a person who is trained and qualified to advise people about the law and to represent them in a court of law, and to write legal documents
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WHICHWORD?
lawyer / barrister / advocate / attorney / solicitor
Lawyer is a general term for a person who is qualified to advise people about the law, to prepare legal documents for them and/or to represent them in a court of law.
In England and Wales, a lawyer who is qualified to speak in the higher courts of law is called a barrister. In Scotland a barrister is called an advocate.
In AmE attorney is a more formal word used for a lawyer and is used especially in job titles: district attorney.
Counsel is the formal legal word used for a lawyer who is representing someone in court: counsel for the prosecution.
Solicitor is the BrE term for a lawyer who gives legal advice and prepares documents, for example when you are buying a house, and sometimes has the right to speak in a court of law.
In AmE solicitor is only used in the titles of some lawyers who work for the government: Solicitor General.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for lawyer is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is lawyer a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, lawyer is tagged as noun.
Does lawyer appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — lawyer appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
