Ok, I’ve been lurking here again lately after a near 2 year hiatus and have started posting a bit lately. After some of the discussion on some of the legal threads over at GD I’m just curious in finding out who around here are lawyers (either professional, as in gradjeated from a certified law school or amateur, as in not licensed but students of the law nonetheless). So… to help me figger this out, the following poll:
Are you a pro-lawyer or amateur-lawyer?
What part of the country (or what other country)?
Areas of special interest or practice?
Thanks for your help and input.
As for me,
I am a pro-lawyer, although I am not engaged in private practice.
“Amateur” (work for record label and must deal w/ contracts and IP stuff regularly)
Ontario, Canada
Entertainment Law
Note: I’m one of the two lackeys who do all the legal grunt work and then at the last step a genuine certified “IP” and/or “Entertainment Law” lawyer doublechecks to make sure we’ve dotted all our i’s, crossed all our t’s and haven’t made any dumbass mistakes. Keeps legal costs way down and most of the time we really do seem to know what we’re doing (much to our amazement.)
Honest Abe I looked. I do lots of research so there’s just no excuse for me if this has been done recently and I failed to find it! Slap me around and point me in the right direction, I can take it!
Law student, so I guess that makes me a pro in training
Chicago
Civil litigation, insurance coverage actually, and some day I would like to get into admiralty law as well, I’d love to work on ship wreck cases for some reason…
And “student of the law” != “amateur lawyer.” There’s no such thing as an amateur lawyer in the U.S., anymore than there’s such a thing as an amateur doctor. You is a lawyer or you ain’t.
I know there’s no such as a true “amateur” lawyer… I was trying to include the people that I know around here frequently post on the legal subjects and are often quite well spoken but have not had formal legal training. I consider those people to be “students of the law” because it is quite clear that they frequently have spent a great deal of time reading and studying up on legal topics. I hope I did not cause any confusion by terming them “amateur lawyers”… perhaps I could have called them “legal hobbyists” or something more clever if I had spent more time thinking about it. I just didn’t think it would cause any problem. I did not mean to imply that I somehow thought it was possible to be anything like an “amateur doctor.”
Sorry about missing that earlier thread. Thanks for the responses here and for pointing me in the right direction legal peoples!
Somewhere in between “pro” and “amateur”, I guess. I’ve finished my law degree, but won’t be entering legal practice in the near future. There be other fish to fry.
Pro, in the sense that I have a license and it’s what I do for a living
Rural Iowa
General practice, some trials, some real estate, some appeals (when I lose and I’m really offended), some bank and commercial work.
