The Atmosphere at the Public Defender's Office

Despite the fact that everyone wears suits at the office, the atmosphere is not overly formal. The suits are, of course, necessary for the courtroom, because the atmosphere in court is extremely formal. The office is a different case. Nearly all the attorneys I’ve met have told me to call them by their first names. I hear numerous light conversations that pertain to events in their lives, be they personal or business-related. The feeling of these conversations is usually the same warm, informal, conversational one, no matter what the subject of the conversation is. Using colorful language is a fairly common practice even among the older attorneys, but those four-letter words really only seem to come up during informal, business-related conversations that involve some degree of frustration. It seems as though using strong language is a way to cope with some of the stresses that come up when attorneys have to do their best to represent people who either have done horrible things or who are uncooperative and overly demanding. The sarcastic, raucous attitude that usually accompanies these conversations has been described by some attorneys there as a necessity if one is to be an effective public defender.

Attorneys’ demeanors toward their clients is, not surprisingly, much more formal. They always refer to the clients and their families by their titles and last names, and they speak very reverently to them even when the treatment they receive in return is much coarser. The public defenders act so respectfully mostly because they care about serving their clients and want to represent them as best they can (which usually works best when the clients are cooperative). However, the defenders also know that their clients can always file a claim stating that they were provided with “ineffective assistance,” since the attorneys are obligated to make the clients aware of this petition. People who are assigned public defenders usually begin under the assumption (in most cases wrongly so) that their legal assistance is going to be second-rate, so it is important for public defenders to dispel that assumption.