Céline Bessière, Muriel Mille and Gabrielle Schütz
In a context promoting partners’ active participation in their divorce or dissolution, family lawyers often put their clients to work – from stating goals and supplying information for the written file, to embodying the case at the hearing. This article focuses on the coproduction of legal work between family lawyers and their clients, based on long-term collective research on family law in mainland France: interviews with attorneys, observations of encounters between lawyers and clients in lawyer offices and in courts, as well as a “3,000 family cases” database. Using a relational, materialist, structural, and intersectional theoretical approach, we show that coproduction of legal work and its meaning varies greatly depending on the power dynamics between lawyers and clients, – on a spectrum that goes from exploitation to empowerment of the client. Coproduced legal work varies according to configurations of class, race, gender, and age on both side of the desk, as well as according to the structure of the legal market. Interactions between lawyers and their clients thus contribute to shape inequality before the law.
