Lawyer USA

Alternative terms include counselor (or counsellor-at-law) and lawyer.

The United States legal system does not draw a distinction between lawyers who plead in court and those who do not, unlike many other common law jurisdictions. For example, jurisdictions in the United Kingdom distinguish between solicitors who do not plead in court, and the barristers of the English and Welsh systems and advocates of the Scottish system, who do plead in court. Likewise, civil law jurisdictions distinguish between advocates and civil law notaries. An additional factor that differentiates the American legal system from other countries is that there is no delegation of routine work to notaries public.

Many American attorneys limit their practices to specialized fields of law.[4] Often dichotomies are drawn between different types of attorneys, but, with the exception of patent law practice, these are neither fixed nor formal lines. Examples include:

Outside counsel (law firms) v. in-house counsel (corporate legal department)

Plaintiff v. defense attorneys (some attorneys do both plaintiff and defense work, others only handle certain types of cases like personal injury, business etc.)

Transactional (or "office practice") attorneys (who negotiate and draft documents and advise clients, rarely going to court) v. litigators (who advise clients in the context of legal disputes both in and out of court, including lawsuits, arbitrations and negotiated settlements)