An attorney at law (or attorney-at-law) in the United States is a practitioner in a court of law who is legally qualified to prosecute and defend actions in such court on the retainer of clients. Alternative terms include attorney and counselor (or counsellor) at law, attorney, and lawyer.[1]
The U.S. legal system has a united legal profession, which means that it does not draw a distinction between lawyers who plead in court and those who do not. Many other common law jurisdictions, as well as some civil law jurisdictions, do draw such a distinction: for example, the division of solicitor and barrister (advocate) found in the United Kingdom, and the division of advocate and civil law notary in France. An additional factor which differentiates the American legal system from other countries is that there is no delegation of routine work to notaries public or their civil law equivalent.
Attorney-in-Fact and Attorney-at-Law
Strictly speaking, an "attorney is one who acts on behalf of another person in some capacity. An "attorney-in-fact" is akin to an agent who acts on behalf of another person, typically with respect to business, property, or personal matters. Such an agent does not have to be licensed to practice law and may not need to have any license at all.
By contrast an attorney-at-law, or lawyer, is a person trained and licensed by a relevant jurisdiction to practice law by representing clients in legal matters and giving legal advice. In the United States, the term attorney, standing alone, generally refers to this meaning rather than to "attorney-in-fact".
The term "attorney-in-fact" is mostly seen in the context of someone representing another person's interest in business negotiations or regarding signature pages on documents where the person signing is doing so on the basis of a power of attorney. The term power of attorney generally relates to an attorney-in-fact, not an attorney-at-law. Alternative titles for "power of attorney" type documents in non-U.S. jurisdictions include the French "Pouvoir", the German "Vollmacht" and the Portuguese "Procuração".
Attorney-at-Law and Attorney General
The term Attorney General is used to designate the chief law enforcement officer of a state or other political jurisdiction. The Attorney General is a lawyer who represents the government, prosecutes criminal cases, defends the government from lawsuits against it, and brings civil lawsuits to enforce consumer protection, antitrust, and other laws.
Older U.S. terminology and non-U.S. terminology
In common law jurisdictions outside the United States (e.g., England, Canada, Australia), attorney is incorrect as a general term, and lawyer, barrister, or solicitor are used instead. In these areas, the specific terms Crown attorney, power of attorney, and Attorney General, are also used. In intellectual property, the term patent attorney is commonly used.
In earlier times, some states, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, maintained a divided legal profession, as can still be found in the United Kingdom, consisting of attorneys (who practised in courts of Law), solicitors (who practised in courts of Equity ) and barristers, also known as counsel, whom solicitors and attorneys instructed to appear in the higher courts. In deference to this practice, when an attorney at law is admitted to practice in some states, his or her certificate of admission bears the title Attorney and Counselor-at-Law in recognition of his inheritance of both of these roles.
Some attorneys use the post-nominal Esq., the abbreviated form of the word Esquire.
Once admitted to practice by the highest court of a state (a function sometimes administered by the state's bar association), an American attorney may file legal pleadings and argue cases in any state court (federal courts usually require separate admission), provide legal advice to clients, and draft important legal documents such as wills, trusts, deeds, and contracts.
In some states, real estate closings may be performed only by attorneys, even though the attorney's role in a closing may involve primarily notarization of documents and disbursement of settlement funds through an escrow account.
Practicing law includes interviewing a client to identify the legal question, analyzing the question, researching relevant law, devising legal solutions to problems, and executing such solutions through specific tasks such as drafting a contract or filing a motion with a court.
Most academic legal training is directed to identifying legal issues, researching facts and law, and arguing both the facts and law in favor of either side in any case.
For several years, law schools have sent through far more students than new job openings have become available. This leads to attorneys (once they pass the bar) seeking work in other occupations, either by choice or by the lack of employment opportunities. This has led to a market in legal temps or contract attorneys, where attorneys spend a certain period of time working on tasks such as discovery for a case.
Media images
Contrary to the media image of attorneys, a great deal of litigation and regulatory legal work is spent conducting research in a law library or in an electronic database like Westlaw, LexisNexis, or Bloomberg L.P. Many attorneys also spend a large portion of their working time drafting documents, such as legal briefs, contracts, wills and trusts. Few television programs and movies accurately portray the hours conducting research, often surrounded by a pile of books or printouts, or drafting documents which form the core of the occupational life of many attorneys.
One occasional exception is the television program Law & Order, which sometimes shows the main characters researching at a computer late into the night (always using Westlaw, due to a contract between Westlaw and the show's producers). Some episodes also show lawyers keeping a small rack of clothes in their office for those times when research lasts all night and the character does not have time to go home to change.
Another notable portrayal of the profession was the series Murder One which featured a group of lawyers as central characters. The Practice did as well, but its accuracy may be questionable.[citation needed]
Movies and television also generally show attorneys focused on a single case. Most litigators have many cases in progress at any given time. Each case has deadlines that must be carefully monitored and court dates which one must not forget. Because they often balance many cases at once, attorneys that litigate often have difficult working lives when important documents must be drafted or other work must be performed on different cases at one time.[citation needed]
In litigation, attorneys spend much time discovering the facts of the case to develop a "theory of the case" that integrates facts and law in a way most favorable to their client. Many attorneys believe[citation needed] that the discovery process has reduced the number of civil cases that actually go to trial since the discovery process often allows for a clear evaluation of the merits of each side's position.
Some attorneys are not trial lawyers. Non-trial attorneys are sometimes called transactional lawyers or corporate lawyers. Transactional or corporate attorneys specialize in activities that seldom involve them in litigation, such as writing legal opinion letters, drafting wills or trust documents, advising clients, structuring business transactions, negotiating and drafting contracts, developing tax strategies, or preparing and prosecuting filings with government agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the Patent and Trademark Office.
