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Practice of law
Main article: Practice of law

Once admitted to practice by the highest court of a state, (the state supreme court), a function sometimes administered by the state's bar association, an American attorney may file legal pleadings and argue cases in any state court, provide legal advice to clients and draft important legal instruments such as wills, trusts, deeds and contracts. Arguing cases in the federal courts usually requires separate admission.

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.

Actions that may be performed by lawyers are referred to as the practice of law. 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 as well as 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.

[edit] 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 for tasks forming 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[weasel words] 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. They specialize in activities that seldom involve them in litigation. Among these activities are 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.

[edit] Specialization
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Many American attorneys limit their practices to specialized fields of law. Often dichotomies are drawn between different types of attorneys, but 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)
* Trial attorneys (who argue the facts, such as the late Johnnie Cochran) v. appellate attorneys (who argue the law, such as David Boies)

Despite these descriptions, most states forbid or discourage claims of specialization in particular areas of law unless the attorney has been certified by his or her state bar[1] or state board of legal specialization. Other states allow indirect indications of specialization (in the form of advertisement language such as "our practice is limited to . . ."), but require that the lawyer states that he or she is not certified by a state board of legal specialization in the advertised practice area. Patent attorneys are allowed to advertise their specialization in all jurisdictions, since registration for patent law is administered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) instead of a state-level body.

Some states grant formal certifications recognizing specialties. In California, for example, bar certification is offered in family law, appellate practice, criminal law, bankruptcy, estate planning, immigration, taxation and workers' compensation. Any attorney meeting the bar requirements in one of these fields may represent himself as a specialist. Similarly, Texas formally grants certification of specialization in the following fields: administrative law, business bankruptcy law, civil appellate law, civil trial law, consumer bankruptcy law, consumer law, commercial law, criminal law, estate planning and probate law, family law, health law, immigration and nationality law, juvenile law, labor and employment law, oil, gas and mineral law, personal injury, trial law, real estate law, tax law and workers' compensation law.[2]

The vast majority of lawyers practicing in a particular field may typically not be certified as specialists in that field (and state board certification is not generally required to practice law in any field). For example, the State Bar of Texas (as of mid-2006) reported 77,056 persons licensed as attorneys in that state (excluding inactive members of the Bar)[2], while the Texas Board of Legal Specialization reported, at about the same time, only 8,303 Texas attorneys who were board certified in any specialty.[3] Indeed, of the 8,303 certified specialists in Texas, the highest number of attorneys certified in one specific field at that time was 1,775 (in personal injury trial law). Despite the relative large number of lawyers that presumably would handle divorce, adoption and child custody matters, Texas reported that of 77,056 attorneys, only 697 in the entire state were certified in family law (which is, arguably, the applicable specialty).

Specialization in patent law is administered by the Office of Enrollment and Discipline of the USPTO, which imposes stringent requirements for applicants to become registered as patent attorneys or patent agents.

About half of American attorneys work solo or in small firms[citation needed]; see law firm. There are also many mid-size firms, with anywhere from 50 to 200 attorneys and since the 1970s, some law firms have merged to form giant firms with 1,000 attorneys or more.

However, whether a law firm is large or small is also a relative concept depending on the size of the community served. A law firm with six attorneys in a small community may be considered a large firm for that area. Because of conflict of interest rules, the maximum size of a law firm is dependent upon the size of the population it serves. Conflict of interest rules prevent one attorney in a law firm from, for example, representing a client in litigation that has an adverse interest to the interests of another client represented by a different attorney in the same law firm.

[edit] Control of cases

An American attorney licensed in each applicable court may in a few cases control and argue his or her case at each level of the judiciary through its entire life cycle. A notable example of this is the Brown v. Board of Education litigation, where the same trial team handled the case from start to finish at the U.S. Supreme Court. However, cases which advance to the appellate level, particularly to the U.S. Supreme Court, are often re-assigned to experienced appellate practitioners or firms.

[edit] Education and training
Main article: Legal education in the United States

[edit] Avenues to becoming a lawyer
Main article: Admission to the bar in the United States

Almost all U.S. jurisdictions require successful completion of a bar examination to be licensed as an attorney. All but a few of those states which require a bar exam also require the applicant to have taken a degree in professional law from an accredited law school; most require it to be an professional degree in law granted in the United States (usually the Juris Doctor, or J.D., a doctorate). Only a few states accept foreign law degrees. In addition to this formal education, attorneys in most jurisdictions must complete regular Continuing Legal Education (CLE) requirements.

Bar exams are administered by agencies of individual states. In 1763, Delaware created the first bar exam with other American colonies soon following suit.[3] A state bar licensing agency is invariably associated with the judicial branch of government because American attorneys are all officers of the court of the bar or bars to which they belong. Sometimes the agency is an office or committee of the state's highest court or intermediate appellate court.

In some states which have a unified or integrated bar association (meaning that formal membership in a public corporation controlled by the judiciary is required to practice law therein), the agency is either the state bar association or a subunit of it. Other states split the integrated bar membership and the admissions agency into different bodies within the judiciary. In Texas, for example, the Board of Law Examiners is appointed by the Texas Supreme Court and is independent from the integrated State Bar of Texas.

In almost all jurisdictions, the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE), an ethics exam, is also administered by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), which creates it and grades it. The NCBE created the MPRE in 1980. The MPRE is offered three times a year, in March, August and November.

The bar examination in most U.S. states and territories is at least two days long (a few states have three-day exams).[4] It consists of essay questions, usually testing knowledge of the state's own law (usually subjects such as wills, trusts and community property, which always vary from one state to another). Some jurisdictions choose to use the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE), drafted by the NCBE since 1988, for this purpose. Others may draft their own questions with this goal in mind, while some states both draft their own questions and use the MEE. Some jurisdictions administer complicated questions that specifically test knowledge of that state's law.

Bar exams also usually consists of the Multistate Bar Examination, which is a multiple-choice standardized test created and sold to participating state bar examiners by the National Conference of Bar Examiners since 1972.[5] The MBE contains 200 questions which test six subjects based upon principles of common law and Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code.

A majority of U.S. jurisdictions also require a performance test, which is intended to be a more realistic measure of actual lawyering skill. The candidate is presented with a stack of documents representing a fictional case and is asked to draft a memorandum, motion or opinion document. Many jurisdictions use the Multistate Performance Test (MPT), which was first created in 1997, while California drafts and administers its own performance tests.

The State of Washington has a separate Law Clerk program under Rule Six of the Washington Court Admission to Practice Rules. A college graduate of good moral character may be accepted into the four-year Rule Six Law Clerk program, obtain employment in a law firm or with a judge for at least 30 hours a week and study a proscribed Course of Study under a tutor. After successful completion of the Rule Six Law Clerk program, a law clerk may take the Washington State Bar Exam and, upon passing, will be admitted as an attorney into the Washington State Bar Association.