Entering the bar in 1895, Maklakov expressed his admiration for the teachings of Leo Tolstoy and, at the novelist's urging, undertook the defence of the Tolstoyans persecuted by the government. He later authored a book about Tolstoy. Maklakov gradually made a name for himself as a brilliant orator with "a profound veneration for legal form". A high point of his legal career was the defence of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jew wrongfully accused of ritual murder of an Orthodox child in 1913.