Real lawyer here. In the olden days, or in England (same thing?), there were two types of lawyers. They were called "barristers" and "soliciters." Today, just to make this extra-special complicated (and because England is dangerously close to France), we started calling barristers "litigators." Television pretends that litigators are the ONLY type of lawyer, since they do all that fun courtroom drama: Litigators are the lawyers who stand up in court and argue with the judge (kind of like a soccer referree) and the jury (kind of like classmates who have the power to sentence you to death -- which is why you should be happy there's a soccer referree there to make sure they follow the rules). When most people think of lawyers, they're thinking of litigators. But litigators -- the lawyers who stand up in court -- don't even make up HALF of the lawyers out there.

So what do the OTHER lawyers do, the ones we used to call "solicitors"?

When your Mommy and Daddy die, possibly (but hopefully not!) painfully and tragically, all of their property -- their home and car, your bed and XBox, and all of their money, will have to go somewhere. Your Mommy and Daddy are smart, so they made a "will" with the help of a different kind of lawyer, one you never see on TV: a lawyer who never planned on seeing the inside of a courtroom, but instead became an expert on writing wills VERY carefully, so that your bratty brothers and sisters can't use their OWN lawyers to steal what your parents wanted you to have for yourself.

Whenever big companies meet each other and want to work together, they have a problem. Big companies are COMPLICATED. They have lots of people, lots of rules, and lots of laws they need to follow! So, they hire ARMIES of lawyers -- "corporate" lawyers -- to figure out all the terribly boring details, and write up all the terribly boring pieces of paper that make sure these complicated companies can work together without getting into trouble. These lawyers rarely go to court either, though they are among the most common lawyers in the "BigLaw" firms.

When a company runs out of money -- and that happens a lot now-a-days -- they need a different kind of lawyer: a "bankruptcy" lawyer. Long ago, smart (?) people decided that it was best to give companies a "get out of jail" card when they ran out of money, instead of forcing them to shut down and fire all their workers (many of them Mommies and Daddies themselves!). If a company owes five apples, but only has three, you need bankruptcy lawyers to figure out who gets the three apples, and who gets nothing. (Then, the people who get nothing call in the litigators to fight over that third apple in front of a judge---today, bankruptcy lawyers and litigators very often work hand-in-hand.)

Money is also very complicated, and lawyers are good at two things: making things less complicated, and making things MORE complicated. Both are useful, depending on what side you're on. If you don't have any apples, you'll want some lawyers to help you figure out how to make it less complicated to grow your own. But if you already own all the apples in your town, you'll want to hire lawyers who will make it MORE complicated for others to grow apples for themselves. We call these lawyers "finance" lawyers (they play on both sides).

The government needs money, too, or Afghanistan would invade us with camels and poppy seeds. They get this money from "taxes." Taxes are a very specific price everyone needs to pay, unless you have a very good team of "tax" lawyers, who are experts on how taxes work. Good tax lawyers can help big companies save one dollar for every single person on the entire planet, every year, without ever going to court. This is... not always a good thing.

Money isn't the only complicated thing, of course. The law itself -- believe it or not -- can be VERY complicated. If you want to send a big machine into space on a rocket, or build a railroad or a pipe that travels through many countries, you need to get permission from the people in charge. Lawyers help with that, and we call these lawyers "transportation and space" lawyers, which is pretty much the coolest name for a lawyer ever.

I am a lawyer who does two things: I'm a litigator, so I go to court and get to argue, but I'm also an "intellectual property" lawyer. IP lawyers work with programmers, engineers, inventors, authors, writers, artists and other creators of IDEAS. Ideas are very valuable, perhaps the most valuable resource we have, so we obviously want to encourage people to have ideas, and to share them with others. We also know that MONEY is a very good way to do this, and let's be honest with ourselves and admit that the people who come up with the good ideas should be first in line to get paid for them. IP lawyers do what they can to make sure that these people are rewarded for their inventions and ideas.

There is a problem here, though: Ideas are not like apples. If I take your apple, then you have one less apple. But, if I copy your idea, it's not like I've taken it from you and made you forget it. Unfortunately, many intellectual property lawyers like to pretend that ideas ARE like apples. They play make-believe, pretending that I can "steal" a thought right out of your head, robbing you of it forever! These lawyers are what I like to call, "wrong." Now, it IS important to make sure that real creators ARE rewarded for the things they create, or else we would have less creators. (Would YOU spend hours on a class project if you knew everyone else would copy your work before school in the morning?) If you invent a brand new rocket engine in your backyard, it would be TERRIBLE if your nosy neighbour took some pictures and sold them to someone else's rocket company! But, at the same time, it's wrong to pretend that taking pictures is the same as actually stealing your rocket. So, intellectual property lawyers have to be very careful, and make sure that we're protecting and encouraging inventors and innovators WITHOUT pretending that "taking a picture" is the same thing as "stealing."

Intellectual property lawyers come in three flavors. "Patent" lawyers protect inventions; they're the ones you want if you're a programmer or an engineer, as they'll secure your claim to your invention, and make sure you're compensated for it. "Copyright" lawyers protect the "expression" of your ideas -- you can't copyright an idea itself (this is why a billion movies about vampires are made every summer), but you can protect your personal EXPRESSION of that idea (which is why there is only one "Twilight" vampire movie, only one "Let The Right One In" vampire movie, and only one "30 Days Of Night" vampire movie, which was the best of the three, unless you count the Swedish version of the second... but I digress). The third type of intellectual property lawyer is a "trademark" lawyer, who protects the logos and identities of companies. Trademark lawyers protect McDonald's' golden arches, Microsoft's Windows flag logo, Apple's bitten-apple logo, and so on. Without Trademark lawyers, you'd have a hundred M"A"cDonald's wannabes confusing everybody with golden arches on every street corner.

In short, for every lawyer you hear about or see in court, there are a dozen lawyers behind the scenes doing both good and bad, but (usually) following the rules. And a great deal work very closely with engineers, programmers and other valuable contributors to society, protecting not so much their ideas, but at least one very important reason for them to bring those ideas into the light of day: We make sure they get the money they deserve. We swear an oath to do it as zealously as we can, because we know the lawyers on the other side swore the same oath. This is called the "adversarial system," which forces both sides to fight each other. Why do you want that? Because if both sides are zealously fighting for their clients, then everyone knows what everyone is doing, and why. Everybody's motives are known, which makes it easier for the judge to sift through the spin and (hopefully) figure out the truth! (The alternative is mediation, which requires trust -- and, since we all live in the real world, trust is ... impractical when you're fighting someone with conflicting interests, to say the least.)