Country lawyer

In the United States, the term country lawyer or county-seat lawyer may be applied to identify an attorney living and practicing primarily in a rural area or town, or an attorney pursuing a legal practice that displays certain (potentially idealized) hallmarks of rural or small-town legal practice. In such areas, the county seat is likely to be an important center of government and home to the county courthouse, the forum for local criminal trials and civil litigation. The legal community may be small and close-knit (at the extreme, with only a few attorneys, all of whom know each other, and all of whom may be personally known to the community), and each individual attorney may handle a wide variety of legal matters as local needs dictate. Historically, such an attorney may have been more likely to have joined the bar by reading law rather than attending school, and in modern times may have (or may be assumed to have) graduated from a lower tier legal program.

Consequently, the term carries with it certain connotations – both pejorative and complimentary – regarding the attorney's education, economic status, and even moral stature. The term may be applied to one's self, where it may indicate self-deprecation or humility. The term may also be used to describe a person who at one time practiced law in a humble setting, and later went on to do other things but (presumably) remained influenced by the country lawyer experience in later life and work.

In contrast, a city lawyer or big city lawyer would work in an urban area, one of many thousands of other attorneys specializing in a single practice area, possibly the graduate of an expensive and prestigious law school and the member of a law firm, potentially responsible to corporate clients whom she has never met in person, and, like most urban denizens, not personally acquainted with most of the other people living nearby. This term, too (especially "big city lawyer"), may carry pejorative connotations.

According to Francis Lyman Windolph in his 1938 book The Country Lawyer, the term turns more on the general nature of the attorney's practice than on the locality in which he practices:

Robert H. Jackson offered his own description in his 1950 essay "The County-Seat Lawyer", focused both on the attorney's education and social values:

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