The renewed interest in the political agency of lawyers in the last 2 decades has seen three key approaches gain prominence in the literature: (a) lawyers as advocates political liberalism (b) lawyers as complex brokers of diverse forms of capital, and (c) the biographical lens. Notwithstanding the important insights that these different perspectives have yielded, they have important shortcomings. First, taking lawyers’ commitment to political liberalism as granted occludes the complex and shifting nature of their ideological persuasions. Second, while the biographical approach is necessarily limited in what it can tell us about the broader profession. Third, although thinking about lawyers as complex brokers allows for complexity in understanding their efforts to negotiate political contexts, it carries with it the risk of producing a very top-down account of the relationship between law and socio-political change. In this paper I employ the concept of ‘cause lawyering’ in order to shed light on the efforts of the Legal Resources Foundation (LRF) - the first a non-profit legal organisation established in Zimbabwe - to employ the law to bring about specific social and political changes. Among the key strengths of the concept is the way that it places both lawyers and their clients at the centre of the analysis. By drawing on this case study from Zimbabwe, the paper also intervenes in debates in the literature on cause lawyering, which have often drawn upon case studies from the global north. Among other things, it maintains that the notion of a ‘cause lawyer’ as distinct category has limited applicability in Zimbabwe given the relatively small size of the market for legal services which discourages specialisation. Instead the paper adopts Marshal and Hale’s conception of cause lawyering as a combination of a set of specific cultural practices. It therefore examines the way that the nature of clients, the political environment, as well as transnational influences shaped the character of LRF's cause-lawyering during this crucial historical moment. Using the debate around the death sentence in the early 1990s, the paper also explores the limits of the progressive commitments of the Legal Resources Foundation. The paper draws from a range of primary sources which include the minutes of the LRF council, reports of the Harare and Bulawayo Legal Projects Centres, minutes of the LRF test case programme, court records, and periodicals.