Exploring the (crisis of) working culture of English and Welsh criminal defence lawyers through autopoiesis

This paper examines the working culture of defence lawyers through the lens of autopoiesis. While this lens is criticised for being tautological, we suggest that applying autopoiesis to the messages that might influence working cultures can allow us to identify conflicts between cultural practices, or conditional programmes developed via communication, which threaten the sustainability of publicly funded criminal defence lawyers. With their day-to-day work managing environmental stimuli at the intersection of political and legal (and – to an extent – economic) systems, the communications received by lawyers about their working environment are replete with challenges. We suggest that application of autopoiesis to pre-existing observed characteristics of criminal defence practice increases our understanding of a criminal defence profession in crisis, and enables us to identify tensions in messaging that warrant further examination to assist sustainability in the profession.