Despite this, a veteran member of Drake & Sweeney ignored this fact because the legal firm would personally profit from making sure that the federal building process started in a timely manner. Brock realizes that the tenants should have been legally deemed tenants instead of squatters, and were therefore entitled to the full eviction and appeal process. Due to the legal complexity of their housing situation, the residents were treated as if they were not entitled to their full rights, which allowed the law firm to force their eviction. The building had previously been used to provide reduced rent housing for the city’s recently unhoused population. Further, he learns that the reason for their expulsion was money-driven, as it had coincided with the abrupt approval of a state construction project to replace their condemned building. After evicting a single mother and her four children, the entire family died. The story’s protagonist then emerges: Michael Brock, a victim of the hostage situation, perceives a grain of truth in the man’s line of questioning and decides to set out to extend his search.Īs Brock’s investigation progresses, he learns that his current employer at the legal firm was involved in an eviction that was egregiously illegal. In the ensuing altercation with the police, he is shot and killed from afar by a SWAT sniper. Hostile and erratic, he demands information about an eviction that was supposed to have taken place. Identifying himself simply as “Mister,” he forcibly takes several lawyers hostage.

The book begins as a disheveled man breaks into the offices of Drake & Sweeney, an extremely powerful law firm in Washington, D.C. Along the way, he resolves to shift his career path, undergoing a personal transformation as he realizes how he can intervene in the complex and brilliant lives of the people who live on the margins of American urban life. Taken as one of the hostages, he is curious about the motive behind the crime and launches his own private investigation. The Street Lawyer, a 1998 work of crime fiction by John Grisham, follows a lawyer named Michael Brock who investigates in the wake of a violent break-in at a law office in Washington, D.C.

The street lawyer