A barrister is a type of lawyer in common law jurisdictions. Barristers mostly specialize in courtroom advocacy and litigation. Their tasks include arguing cases in courts and tribunals, drafting legal pleadings, researching the law and giving legal opinions.
A lawyer is a person who is qualified to offer advice about the law, draft legal documents, or represent individuals in legal matters.
In its most general sense, the practice of law involves giving legal advice to clients, drafting legal documents for clients, and representing clients in legal negotiations and court proceedings such as lawsuits, and is applied to the professional services of a lawyer or attorney at law, barrister, solicitor, or civil law notary. However, there is a substantial amount of overlap between the practice of law and various other professions where clients are represented by agents. These professions include real estate, banking, accounting, and insurance. Moreover, a growing number of legal document assistants (LDAs) are offering services which have traditionally been offered only by lawyers and their employee paralegals. Many documents may now be created by computer-assisted drafting libraries, where the clients are asked a series of questions that are posed by the software in order to construct the legal documents. In addition, regulatory consulting firms also provide advisory services on regulatory compliance that were traditionally provided exclusively by law firms.
A paralegal, also known as a legal assistant, or paralegal specialist is a legal professional who performs tasks that require knowledge of legal concepts but not the full expertise of a lawyer with an admission to practice law. The market for paralegals is broad, including consultancies, companies that have legal departments or that perform legislative and regulatory compliance activities in areas such as environment, labor, intellectual property, zoning, and tax. Legal offices and public bodies also have many paralegals in support activities using other titles outside of the standard titles used in the profession. There is a diverse array of work experiences attainable within the paralegal field, ranging between internship, entry-level, associate, junior, mid-senior, and senior level positions.
King & Spalding LLP is an American multinational corporate law firm that is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with offices located in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It has over 1,300 lawyers in 23 offices globally. It is Am Law 100, Global 30, and white-shoe firm.
A bar examination is an examination administered by the bar association of a jurisdiction that a lawyer must pass in order to be admitted to the bar of that jurisdiction.
A public defender is a lawyer appointed to represent people who otherwise cannot reasonably afford to hire a lawyer to defend themselves in a trial. Several countries provide people with public defenders, including the UK, Belgium, Hungary and Singapore, and some states of Australia. Brazil is the only country in which an office of government-paid lawyers with the specific purpose of providing full legal assistance and representation to the needy free of charge is established in the constitution. The Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, requires the US government to provide legal counsel to indigent defendants in criminal cases. Public defenders in the United States are lawyers employed by or under contract with county, state or federal governments.
A law firm is a business entity formed by one or more lawyers to engage in the practice of law. The primary service rendered by a law firm is to advise clients about their legal rights and responsibilities, and to represent clients in civil or criminal cases, business transactions, and other matters in which legal advice and other assistance are sought.
Attorney's fee is a chiefly United States term for compensation for legal services performed by an attorney for a client, in or out of court.
In Poland, any person holding a Magister's degree in law is called a "jurist" or "lawyer". According to Polish legal doctrine, a lawyer should be understood as a person who graduated from law school with the aforementioned degree, even if such a person does not practice law after graduation.
FindLaw is a business of Thomson Reuters that provides online legal information in the form of state laws, case law and codes, legal blogs and articles, a lawyer directory, DIY legal services and products, and other legal resources. The company also provides online marketing services for law firms. FindLaw was created by Stacy Stern, Martin Roscheisen, and Tim Stanley in 1995, and was acquired by Thomson West in 2001.
Of counsel is the title of an attorney in the legal profession of the United States who often has a relationship with a law firm or an organization but is neither an associate nor partner. Some firms use titles such as "counsel", "special counsel", and "senior counsel" for the same concept. According to American Bar Association Formal Opinion 90-357, the term "of counsel" is used to describe a "close, personal, continuous, and regular relationship" between the firm and counsel lawyer. In large law firms, the title generally denotes a lawyer with the experience of a partner, but who does not carry the same workload or business development responsibility.
Legal outsourcing, also known as legal process outsourcing (LPO), refers to the practice of a law firm or corporation obtaining legal support services from an outside law firm or legal support services company. When the LPO provider is based in another country, the practice is called offshoring and involves the practice of outsourcing any activity except those where personal presence or contact is required, e.g. appearances in court and face-to-face negotiations. When the LPO provider is based in the same country, the practice of outsourcing includes agency work and other services requiring a physical presence, such as court appearances. This process is one of the incidents of the larger movement towards outsourcing. The most commonly offered services have been agency work, document review, legal research and writing, drafting of pleadings and briefs, and patent services.
A duty solicitor, duty counsel, or duty lawyer, is a solicitor whose services are available to a person either suspected of, or charged with, a criminal offence free of charge, if that person does not have access to a solicitor of their own and usually if it is judged by a means test that they cannot afford one. The system is operative in several Commonwealth countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Law practice management (LPM) is the management of a law practice. In the United States, law firms may be composed of a single attorney, of several attorneys, or of many attorneys, plus support staff such as paralegals/legal assistants, secretaries, and other personnel.
A retainer agreement is a work-for-hire contract. It falls between a one-off contract and permanent employment, which may be full-time or part-time. Its distinguishing feature is that the client or customer pays in advance for professional work to be specified later. The purpose of a retainer fee is to ensure that the employed reserves time for the client in the future when their services are needed.
Crowell & Moring LLP is an international law firm headquartered in Washington, DC, with offices in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orange County, Chicago, Denver, London, Brussels, Doha, and Shanghai. With approximately 600 lawyers, the firm advises multinational corporations on regulatory, litigation, corporate, and investigations matters. As of 2022, Crowell & Moring is ranked among the top 100 law firms in the United States in The American Lawyer's "AmLaw 100" list, based on gross revenue.
Legal aid in the United States is the provision of assistance to people who are unable to afford legal representation and access to the court system in the United States. In the US, legal aid provisions are different for criminal law and civil law. Criminal legal aid with legal representation is guaranteed to defendants under criminal prosecution who cannot afford to hire an attorney. Civil legal aid is not guaranteed under federal law, but is provided by a variety of public interest law firms and community legal clinics for free or at reduced cost. Other forms of civil legal aid are available through federally-funded legal services, pro bono lawyers, and private volunteers.
Unbundled legal services, also known as limited scope representation and discrete task representation, is a method of legal representation in which an attorney and client agree to limit the scope of the attorney’s involvement in a lawsuit or other legal action, leaving responsibility for those other aspects of the case to the client in order to save the client money and give them more control. Unbundled legal services, limited scope retainers or discrete task representation are available in multiple jurisdictions, including the United States, as well as the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario. One common use of unbundled legal services is family law, as a case is often too complex for a pro se litigant to handle alone but the cost of full-service legal representation is often prohibitive.
UpCounsel is an online marketplace for legal services created to enable users, primarily entrepreneurs and businesses, to find and hire attorneys. The company is based in San Francisco, California. Initially, UpCounsel provided service to users in California and New York.
