This book offers a timely and detailed examination of the reality of criminal legal practice today. Drawing upon extensive anonymous interviews with criminal lawyers in England and Wales, it illuminates how financial pressures arise within the criminal justice system and how lawyers seek to navigate them. The work of criminal lawyers is frequently depicted in the news and media as exciting, well-paid and worthwhile, with prosecutors aiming to convict the guilty and defence lawyers fighting against miscarriages of justice. In contrast, the picture reported by many is of an already creaking...