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Legal Advoce
A lawyer,
according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the
law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person licensed to
practice law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established
by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs,
maintain stability, and deliver justice. Working as a lawyer
involves the practical application of abstract legal theories
and knowledge to solve specific individualized problems, or to
advance the interests of those who retain (i.e., hire) lawyers
to perform legal services.
In practice, legal jurisdictions exercise their right to
determine who is recognized as being a lawyer; as a result, the
meaning of the term "lawyer" may vary from place to place.
* In Australia, the word "lawyer" is used to refer to both
barristers and solicitors (whether in private practice or
practising as corporate in-house counsel) but not people who do
not practice the law.
* In Canada, the word "lawyer" only refers to individuals who
have been called to the bar or have qualified as civil law
notaries in the province of Quebec. Common law lawyers in Canada
may also be known as "barristers and solicitors", but should not
be referred to as "attorneys", since that term has a different
meaning in Canadian usage. However, in Quebec, civil law
advocates (or avocats in French) often call themselves
"attorney" and sometimes "barrister and solicitor".
* In England, "lawyer" is used loosely to refer to a broad
variety of law-trained persons. It includes practitioners such
as barristers, solicitors, legal executives and licensed
conveyancers; and people who are involved with the law but do
not practise it on behalf of individual clients, such as judges,
court clerks, and drafters of legislation.
* In India, the term "lawyer" is often colloquially used, but
the official term is "advocate" as prescribed under the
Advocates Act, 1961.
* In Scotland, the word "lawyer" refers to a more specific group
of legally trained people. It specifically includes advocates
and solicitors. In a generic sense, it may also include judges
and law-trained support staff.
* In the United States, the term generally refers to attorneys
who may practice law; it is never used to refer to patent agents
or paralegals.
* Other nations tend to have comparable terms for the analogous
concept.
In most countries, particularly civil law countries, there has
been a tradition of giving many legal tasks to a variety of
civil law notaries, clerks, and scriveners. These countries do
not have "lawyers" in the American sense, insofar as that term
refers to a single type of general-purpose legal services
provider; rather, their legal professions consist of a large
number of different kinds of law-trained persons, known as
jurists, of which only some are advocates who are licensed to
practice in the courts. It is difficult to formulate accurate
generalizations that cover all the countries with multiple legal
professions, because each country has traditionally had its own
peculiar method of dividing up legal work among all its
different types of legal professionals.
Notably, England, the mother of the common law jurisdictions,
emerged from the Dark Ages with similar complexity in its legal
professions, but then evolved by the 19th century to a single
dichotomy between barristers and solicitors. An equivalent
dichotomy developed between advocates and procurators in some
civil law countries, though these two types did not always
monopolize the practice of law as much as barristers and
solicitors, in that they always coexisted with civil law
notaries.
Several countries that originally had two or more legal
professions have since fused or united their professions into a
single type of lawyer. Most countries in this category are
common law countries, though France, a civil law country, merged
together its jurists in 1990 and 1991 in response to
Anglo-American competition. In countries with fused professions,
a lawyer is usually permitted to carry out all or nearly all the
responsibilities listed below.
Germany
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