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| Specialty in the Legal Profession |  Here are just few of the areas of specialty in the legal profession today:
Loans and mortgages, Refinancing, Consolidation of loans, Taxes, Criminal Defense or Prosecution, Personal Injury, Registration of Domain Names, Wrongful death suits, Insurance settlements, Medical claims, Malpractice suits, Bankruptcy, Divorce and Pre-Nuptial Agreements.
This list demonstrates how watchfully every aspect of our society is crashed by the legal system and lawyers, also called attorneys, are the spine of the system both in advocating for clients and in advising them. The job of lawyers is not to write the laws but to apply them to exacting circumstances.
By the mid-1500s in England two different types of lawyers had appeared, actually creating two branches of the profession, which are still operating today: barristers and solicitors. A barrister is approximately equal to a trial lawyer and though a solicitor may appear in a lower court, he or she mostly advises clients and prepares cases for barristers to present in higher courts. But there was a usual conflict built into their class system. Only people of the upper classes could afford to be educated well enough to practice law but it was deliberation to be under members of those classes to practice a profession at all. One should, in those days, have sufficient inherited income or income from goods to have a protected livelihood without having a profession.
There was no such chauvinism in the American colonies. It was considered a pleasing thing for children to grow up with the idea of earning an income other than that provided by the land and the law, with its necessity for higher learning, was a more respectable profession than many. Americans expected to have rights, to have those rights protected by law and for those protections to be supported by local courts. While they often went to England to be educated in the law they did not mean for English courts to administer American justice. In fact, it was the principles of English law and the fact that the law was not being administered quite in the American colonies that led to the desire for sovereignty from the crown. Nearly a quarter of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had studied law in England.
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