Are you considered to be a lawyer after finishing law school, or after passing the ba

Factual Questions
21

I’d like to disagree slightly with my learned Sydneysider friend. In Victoria, and I believe that the process is similar in most states, to be considered a legal practioner in most Australian states, you must hold a practising certificate. This certificate must be reissued every year, based on your completion of the educational / experience requirements (LLB, articles of clerkship), as already mentioned. However, there are additional requirements such as trust fund reporting and audits, as well as compliance with the ethical rules of the profession, and a fairly nominal fee.

So, a major ethical breach, or a bit of embezzlement, and you’ll lose your certificate and can no longer be considered a legal practioner. It’s possible to be readmitted, but I don’t know the process. If you’ve lost your practising certificate (I knew one semi-retired lawyer who merely let his lapse), you can still perform certain quasi-legal tasks eg the drafting of wills under certain conditions, but you cannot give legal advice.

22

A similar regime exists in the States, Atticus; you are a lawyer when you’re admitted to the Bar, but ethical breaches can get you booted therefrom, and you’re not allowed to practice then.

–Cliffy

23

must…resist… temptation …for… joke about…slugs

24

I know someone who also brags that she is a lawyer and boasts about her undergraduate law degree. She has every excuse under the sun why she can’t complete the bar exam (‘ooh…I have a disability and it’s therefore too hard for me because they won’t make allowances’), but apparently gives legal advice at a free legal aid place as a volunteer…and apparently pays some registration or other to the Law Institute of Victoria for the privilege.

Can someone please confirm that she is NOT a lawyer? This is a person whose truthfulness in many contexts leaves much to be desired (I’ve caught her out in several porky pies), and frankly I’m a little sick of her fabrications. Next time she calls herself a lawyer, I would like nothing better than to say, ‘But that’s not quite truthful, is it - because you know very well that you’re NOT a lawyer’. But I need to get my facts straight.

So please someone, confirm that she isn’t a lawyer…and how it is that she can volunteer to give out advice at a free community legal aid place. Because that will be her next move, to mention that.

The person concerned knows even less about some areas of the law than I do…and my degrees certainly weren’t in law. You will really make my day if you can confirm that she isn’t a lawyer!!!

25

Plug in her name at the bottom of this page.

26

That explains a lot.

She’s listed as a legal practitioner, but only as a volunteer. I clicked on a link to read the conditions under which they can practice. And she can be given a licence to practice as a volunteer in a community legal centre, but is prohibited from working outside the bounds of that licence.

So she is a lawyer - but only barely, in the most technical of technical senses, and would cease to become so if she gave up that volunteer role. And can’t practice in a real law firm. And hence why she can’t look for a law job in the private sector, though she maintains that she only wants to work in the public service. But of course that is not a law job either, I have discovered, but one open to anyone without a law degree. She recently fabricated an entire stream of experience in her current paid job to get a law-related job in the same department…and then discovered that checks would be made and when she asked whether her supervisor would back up her lies, the supervisor said she wouldn’t sacrifice her own integrity to cover this person’s back. She never got the job.

I noticed that she has told me lies about how much she pays for her licence as well. She told me she pays in excess of $800 per year.

I do not know how she got around the mental health conditions, as she has more than one psychiatric illness, but it does explain why she goes to such lengths to lie and conceal the extent of her dysfunction, which became very apparent to me as an educator who has worked with disabilities and clued in to certain maladaptive behaviours. She acknowledges some (ones that wouldn’t interfere with law practice), but I suspect there are more serious underlying ones based upon the abnormal attention seeking behaviour, manipulation and lying. The more I’ve been noticing and paying attention to the disconnects, the nastier she has got in her attitude towards me when she thinks no-one is around. I believe there has been a bit of shifting between counsellors. Perhaps moving on if someone gets too close?

Thank God she is only a volunteer. Mental note to self: never seek legal advice from a centre which is desperate enough to take her on as a volunteer!

27

She may not be a lawyer after all. Reading the following from the LIV:

Section 2.2.2(2) of the Act provides limited exceptions to the prohibition in section 2.2.2(1) and enables a person who is not an Australian legal practitioner to engage in legal practice in Victoria in the following specified circumstances:

under the authority of a law of this jurisdiction or of the Commonwealth;
as an incorporated legal practice in accordance with Part 2.7;
as a community legal centre in accordance with Part 2.9;
as an Australian-registered foreign lawyer practising foreign law in accordance with Part 2.8 (see below);
as  a person who prepares an enterprise agreement or agreement-based transitional instrument within the meaning of the Commonwealth Fair Work legislation on behalf of a party or proposed party to the agreement;
as a licensee under the Conveyancers Act 2006who performs conveyancing work in accordance with that Act;
as a person who represents another person in proceedings before a court or tribunal with leave of the court or tribunal;
a person who does anything in the course of their employment with the Crown or a public authority or in the performance of duties under an appointment by the Governor in Council.

I guess if I am in doubt there is one sure way of finding out: ring the Law Institute of Victoria and ask!

28

When I got my law degree in 1966, I did not have to get a JD. An LLB would suffice. (I do have a JD, BTW). Perhaps things have changed. Also, I did not have to undergo a personal interview to determine my character. Affidavits by others that I was of good character sufficed. I don’t believe zombies can get licensed to practice, but many do get law degrees. :slight_smile:

29

I’m not sure this will be of interest so I’ll keep it short. Requirements probably vary a lot by state. In NJ, part of the JD requirement is a residency requirement. I recall it as being 6 semesters of 12 credits or more, but that’s obviously wrong or incomplete since many people went part time.

The background check can be a little scary if you have any “skeletons” that are a matter of public record (in which case they aren’t really skeletons I guess). And they also fingerprint you. All this after you’ve managed to survive a 2-day bar exam. Oh the indignity.

Finally there is the swearing in ceremony which also makes you a member of the bar for the 3rd Circuit, or something like that. Never really did figure out how that works.

NJ also requires practicing attorneys to take a certain number of credits each year from ICLE or other recognized sources of continuing legal education. Too many attorneys don’t keep up with changes in law so I guess this is meant to help ameliorate that problem. If you’re retired or fall into one of a couple other categories, you’re excempt.

You also have to pay into the Client’s Security Fund each year. This is set up to help compensate clients who have been ripped off. It’s also the best way to see if someone is actually admitted to practice in the state.

30

That makes sense. Most professions would require a certain amount of professional development each year. In my own profession, I have to in order to be a fully registered practitioner…yet someone who just has a working with children licence (ie not a professional) doesn’t. Worth checking that out, too.

31

The public understands a lawyer to be someone who is licensed to practice law.

Black’s law dictionary Fifth Edition (there are now several newer editions, but that is the one I have) says:

“Lawyer. A person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel, or solicitor, a person licensed to practice law. Any person who prosecutes or defends causes in courts of record ot other judicial tribunals of the United States…”

In the sense that your law school student or graduate is a person learned in the law, they are in a very narrow sense a lawyer. They are not a lawyer in the sense that anyone who is not a law student or unlicensed grad or someone outside of the legal studies industry would contemplate. My friends who were lawyers but now are retired refuse to call themselves lawyers, even though they are learned. It is misleading to virtually everyone outside legal studies for unlicensed people to call themselves lawyers.

32

Hijack, since the question’s been mostly answered:

Why do JDs not call themselves “doctor”? Today, at least in Canada, an MD is basically an undergrad degree (at most a Master’s), yet MDs get to use the title Doctor.

33

Why would one want to be confused with a paltry academic? :wink:

More seriously, why would one want to be confused with an MD?

34

Why JD rather than LL.B.? Well why not? As a generalization, PhDs run our universities, JDs run our legal systems, and MDs keep us alive. (Well, to be honest, the reality is that grad students run our universities, clerks run our legal systems, and nurses keep us alive, but that’s another thread.) Regardless of what academic hoops professionals have or have not gone through, they all end up with a high honorific: doctor. Why then do physicians use the honorific while lawyers do not? Because a lawyer wandering about insisting on being called Doctor would end up being sent to a doctor to figure out what was wrong with him. General usage by regular folks is not to be messed with.

Think of the title Doctor as used in a first professional degree as an honorific that is a reflection of the place that profession holds in society. For example, in England an MD degree is an advanced academic degree, whereas the first professional degree for doctors (i.e. physicians) there is a Bachelor of Medicine. For open your mouth and say ah doctors in England, Doctor is strictly honorific. (It gets even odder, in that doctors in England who go on to become surgeons then drop the doctor honorific and go back to being called Mr. as a nod to their roots as barbers.)

So let`s say that you are running a university faced with professionals running about being called Doctor by everyone their grandmother and their dog simply as a courtesy, despite not actually holding an academic doctorate? If you are a practical Scotsman, you recognize the obvious and start naming degrees to match reality. Look back at the ancient universities: Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin. The Scottish ones started the pattern of awarding an MD as a first professional medical degree. The USA took up this pattern, and in fact professional doctorates in medicine and law were being handed out in the USA before research/academic doctorates. For example have a boo at what Yale was awarding: http://oir.yale.edu/1701-1976-yale-book-numbers .

Its interesting to note that in England the first professional degree for a lawyer is an LL.B., and one enters into it as a first university degree, whereas in the USA the first professional degree for a lawyer is a JD and one enters into it as a graduate degree after completing an undergraduate degree. In Canada, the LL.B is being (or has been – Im not up to date on this) phased out in favour of the JD, for in Canada almost all entrants into the first professional law degree program already have an undergraduate degree, and much more significantly, it confuses the hell out of American clients when they need to hire lawyers for Canadian matters and for trans-boundary American matters. Quite simply, the change from LL.B. to J.D. in Canada has been primarily driven by practicality, rather than academic technicality. As you can guess, practical Scots from our first Prime Minister McDonald on down have played a very significant role throughout Canada`s history.

35

Back to the OP

Not only is he not a lawyer, what he’s doing specifically against the law in Ohio.

In my state fraudulently holding yourself out as a lawyer before you are licensed is widely believed to be the only absolute bar to admission (I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but it’s what people say).

36

I graduated law school and passed both the MPRE and the NY Bar. While waiting my results I took on a policy assignment or two and never finished the paperwork, never paid my monies, and never looked back. My wife occasionally refers to me as a lawyer or some such in casual conversation or with clients, and my hair stands on end. I AM NOT A LAWYER! Not from an aversion to the thought, but because until I send in the paperwork, finish the interview, and pay my fees, I am not a lawyer.

37

I have a law degree and never sat for the bar (did a joint MBA, decided to go the business route).

I’m not a lawyer, period.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that I can’t work in some legal functions though.

I was once a certified legal intern in Indiana, which meant that I could practice under a supervising attorney’s license and was even able to represent my employer (a city) in court.

I also interned at a large corporate law firm, where I drafted legal briefs, reviewed contracts, wrote memos to clients, etc. Of course, some licensed attorney’s name shows up on any relevant document, after they review the work and sign off on it.

After finishing law school, I joined a company through a rotational program and actually did a rotation in one of the legal departments, where I drafted contracts, helped with witness preparation, provided legal advice to internal clients, and did the same type of work as other attorney’s in the company. Of course, I couldn’t represent anyone in court, or sign off on any external documents, etc.

So, having a law degree doesn’t make you a lawyer, but you don’t also have to be a lawyer to do things that most people would consider practicing the law.

But, and this is the important part, if you have a law degree and are not licensed, you need to be super careful about what you do. When I was working in that legal group, I always made it very, very clear to people that I was not a licensed attorney. It’s the “holding yourself out to be an attorney” part that is the most important.

38

The LL.B. is being phased out in Canada. It makes sense; with very, very few exceptions, everybody admitted to a Canadian law school has a bachelor’s degree at the very least, as their American counterparts do. Canadian law schools follow the Langdellian system, as American law schools do. Calling a Canadian first professional degree in law a “bachelor’s,” when the Canadian first professional degree in medicine is a “doctorate,” is silly.

I did have a few American clients who had a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that I had the same education as an American lawyer. It was the “Bachelor of Laws” degree that confused them, for the reason you said.

That being said, my law school offered me the chance to “trade in” my LL.B. for a J.D. I think I’ll stick with my LL.B. I don’t do much transborder business any more, and the LL.B. is still understood as a proper law degree here in western Canada.

39

Mine’s been sitting on the to-do list for a few years. I guess it’s safe to say that it isn’t high on the priority list.

40

My understanding is that Quebec is the major exception; CEGEP (junior college) graduates can enter professional programs like law (or even medicine) directly, without needing to get a general undergrad degree first. Of course Quebec’s education system has major differences from the rest of North America, mainly due to the aforementioned college-level in between school (which only goes up to grade 11) and university (most bachelor’s degree programs being 3 yrs rather 4).