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 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, 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 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 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, 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:

Notable examples

The country lawyer's image – and mythology – has become that of advocate and protector of the common man. Notable American examples include:
Notable Canadian examples include:
The "simple country lawyer" has become a recognizable archetype in the media. In common depictions, the lawyer may speak with a slightly exaggerated rural or US southern accent and is always ready to admit – usually as part of a charming speech – that he is not as well-educated as his opponent, the big city attorney. His dress is simple and appropriate, never flashy – usually he wears a white linen suit. He is courteous, modest, and polite, and sometimes re-words difficult testimony in a way that the "plain folks" of the jury will understand. This behavior can have the dual effect of endearing himself to his peers and distancing overly intellectual witnesses called by the opposition. Despite these characteristics, however, the "simple country lawyer" is almost always a shrewd litigator who knows the law very well.
Examples may be found in Anatomy of a Murder, My Cousin Vinny, A Time to Kill, Matlock, and Futurama. The character of District Attorney Jim Garrison uses elements of the simple country lawyer in the courtroom in JFK. Charles Laughton played a variation on the character—though it was that of a US Senator—in the film Advise and Consent.