John Donne spent five years as a member of Lincoln's Inn before entering the service of Sir Thomas Egerton, the last Lord Keeper under Elizabeth and the first Lord Chancellor under James. Despite his con-nection with these legal environments, few studies have been devoted to the poet and the law, and even fewer to his fifth and final satire on legal reform. Critical tradition has largely followed Wesley Milgate's lead in dismissing ‘Satyre V’ as ‘the weakest’ in the series, as it has ‘the air of a rather hastily-put-together occasional piece’. The occasional nature of the poem, however, should attract rather than repel contemporary critical interest. Composed while Donne was a legal secretary for Egerton in the late 1590s, ‘Satyre V’ reverberates with the complex legal, political, and literary cultures that circulated through the halls and chambers of York House, the Lord Keeper's residence. The poem not only directly addresses Egerton, but its focus on legal abuse and ‘how law regulates itself’ is an appeal to the sensibility of this particular Lord Keeper who was well-known for his judicial integrity and commitment to legal reform when he first came to office. In an early seventeenth-century manuscript entitled ‘Memorialles for Judicature’, Egerton outlines four major areas of the law in need of reform: ‘the mischievous growth of litigation in society, the increased costs of the courts, the excessive fees of serjeants and attorneys, and the proliferation of dishonest and inexpert men in the law profession’. All of these developments in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean legal culture are at least glanced at in Donne's final satire. Both M. Thomas Hester and Annabel Patterson place ‘Satyre V’ in the tradition of advice literature and argue that Donne equates his role as satirist with his role as legal advisor or counsellor. While he praises Egerton, however, Donne does not directly advise him in the poem. Nor historically was Donne a legal counsellor to the Lord Keeper: Egerton had far more learned and experienced men at his disposal for that service, including Francis Bacon and William Lambarde. ‘Employed as one of the Lord Keeper's three working secretaries’, Louis A. Knafla explains, Donne's ‘duties would have included scheduling, meeting and greeting guests, legal research and drafting memoranda for the wide range of the Lord Keeper's public, rather than private, businesses’.