Attorney in Europe

Definition of Attorney

(1) A person appointed by another to act in his place or represent him. See Power of Attorney. (2) Formerly persons admitted to practise in the superior Courts of common law : they represented suitors who did not appear 111 person. Since the (English) Judicature Act, 1873, they were entitled “Solicitors of the Supreme Court”.

Attorney is often used interchangeably with lawyer, but in a narrower sense it denotes a legal agent for a client in the transaction of business: Corporate attorneys negotiated the new contract.

“Attorney comes, by way of Middle English attourney, from Middle French atorné, a past participle [a word usually ending with -ed, -d, -en, as in billed] of atorner, meaning ‘to direct, appoint’. This derives from Old French a ‘to’ and torner ‘to turn (in the sense of ‘to turn to’)’. Thus, in its original use, an attorney was someone you turned to or someone you let handle your affairs for you. The earliest use in English is from the late thirteenth century, and it distinguishes the action of a person acting “in person” or “in his own person” from the work of someone acting for another “by attorney”. . . . As the body of special professional legal agents became recognized in English law, there developed, beginning in the fourteenth century, the specific use to mean ‘attorney-at-law (one licensed to practice law in the courts). . . . (The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991, pp. 28-29)

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See Also

Lawyer in the European Legal Encyclopedia
Counselor in the European Legal Encyclopedia
Counsel in the European Legal Encyclopedia
Barrister in the European Legal Encyclopedia
Solicitor in the European Legal Encyclopedia
Attorney in the European Legal Encyclopedia