Attorney

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 counselor (or counsellor-at-law) and lawyer.[1]

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 (such as Britain, which has distinct between solicitors and barrister (or, in Scotland, advocates) or and civil law jurisdictions (such as Italy and France, which distinguish between advocates and civil law notaries). 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 notaries (their civil law equivalent).

Attorneys may use the post-nominal letters Esq., the abbreviated form of the word Esquire.