). As someone experiences a legal problem, they may encounter a range of emotions. Participants described how emotions played a key role in a client's journey through the legal system. Clients were described in various emotional states such as in a ‘high state of distress’ (Henry, solicitor), ‘really frustrated…very overwhelmed’ (Aoibheann, barrister), ‘highly strung’ (Amelia, solicitor), ‘very emotional about everything’ (Olivia, solicitor) and ‘quite aggressive’ (Orla, solicitor).
For legal aid workers, the immediate and explicit task is to convey the relevant legal information (or in the case of solicitors, to give legal advice) but participants described how much of the work entails managing the emotions that result from clients hearing this information. The work of navigating and responding to these emotions was described as ‘difficult’ (Olivia, solicitor), ‘hard’ (Emily, legal clerk) and ‘challenging’ (Jack, clerical officer). Ciara (solicitor) depicts the out of place nature of these emotions: From the legal point of view, there’s very little law and in some ways, people are actually just taken through a process…sometimes it can be kind of kicking and screaming and stuff, and notices of motion…it may be an order for discovery…but they can’t see why they should have to….what I have to say to a lot of people as well, I say this isn’t a legal issue.
Participants described accepting that their attempts to manage these emotions may not be successful. As Liam (solicitor) noted: The certain reality is, you can’t always control people’s emotions, people will become heightened, aggressive, you know in court that they’ll shout and whatnot. So yeah, it’s something that isn’t necessarily always manageable, of course, you just need to kind of see what you can do in any individual circumstance.
The difficulty in navigating these emotions is further compounded by the fact that solicitors are obliged to ensure that their clients are fully informed of the process, which often involves telling clients that things may not go their way. It is their responsibility to both ‘paint the blackest picture for the client and say this is a possible outcome for you’ (Séan, solicitor) and to some extent acknowledge or deal with the emotional fallout from this: I suppose you do have to be mindful and careful with people and that is difficult, because then you have to work out the best way to give the news that they don’t want to hear. Some people are more receptive to that…I suppose it’s trying to be as understanding as possible while also - and this is the delicate, the really delicate balance that applies across the board in family law - being the representative without being necessarily the shoulder to cry on. (Henry, solicitor) It’s a difficult situation, because obviously I can’t lie to a person and say it’s all going to be fine. I have to lay out what might happen, but some people do go directly to the worst possible scenario, and you have to draw them back from that. (Olivia, solicitor)
Olivia has an ethical obligation not to lie to her client but when being honest and upfront with the client, she must engage in a delicate dance of truth telling and ‘draw[ing] them back’ from the truthful but unwelcome worst-case scenario. The need to tell clients things they don’t want to hear relates to examples in Ward and McMurray’s (2016: 62) work where undesirable tasks ‘disrupts the preferred order of the recipient's family life and in so doing demands…the appropriate emotional performance’. Legal aid workers are also forced to make judgements as to what type of emotional engagement with a client is appropriate and this is experienced as challenging and difficult. The correct balance of emotional display is hard work for legal professionals (Westaby, 2010). As Ward and McMurray (2016: 62) note, gauging what is and isn’t appropriate when a client’s emotional needs demand a response is ‘a complex relational task contingent on material circumstances and an assessment of the needs and character of different members of the public’.
Legal aid workers also described the impact of these clients’ emotions on them personally. Emily described some clients as ‘needy’ and ‘emotionally manipulative’, emphasising the impact of the client's emotions on her. Amelia recounted dealing with a particular client whom she found difficult due to their frequent emotional displays: I find that draining actually…I find control, trying to cont - not control - trying to contain somebody. It’s like restraining them, you know, so they don’t hurt themselves, but you’re sort of containing them from what they’re going to say and explode. (Amelia, solicitor) Typically, one of the easiest…maybe the best ways of dealing with it, perhaps, is always, I think to emphasise the positive aspects of it - and emphasizing just the process itself as having been important to them and emphasizing that they got their opportunity or you know, if they have options emphasizing the options or the alternatives that they have. (Paul, barrister)
Paul continued on to say that emphasising legal ideals and principles such as due process is the ‘easiest’ way to navigate difficult emotions such as disappointment, indicating that this provides some relief for him personally from the taxing nature of the work. Through this, the position of emotions as dirt within the legal system is communicated to clients. Similar to participants in other studies of emotional dirty work (McMurray and Ward, 2014; Whiley and Grandy, 2021), Paul locates himself as acting as an ‘agent in the containment of emotional dirt’ (McMurray and Ward, 2014: 1123). Paul absorbs or contains these emotions and, in this way, shields the rest of the legal institution from these emotions. But unlike the legal system more broadly, Paul cannot be shielded from this emotion. He must deal with it and engage in practices to manage it: It can be very challenging, because you’re dealing with a very upset, or perhaps very disappointed [client], or you know it’s often important as well to try and explain to them what it was that was the issue, maybe because…if you have a written judgment, or a decision, or whatever it can be difficult for a lay person to discern you know why was it that it went this way, so making sure that they understand that is a useful tool. (Paul, barrister)
Legal aid workers occupy a space between the emotional fallout of life changing events and the prescribed logical arena of law. Emotions can be seen as ‘dirt’ as they offend against the norms and values of the legal system. Westaby (2010: 153) notes that due to the intense emotional labour involved in immigration work, solicitors report ‘feeling like a sponge’. This is due to the job requiring intense displays of empathy and solicitors feeling the need to absorb these emotions in some way. In the context of dirty work, we can take this metaphor a step further. Legal aid workers do not just engage in empathy, but they must also manage the dirt. They must absorb it and clean it. Like a sponge, they ‘clean’ the messy details of people's lives to make them more palatable to the legal profession and develop ways to manage this.
How Legal Aid Work is Dirty and Tainted
Participants described a form of occupational stigma being associated with working at the Legal Aid Board. This is not a new story in the history of legal aid workers. In Brooke’s (2016) account of the history of legal aid, he notes that the tradition of lawyers providing pro bono services has always attracted a level of social stigma due to its strong links with poverty and destitution. This can be understood as social taint as it arises from legal aid’s association with serving others, particularly those who are living in poverty. This is distinct from many others in the legal profession and relates to questions posed in Kinghan's (2021) study as to whether cause lawyers, whose work focuses on social justice issues, can be viewed as being inside or outside the legal profession due to the distinct context and constraints on their practice.
Dirty work often encourages outsiders to ask questions of the workers such as ‘Why would you want to do that?’(McMurray and Ward, 2014: 1123) or ‘How can you do it?’ (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999: 413). These types of questions are often painted as the common denominator among dirty jobs. Dirty jobs do not have particular attributes; instead, they are united by the way in which they provoke a specific visceral response from others. The fact that occupations such as butchers, criminal barristers and abortion nurses all involve different types of work and in different contexts, yet all evoke a similar reaction is exactly why the construct of dirty work is important. As Ashforth and Kreiner (1999: 415) state, ‘people ask funeral directors, “how can you do it?” just as surely as they do butchers’.
The work done by people in the Legal Aid Board also results in outsiders being perplexed by how or why someone might do this kind of work. This aversion to the work was described as coming from the broader legal profession as well as friends and family. This sentiment was directly linked to legal aid workers’ proximity to emotional dirt: I’ve had a lot of people saying, well, you know, I just could never, like particularly…lawyer friends of mine or colleagues of mine, who are maybe working as criminal practitioners or various areas of the law. A lot of them have said absolutely not. I could just never work in that area. It is, it’s not for everybody…because of the fact that there is an emotional charge to the work. (Lucas, solicitor)
There was also a sense in which the job was tainted due to the lack of occupational prestige both in the eyes of lawyers and their clients. Lucas noted that one further reason his lawyer friends couldn’t do his job was the ‘highly specialised’ nature of much of his work. Other legal aid workers felt that other lawyers ‘don’t view it as proper law’ (Conor, barrister). Siobhán described how her work can also be questioned because of the reduction in occupational prestige associated with working for lower pay in a well-paid profession: There would be people who would wonder what the hell you’re at. They would genuinely, there are people who don't know you personally, who would wonder why you are working like that when you're not being paid for it…those who are not in the board[Legal Aid Board] who would look in and go, that is insane, what are you doing that for. (Siobhán, solicitor)
Participants described how they felt that clients also believed that legal aid solicitors were tainted, they are the ‘last chance saloon’ (Fiona, legal clerk). In participants’ view, clients see them as ‘obviously not up to it’ (Olivia, solicitor) because ‘if you were a real solicitor, you’d be working…for one of these big firms’ (Leah, clerical officer). This seemed to be influenced by societal beliefs and attitudes towards success within the legal profession. Even those who seek legal aid workers out in times of need and often in desperation see them as undesirable compared to their private practice peers. Participants believed that they were viewed as not as capable as their peers and in this way experienced reduced occupational prestige. This demonstrates legal aid workers’ awareness of their proximity to dirty matter.
Goffman (1963) argues that people who are not directly tainted, but are instead associated with people who are stigmatised, offend in a distinct way. They offend people who are further removed from the stigma by illustrating the distance between them and those they stigmatise. People associated with stigmatised groups, such as legal aid workers, demonstrate the degree to which ‘normal’ people have removed themselves from the stigmatised (Goffman, 1963: 30). As Fiona (legal clerk), Olivia (solicitor) and Leah (clerical officer) alluded to above, they offend both outsiders and those directly stigmatised. People who occupy this position make both clients and outsiders uncomfortable as they are ready and willing to carry this stigma ‘burden that is not really theirs’ (Goffman, 1963: 31). Legal aid workers’ association with social taint and willingness to deal with emotional dirt leads to both those removed from this space and those within it to be offended.
Participants explained how taint came not only from within the profession but also from outside it. Outsiders such as friends and family also asked, ‘How could you?’(Aoibheann, barrister). As Lucas (solicitor) explains: A lot of people have said, you know, I could never do your job…you do get that. I mean, I’ve heard that from quite a number of family members and friends, actually. The only time that perhaps it’s difficult is when challenged in my own personal kind of, and, you know, socially mobile educated circles of how could you defend someone, and I will just say, because that’s my job.
Ashforth and Kreiner (1999) posit that dirty work is often not seen as unimportant work. In Tadgh's words, ‘people understand the want to do meaningful work’, but despite this understanding: They just wouldn’t do it themselves; you know what I mean? When they say…I don’t understand how you do it, rather than why you do it. (Tadgh, solicitor)
This highlights how others recognise the necessity for people, like legal aid workers, to engage in dirty work and perform cleaning practices. It also demonstrates their wish to remain personally and psychologically removed from it. Similar comments are also made to criminal defence lawyers (Gunby and Carline, 2020), but these reflections from participants demonstrate how civil legal work is also viewed as dirty by society. Due to their awareness of this, legal aid workers may also engage in practices to protect outsiders from the ‘dirty’ elements of the job. Amelia described a difficult case that she was involved in and noted the challenges of having conversations with friends and family about her work: It doesn’t really get to me [describes explicit details of child abuse] but, like, who can? Who can hear that? Yeah so, I just don’t talk to friends and family about it, but you can debrief, you have colleagues who I would speak to, dark sense of humour, there’s a lot of that that goes on. (Amelia, solicitor)
Amelia gives a sense here of the ways in which legal aid workers shield others from the ‘dirty’ elements of our social world – those aspects that the rest of us rather not think about. By asking ‘Who can hear that?’, Amelia acknowledges how most of society is removed from the realities of this work. We are so far removed from this dirt that Amelia is unsure if we will be able to handle even hearing about it. Legal aid workers debrief or redistribute this dirt among themselves and develop ways of coping such as humour. Riviera (2015) argues that while professions such as hospice workers are associated with physical and social taint, what makes most of society ask why someone would do that work is an aversion to the taxing emotional work required in the role. In a similar sense here, participants describe being tainted by their proximity to the challenging emotions of others as well as broader social stigma.
Dealing with the Consequences of Being Dirty
Dirty workers generally shift attention away from the stigmatised elements of their work and towards the non-stigmatised aspects of their work in a bid to manage the taint (Ashforth and Kreiner, 1999). Despite the stigma associated with the work, dirty workers often foster positive work identities (Ashforth et al., 2007). This can present as people describing the personal satisfaction that they get from the work (McMurray and Ward, 2014).
During the interviews, I rarely asked people outright whether they enjoyed their job, but I did ask everyone towards the end of our discussion whether there was anything else they would like to tell me or that they thought it was important that I know. I was surprised by the number of participants who at this point chose to speak about the personal enjoyment or satisfaction that they got from the job. Some participants expressed how they found the work enjoyable, and this appeared to occur in the varying role levels. Jack, a clerical officer, described working for the Legal Aid Board as ‘a very positive experience’ and noted that he ‘do[es] enjoy working here’. Gráinne, a solicitor, felt that it was important that I knew that ‘most people do get enjoyment and fulfilment from their role’.
Echoing findings from Gunby and Carline's (2020) study on criminal barristers, the role was also described as intellectually satisfying. Henry (solicitor) noted how he ‘enjoy[s] the academic challenge of it in terms of kind of digesting material, coming up with an argument’. For Frank (solicitor), an element of the role that he found pleasure in was ‘the mental engagement with having to…assess a given factual set of circumstances and applying your legal knowledge to find a solution for the benefit of the client…I just like that aspect of it’. Liam (solicitor) hinted at deriving satisfaction from doing work that others felt they wouldn’t be able to handle: There’s almost somewhat of a kind of grudging respect, almost that you’re willing- that you’re doing that type of work but yeah, maybe they don’t understand why you would still want to do it.
The majority of participants who expressed that they found their job satisfying spoke about it in the context of helping those who really needed help or making a difference. This is perhaps best understood as ‘reframing’: a process by which workers alter the meaning attached to their work. As Ashforth and Kreiner (1999: 421) note, ‘perhaps the most common justification for dirty work is to describe the occupational mission – the espoused purpose for which the work was created – in value-laden terms’. The ‘dirty’ elements of the job are enveloped in more uplifting values that eschew the workers’ association and proximity to dirt. This is not to argue that the work of legal aid workers does not make a difference or help people. The purpose here is not to comment on the value of the work itself but to understand the social consequences and the mechanisms by which participants deal with engaging in work which is stigmatised. Through understanding these practices in this way, we gain insights into the impact of difficult aspects of the work and methods of managing this difficulty.
For Leah (clerical officer), the ability to help people deal with actual problems was contrasted with other forms of public service ‘you’re not a mindless civil servant somewhere in the background, just sticking data together. It really is something that’s needed’. Gráinne (solicitor) explained how the ability to help was what ‘makes the job so worthwhile for a lot of the solicitors that work here’. Although he also spoke at length about the problems within the organisation, Séan compared his experience in the Legal Aid Board to working in other areas of law: I’ve probably worked in virtually every practice area at every different level, and I can honestly say that this is the best gig I’ve had so far. Most rewarding, and it’s the best work, because you’re really working with the law, and you really are trying to help. (Séan, solicitor) Working where I am, there is an immense satisfaction in helping people that really, really need it…so I’m completely honest when I’m ticking that box on job satisfaction, it’s worth a lot.
Legal aid workers described how the satisfaction derived from helping others enabled them to stay motivated and keep going in a challenging context: The pro-social aspect of the legal aid board and like civil service or public service work in general really draws me, and it’s a motivator for me, because it makes me feel like I’m doing something real but then, as you learn more about the system and everything…at least you’re doing something that’s helping an actual person. (Nora, legal clerk)
Despite emphasising the importance of dealing with client's emotions in their day to day work, participants framed what made their job worthwhile through other aspects of the work when describing how they helped people in practical terms. Séan notes he's ‘really working with the law’ and Nora is ‘doing something real’ through understanding the legal system and disseminating this knowledge to others. In describing what made the job worthwhile, they didn’t talk about times when they calmed a client down or sat with someone crying. They didn’t emphasise the emotion work that they engaged in – they emphasised esteemed parts of the profession. Similarly, other dirty workers such as butchers, home carers and nurses describe taking pride in the training and technical skills they display through dealing with various forms of dirt (McMurray, 2012). Through the process of describing the value of their work in ‘real’ terms such as the enjoyment, intellectual stimulation and practical elements of their work, legal aid workers obscure their proximity to difficult emotions. They also transform the meaning of the work from something that is tainted to something which enhances their professional identity. This simultaneous distancing from and transforming of the meaning of the work enables them to continue to engage with the dirt.
A further way in which legal aid workers maintained a positive identity was through ‘recasting’. Recasting ‘describes an attempt to re-narrate encounters with service recipients so as to make sense of or explain away transgressive or difficult emotional encounters’ (Ward and McMurray, 2016: 69). Workers describe their encounters with the emotions in a way that helps them to manage the impact of the emotions on them. Ward and McMurray (2016) argue that veterinarians ‘recast’ their client's emotions as understandable due to the close relationships that people have with their pets. Clients’ aggression converts from a personal attack to something that is manageable and simply the unwanted impact of concerns for their animals. This isn’t to say that the client’s emotions are not due to these reasons or that they are not understandable, but to examine why dirty workers might feel the need to retell stories of previous encounters in ways that try to make sense of or mitigate the dirt.
Emily, a legal clerk, recasts the difficult emotions she must deal with by focusing on the domestic violence that her clients have faced: A lot of women who come and want to talk about the domestic violence that they’ve gone through it’s been built up for a long time so and also like not even kind of physical domestic violence, but a lot of it is kind of coercive control or emotional abuse it’s like they’re dying to get it out of them…I let them get it out of their system as much as I can without it going on for a very, very long time…a lot of people are just trying to offload on that first call, and it’s almost they’re kind of trying to, they’re trying to make you the person who now they’re putting this information on to and you are now, the person who is responsible for fixing these issues.
Recasting helps dirty workers to make sense of situations when clients behave badly and allows them to manage this dirt: I would pass no remarks on a lot of the behaviour, that objectively isn’t acceptable, because it’s just people letting off steam…most of the time, I wouldn’t let it bother me. I have been called terrible names. I have been told where to go with myself several times, but that’s usually because the client was just at the end of their tether…you don’t get to see people at their best in family law and you have to make allowances for that. This isn’t the wedding day, this isn’t the hair beautifully done, in the big dress. This is the bottom falling out of their life. And you are a part of the process that is hammering home that their life is possibly circling the drain…you’re the lightning rod for a lot of their emotion. And you kind of have to accept that as part of the process but you also have to protect yourself in that and be professional about how much of it you let in. (Siobhán, solicitor)
Recasting and reframing as practices demonstrate one of the many ways through which workers seek to manage the difficulty in dealing with emotions. There are noted intersections with wellbeing and neoliberalism in the legal profession (Collier, 2014), and the continued rise of neoliberal tactics means that these difficulties are intensifying (Mant, 2017). Neoliberalism in England and Wales has led to the ‘deconstruction’ (Sommerlad, 2015) of social rights and a decline in the socialcapital of legal aid lawyers (Sommerlad, 2004). Historically in Ireland, there has been both political and judicial resistance to recognising and enforcing social rights (Nolan, 2014) and the welfare state has largely veered away from challenging privilege (Kirby, 2010). Unlike the ‘shock’ waves of neoliberalism in many countries, Irish neoliberalism can be understood as an ‘uninterrupted disturbance’ that is felt through ‘the gradual but constant shaking of workers confidence, chipping away at any gains they might have made’ (Fraser et al., 2013: 48). While the articulation of neoliberalism may vary, the implications of these tactics on workers are largely similar. Legal work is increasingly being recognised as having an emotional impact on legal professionals. Lawyers are expected to be mentally strong and the shame of struggling means that they must collectively find methods of coping with these difficulties (Jones et al., 2020). Through reframing and recasting practices, legal aid workers develop methods of dealing with client's emotions but also with the impact of the emotional ‘dirt’ on them and the ripples of neoliberalism.
Conclusion
This article has explored a new way to theorise and understand legal aid work. It contributes to understandings of the collective consequences of this work as it explores the broader social implications for those who work in this space. Ultimately, the paper argues that emotions in this context can be understood as emotional dirt, that legal aid workers are tainted due to their proximity to this dirt and that legal aid workers engage in practices to manage and deal with the consequences of this dirt. Legal aid workers act as sponges as they simultaneously absorb and clean the dirt associated with emotions, all while clients’ lives are ‘circling the drain’.
Emotions are positioned as dirty as they disrupt appropriate and preferred orders, as was the case for other dirty workers such as the Samaritans (McMurray and Ward, 2014) and border patrol officers (Rivera, 2015). In Douglas’s (2001: 37) words, they ‘contradict cherished classifications’ in the legal system. Understanding these emotions as dirty also speaks to the role of emotions in bureaucratic organisations more generally and answers the call by organisational scholars to examine emotion and dirty work in spaces where it has been ‘silenced, normalised or overlooked’ (Rivera, 2015: 219). The recent International Bar Association Global Survey (2021) noted how many lawyers find it difficult to speak about the impact of legal work on them, due to the stigma of mental health problems. The stigma implicated in legal aid work is multi-faceted and is felt by those working in the service in diverse ways. There is an urgent need to address the systemic cultural problems that have become normalised across legal practice.
There are limitations with sampling across a range of legal aid workers. For example, even within the legal profession, the roles and experiences of barristers and solicitors are generally seen to be distinct (Cooke, 2022). The importance of exploring a range of roles was stressed by research participants as central to understanding the organisation and legal aid work within the Irish context. This gives insight into the importance of the relational and collective aspects of the work. When we exclusively study different legal professionals in siloed studies, we miss opportunities for commonalities to be drawn across those working in the field. We miss the shared social norms and behaviours of working in these organisations. There are distinct ways in which people arrive at the legal profession and specific norms and expectations that are communicated within the profession. When we only focus on people who do the ‘professional’ elements of this work, or those who have esteem and clout within this arena, we may miss some of more nuanced and pervasive ways that legal ideals seep into various roles and hierarchies within the legal sector. In simpler terms, we continue to reinforce the centrality and dominance of legal understandings of this work. The centrality of emotional, relational and embodied aspects of the work may be overlooked. A full exploration of this is beyond the scope of this article. Instead by exploring the data through the distinct theoretical framework of emotional dirty work, the article demonstrates the value of multi-role studies within sociolegal scholarship and highlights the types of experiences and understandings of law that may be obscured when we focus purely on lawyers or specific legal roles. Different roles and positions have different tasks and experiences within the legal system, but there are also experiences common to all those who work within it. When we study paralegals, judges or lawyers in silos, we may obscure the experiences shared by all. The experiences of Leah, Jack (clerical officers), Nora, Emily and Fiona (legal clerks) are central to demonstrating the relevance of this theory and would have been overlooked had this study only focused on lawyers.
The research opens several avenues for further exploration. While there are distinct cultural and practice differences between the Irish jurisdiction and others, emotional dirty work as a way of understanding legal aid work may be applied in other jurisdictions. Common law legal systems shun emotions in every area of law, albeit to varying degrees. Similarly, dirty work as a framework may be examined in several areas of the legal professional. Law is often seen as a pathway for resolution; by its nature, it involves dealing with aspects of people's lives that they may find difficult to resolve– in other words their ‘messes’ (Scarduzio, 2011: 292–293). There is also more to be unpacked in this research around hierarchy and gender, particularly given the masculine nature of law as a discipline and the ‘hyper-masculine’ cultures of neoliberalism (Collier, 2016: 13). It is important to consider who within these organisations absorbs the majority of emotional dirt and why (Mastracci, 2021).
The increasing demands and the need to navigate numerous aspects of this work are beginning to be recognised in a variety of areas of law from corporate law firms (Sommerlad, 2016) to legal aid practices (Cooke, 2022), as is the impact of this on lawyers’ wellbeing (Jones et al., 2020). Neoliberalism is having a significant impact on legal aid (Mant, 2017), and stigmatising processes are intimately linked with neoliberalism (Tyler and Slater, 2018). This results in increased alienation, emotional stress and burnout. Supporting clients in this context involves ‘labours of love and blood, sweat and tears’ (Mayo et al., 2015: 116). Even within this pressurised neoliberal regime, there is still scope for cultural change around the role and purpose of emotions within legal practice (Jones, 2023). We need to recognise that legal aid workers will inevitably deal with emotions, and we must support and train these workers to respond to this. It may also be necessary to think more critically about the limitations of our broader legal system in responding to these tensions. It is not sustainable for legal aid workers to continue to act as sponges in this context. Understanding the influence of stigma in this work is essential to understanding how people experience and deal with these difficulties collectively. The degree to which the rest of us remove ourselves from the difficulty of this work comes at a cost for those working in legal aid. Understanding this through a ‘dirty’ work lens is a step towards beginning to acknowledge this cost.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This research was conducted in collaboration with the Legal Aid Board. I would like to thank the research participants who gave their time and knowledge and the Legal Aid Board's research team for their assistance with this study. My thanks also goes to Dr Jennifer Sigafoos, who gave helpful feedback and support on various stages of this work. Finally, I am grateful for the valuable and thoughtful comments of the reviewers of this article in the peer-review phase.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a Graduate Teaching Fellowship at the University of Liverpool.
