The Street Lawyer

The Street Lawyer is a legal thriller novel by John Grisham. It was Grisham's ninth novel. The book was released in the United States on 1 January 1998, published by Bantam Books, and on 30 March 1998 in the UK, published by Century.

Plot

A homeless man, identifying himself only as "Mister," enters the offices of the powerful Washington D.C. law firm Drake & Sweeney and takes many of the lawyers hostage while angrily demanding information about some kind of eviction that took place. Although he is eventually shot and killed by a police sniper and the hostages freed, one of the hostages, an antitrust lawyer named Michael Brock, is concerned by what he has learned and feels compelled to investigate further.
He finds his way to the 14th Street Legal Clinic, where he meets Mordecai Green, an advocate for the homeless, who asks him to help one night at a homeless shelter. Green, along with his abrasive but brilliant and committed staff (an idealistic Jewish lawyer named Abraham and a Latina office genius/jack of all trades named Sophia) work to provide legal help to the most downtrodden members of society. As Brock's investigation deepens, he finds that his own employer was complicit in an illegal eviction, which eventually resulted in the death of a young homeless family. It involved the sudden approval of a federal building project on the site of a condemned building that had been serving as a rent-payment housing center for formerly homeless families; due to the rent system, these individuals were tenants and not squatters and thus entitled to a full legal eviction/contestment process, but a senior Drake & Sweeney attorney ignored this information because the firm had a large stake in ensuring the federal project start on time, and thus illegally threw everyone out into the freezing winter streets. He takes a confidential file, intending to copy it, but is quickly suspected of its theft.
Shocked by what he has found, Brock leaves his firm to take a poorly paid position with the 14th Street Legal Clinic, which works to protect the rights of the homeless. This leads to the severing of his links to his previous white-collar life, as his already-dying marriage officially ends in an amicable divorce. He later becomes emotionally involved in the case of a woman named Ruby, whose drug addiction led to her losing custody of her son. He also meets a lovely young homeless advocate named Megan and they start a relationship. As Drake & Sweeney comes after Brock with theft and malpractice allegations, the clinic launches a lawsuit against the law firm and its business partners. The firm makes a deal where Brock has his license suspended for a short time, while they settle for a large amount of money and fire the sleazy senior partner whose actions led to the young family's death.
Drake & Sweeney's head partner, deeply troubled by the events, offers to make his entire staff available for pro bono work to assist the clinic in fighting for the rights of homeless people. The book ends with Brock taking a short vacation with Megan and Ruby, and them
reflecting on their lives.