It doesn’t matter if you’re someone who’s seeking to learn more about the practice of law, wants to practice it yourself, or are looking for someone who does—you are wondering which branch of law practice you should look into.
To people who are not as aware when it comes to the various practices of law that exist, the field may be a confusing world of unusual phrases and a lot of reading. To the naked regular citizen eye, the practice of law may seem like a professional shouting match between two people who are licensed and paid a median salary of 120,000 dollars annually.
There are also people who assume that one lawyer can help them with any legal matter. That though can be attributed to the fact that a lawyer is certified to practice a vast array of legal matters, except for some that require additional licensing. The field of law practice is so wide that it is practically beyond them to effectively provide legal services to clients with issues encompassing areas out of their main specialization.
As a result, lawyers are confined to a single area of law that they want to master and provide legal services for. However, even if the law is created to uphold justice, fairness, and equality–there are some areas of law practice that are more used than the others.
Corporate Law
Corporate law or business law is a broad area of law practice that covers employment, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and intellectual property. Business lawyers or business lawyers, in the most basic sense, help you individuals in forming a company, ensuring that everything runs on grounds of legality.
The more complicated sense of business lawyers is their tasks when it comes to employment issues and your company’s compliance with taxes. There are also lawyers who prefer to work with small businesses and budding businesses, while there are ones who prefer to work with the big boys—the large corporations.
Labor Law
Labor lawyers or employment lawyers do as they’re called—they handle legal matters pertaining to employment. They work with businesses to ensure that they are compliant with existing labor laws that are state- and federal-mandated.
They might sound similar to corporate lawyers in the sense that they handle employment matters, but they focus primarily on that. Whereas, corporate lawyers also focus on tax compliance.
It’s important to note that both practices can be litigators or transaction lawyers. Litigation lawyers handle lawsuits and transaction lawyers handle business negotiation deals and documentation.
Intellectual Property Law
Intellectual property or IP lawyers deal with the protection of an individual or group’s intellectual property rights. IP is intangible and can be copyrighted, trademarked, and patented. IP lawyers may choose to focus on the two former issues while some opt for specializing in the latter.
The patent area of IP law requires additional licensing rather than just a law degree. Additionally, it requires a technical background in engineering, chemistry, life sciences, or software development. IP lawyers specializing in engineering may only offer services to groups or individuals in engineering when it comes to legal matters concerning patents.
Like the first two areas of law practice we talked about, IP law can have litigation and transaction lawyers who handle lawsuits and documentation.
Family Law
What a family lawyer does should be clear as day—they handle direct family matters that need legal intervention. They can handle legal matters in prenuptial agreements, divorce, family planning, custody battles, and other matters that are respective to families.
There are more lawyers who focus on divorce cases while the rest provide legal services to the other areas of family law.
Personal Injury Law
Personal injury lawyers or PI lawyers deal with legal matters concerning injuries of any kind. They are the lawyers consulted by people who get involved in, for example, vehicular accidents that inflicted injury, when a doctor makes a misdiagnosis, a product gave you an injury, or when you sustain an injury in your workplace.
PI lawyers help you get settlements from the party you are suing for their negligence that led to your injury. Most of the time, they work alongside insurance firms.
Now that you know the most common law practices used in the real world, it’s time for you to look into that law school or consult that lawyer to help you with legal matters. With the right information about the different practices of law, you’d be wasting less time looking for the right lawyer with the right specialization to provide legal services for you.
