Lawyer. A lawyer or attorney is a person who practices law, as an advocate, attorney, attorney at law, barrister, barrister-at-law, bar-at-law, canonist, canon lawyer, civil law notary, counsel, counselor, counsellor, solicitor, legal executive, or public servant preparing, interpreting and applying law, but not as a paralegal or charter executive secretary. Working as a lawyer involves the practical application of abstract legal theories and knowledge to solve specific individualized problems, or to advance the interests of those who hire lawyers to perform legal services. The role of the lawyer varies greatly across different legal jurisdictions. In practice, legal jurisdictions exercise their right to determine who is recognized as being a lawyer. As a result, the meaning of the term lawyer may vary from place to place. Some jurisdictions have two types of lawyers, barrister and solicitors, whilst others fuse the two. A barrister is a lawyer who specializes in higher court appearances. A solicitor is a lawyer who is trained to prepare cases and give advice on legal subjects and can represent people in lower courts. Both barristers and solicitors have gone through law school, completed the requisite practical training. However, in jurisdictions where there is a split-profession, only barristers are admitted as members of their respective bar association. In Australia, the word lawyer can be used to refer to both barristers and solicitors, and whoever is admitted as a lawyer of the Supreme Court of a state or territory. In Canada, the word lawyer only refers to individuals who have been called to the bar or, in Quebec, have qualified as civil law notaries. Common law lawyers in Canada are formally and properly called barristers and solicitors, but should not be referred to as attorneys, since that term has a different meaning in Canadian usage, being a person appointed under a power of attorney. However, in Quebec, civil law advocates often call themselves attorney and sometimes barrister and solicitor in English, and all lawyers in Quebec, or lawyers in the rest of Canada when practicing in French, are addressed with the honorific title, Me. or Maetre. In England and Wales, lawyer is used to refer to persons who provide reserved and unreserved legal activities and includes practitioners such as barristers, attorneys, solicitors, registered foreign lawyers, patent attorneys, trade mark attorneys, licensed conveyancers, public notaries, commissioners for oaths, immigration advisers and claims management services. The Legal Services Act 2007 defines the legal activities that may only be performed by a person who is entitled to do so pursuant to the Act. 'Lawyer' is not a protected title. In Pakistan, the term Advocate is used instead of lawyer in The Legal Practitioners and Bar Councils Act, 1973. In India, the term lawyer is often commonly used, but the official term is advocate as prescribed under the Advocates Act, 1961. In Scotland, the word lawyer refers to a more specific group of legally trained people. It specifically includes advocates and solicitors. In a generic sense, it may also include judges and law-trained support staff. In the United States, the term generally refers to attorneys who may practice law. It is never used to refer to patent agents or paralegals. In fact, there are statutory and regulatory restrictions on non-lawyers like paralegals practicing law. Other nations tend to have comparable terms for the analogous concept. In most countries, particularly civil law countries, there has been a tradition of giving many legal tasks to a variety of civil law notaries, clerks, and scrivener. These countries do not have lawyers in the American sense, insofar as that term refers to a single type of general-purpose legal services provider; rather, their legal professions consist of a large number of different kinds of law-trained persons, known as jurists, some of whom are advocates who are licensed to practice in the courts. It is difficult to formulate accurate generalizations that cover all the countries with multiple legal professions, because each country has traditionally had its own peculiar method of dividing up legal work among all its different types of legal professionals. Notably, England, the mother of the common law jurisdictions, emerged from the Middle Ages with similar complexity in its legal professions, but then evolved by the 19th century to a single division between barristers and solicitors.