Attorneys

Doing a search for just the term “Attorneys” in the news today brings up almost 40,000 news stories in google’s news search. It seems that there are so many stories for so many different things with Attorney in the article that it seems researching attorneys in general in the news is not as easy as I had wanted it be. I suppose looking for a particular attorney by name in the news search may be beneficial, but doing general attorney research with the news searches does not appear to be very helpful.

In the USA it has been difficult for me to draw a real distinction between a lawyer and Attorney.  A quick glance at the wikipedia entries fro attorney and lawyer don’t clear up the distinction as well as I had hoped, although in Canada and other countries I find that there is major and clear distinctions.

From wikipedia’s “Attorney” page:

The American legal system has a united (or fused) legal profession, and 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, have a separation, such as the solicitor and barrister/advocate split in the United Kingdom and the advocate/civil law notary split in France. There is also no delegation of routine work to notaries public or their civil law equivalent.