You should probably ask an attorney…oh wait a minute you are an attorney. I guess I’m more surprised that as a licensed practitioner in your field, that requires continuing education, that you don’t know the answer yourself.
Will law firms have both barristers and solicitors in them? And if so, if you hire a firm, will you get both types of services as needed?
Barristers don’t work in firms, they’re self-employed on a what-you-eat-is-what-you-kill basis. Either they’re all on their own, or they’re part of an organised business venture called “chambers” which provides office space, infrastructure and support staff, maybe trains a few barristers-to-be (“pupils”) and takes a cut of each of its members’ revenues in return. Solicitors, on the other hand, can be employed in firms on a salary basis; the big-name “Magic Circle” firms are full of solicitors but not barristers. For the purposes of litigation, they cooperate on a regular basis with a limited number of barristers specialising in different subject areas.
The whole system works only because actual litigation is surprisingly rare in England. The entire system, including the outrageously high hourly rates charged by top barristers, operates to incentivise claimants to seek out-of-court settlements and ADR before anyone even begins to take serious steps towards going to court.
You know, that explains so much. I was watching an Australian TV show called “Rake” a while ago, and while I generally enjoyed it, I was constantly befuddled by the cast’s business practices, office arrangements and general professional relationships between each other. Your post clarifies a lot about it.
Re: civil law notaries in the Canadian system, that sounds like it (might be) comparable to “notarios” in Mexico. Which is a huge problem for us immigration attorneys here along the US side of the US-Mexico border. Because many Mexican immigrants will assume—often with the help of certain disreputable members of the profession—that a notary public in the US has the same kind of training and ability to handle low-level legal matters as a notario in Mexico, in particular when it comes to filing immigration paperwork. The end result is certain self-styled “notarios” in the US will charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to “help” file immigration forms on behalf of desperate (often undocumented) immigrants, and—worst of all—in many cases they will do just that: they will actually file the forms, riddled with errors at best and filled with fraudulent representations at worst.
For example, an undocumented immigrant might go to a self-styled “notario” trying to get a work authorization document (so they can work legally in the US, and not have to risk being so heavily exploited by working under the table). The “notario” will tell them “Si, puedo ayudarte con eso…” They’ll slide some forms across the table, “Tu firma, por favor…” get the immigrant’s signature without translating the documents for them, and then send them off. Lo and behold, in a few months, work authorization comes in!
Only it turns out, the way they got that work authorization was by having the immigrant sign an application for asylum, and filled it in (without the immigrant’s knowledge) with some canned story they pulled off the shelf, and now the immigrant is on the hook for making a false statement to obtain an immigration benefit. I mean, sure, they can try and argue they didn’t know what they were signing and didn’t intend to lie, but I think you can all imagine how that goes down in our immigration system, where undocumented immigrants are presumed to be rapists and murderers, and so much as looking at a can of produce the wrong way can lead to indefinite detention and a total loss of due process rights. And of course they haven’t actually gotten asylum: it’s just that having the asylum application pending might allow them to get work authorization in the meantime. But when the US government gets around to actually processing the asylum application (potentially years later, by which time the notario has flown the coop or just committed to denying everything)…
Anyway, yeah, the only thing that keeps an actual attorney in the US from representing someone in a murder case despite having no experience or training is their own sense of morality, professional ethics, and of course the fear of getting sued for malpractice.
I am not an attorney. Note the “If” in the OP. Hypothetical attorney persona.
Florida imposes certain minimum qualifications on an attorney acting as counsel in a capital case (i.e. one where the state is seeking the death penalty).
For example
I’m guessing other states have similar standards.
Why do they put minimum standards for capital cases in the Rules of Civil Procedure?
They don’t. That’s just a mistake by that particular website.
I think so, yes. Quebec and Mexico are both in the civil law tradition, which has notaries.
Japan has a system of judicial scriveners:
Scrivener (“écrivain” in French) is also the traditional term for a solicitor in Jersey (which is a dependency of the British monarchs but whose legal system is based on Norman law and which therefore uses a lot of archaic French terminology), but more recently the country has renamed them solicitors.