Attorneys in the United States

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An attorney at law (or counsellor-at-law) in the United States is a practitioner in a court of law who is legally qualified to prosecute and defend actions in court on the retainer of clients.^[1] As of January 1, 2023, there were 1,331,290 active lawyers in the United States.^[2] In terms of absolute numbers, the American legal profession was the largest in the world as of 2015, and it is thought to be the largest in the world in proportion to domestic population.^[3] A 2012 survey conducted by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell determined 58 million consumers in the U.S. sought an attorney in the last year and that 76 percent of consumers used the Internet to search for an attorney.^[4]

The United States legal system does not draw a distinction between lawyers who plead in court and those who do not, unlike some other common law jurisdictions. For example, jurisdictions in the United Kingdom distinguish between solicitors, who do not plead in court, and barristers, who do. Likewise, civil law jurisdictions distinguish between advocates and civil law notaries. An additional factor that differentiates the American legal system from other countries is that there is no delegation of routine work to notaries public.

Attorneys may be addressed by the post-nominal letters Esq., the abbreviated form of the word Esquire.