What’s the Difference? Attorney or Lawyer?
When you go around searching for legal assistance do your search for ‘lawyer’ or ‘attorney’? I tested this to see if there was a preference. I would think that people would search ‘lawyer’ more often than attorney. I don’t know why I would assume that, seems to be easier to say, we see it more in the media, and so on….. I checked it out in a quick test on Google Trends and found that, simply in terms of trending words, ‘attorney’ is searched far more than ‘lawyer’.
Partially this has to do with the difference between the two. There is a subtle one (note, I was testing only US trends). Typically an Attorney is somebody legally empowered to represent another person, or act on their behalf in court. A Lawyer is somebody who can give legal advice and has been trained in the law. In the US the terms are generally synonomyous, however, our test shows maybe they aren’t since one trends far higher (and searches for attorney are more as well).
In Canada, the titles do have a bit more nuance. You typically don’t hear about attorneys unless you’re giving the ‘power of attorney’. Lawyers are referred to anybody who has only refers to individuals who have been called to the bar.