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court? It was not possible to learn anything by looking at
him, even though K. was scrutinizing him quite brazenly. It
could almost be supposed he was deliberately hiding his
thoughts as he waited to see what effect his words would
have. But he clearly deemed K.’s silence to be favourable for
himself and he continued, “You will have noticed the size of
my office, but that I don’t employ any staff to help me. That
used to be quite different, there was a time when several
young lawyers were working for me but now I work alone.
This is partly to do with changes in the way I do business, in
that I concentrate nowadays more and more on matters
such as your own case, and partly to do with the ever deep-
er understanding that I acquire from these legal matters. I
found that I could never let anyone else deal with this sort
of work unless I wanted to harm both the client and the job
I had taken on. But the decision to do all the work myself
had its obvious result: I was forced to turn almost everyone
away who asked me to represent them and could only ac-
cept those I was especially interested in well there are
enough creatures who leap at every crumb I throw down,
and they’re not so very far away. Most importantly, I be-
came ill from over-work. But despite that I don’t regret my
decision, quite possibly I should have turned more cases
away than I did, but it did turn out to be entirely necessary
for me to devote myself fully to the cases I did take on, and
the successful results showed that it was worth it. I once
read a description of the difference between representing
someone in ordinary legal matters and in legal matters of
this sort, and the writer expressed it very well. This is what

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