Calling all lawyers! List of specific fields for Law

[apoc527]

Yuck, I just went and actually read the skill description. That makes a general practictioner a near impossibility on any kind of reasonable point budget, yet solo practitioners are very common.

For my state, when I took the bar, I basically had 1 point in every single Law speciality relating to Washington state (plus federal Indian Law). That's the required knowledge to pass the bar, almost by definition.

Most of that knowledge is now gone, although I could easily find out what I needed to know about almost anything.

Actually being a lawyer is as much about Diplomacy, Writing, and Fast-Talk (with Detect Lies, Body Language, and other such social skills as second tier requirements) as it is about points in Law skills. Research is probably the most important skill, however, as it is what allows you to actually answer legal questions. I might require a Law specialization for Research if one doesn't exist, but one thing I would most DEFINITELY NOT do is make research dependent on individual law subspecialties. The law subspecialties, as numerous or not as you want to make them, are really only what a lawyer is confident in answering on relatively short notice. (And by short notice, I mean less a few days...it would take me weeks to get conversant in complex environmental litigation, but I can answer a consumer protection question either on the fly or within a couple hours to days.)

Also, ALL practicing lawyers need a broad foundation in many areas of law, something that these mechanics don't really allow for. For example, any "litigator" is going to know contracts, procedure, constitutional law, and likely a fair amount of random substantive nuggets from probate to property. Almost all lawyers will know some constitutional law, as it's very foundational in the USA. This is why I'd rather see optional specialties in addition to a primary skill that should be specialized only by country or legal system.

It's somewhat important to know the difference between the English/American system (generally called "common law") and the "civil law" system of most non-British Commonwealth nations. Basically, in a civil law society, EVERYTHING is controlled by a drafted statute. If you want to know the answer to a legal question, you have to go out and hit the passed, codified laws to find the answer. In a common law system, there are almost always statutes, but there's also judicial precedent, which taken together (the body of case law, not statutes), constitutes the "common law" as it has evolved literally since medieval times (Americans owe many common legal concepts to early English kings).

Being a lawyer in the American/English system and being a lawyer in continental Europe are often quite different. The way trials are held is very different, the relationship between opposing counsel is very different, and the interactions between judges and lawyers is very different.

For modern Earth, I'd thus make the Law skill require one of these two specializations:

Law (<American or English>) and Law (<pick a civil law country>)

Then, I'd make all the substantive areas of law you want into additional, but optional subspecialties, probably all defaulting to the main Law above at -4. This main Law skill is very general. It covers answering basic questions about a broad swath of law, much of which will have been learned in law school or while studying for a bar exam. If pitted against a subspecialty, there should probably be an additional -2 to -4 penalty applied (or a bonus applied to the specialist).

Thus, an American corporate litigator is going to have Law (American), Law (American/Corporate), Law (American/Contract), Fast-Talk, Diplomacy, Writing, Research, and, if a trial lawyer, probably Acting and possibly Performance (I'm not kidding).

Wow, that got longer than I wanted.

EDIT: I'd probably require a civil vs. criminal split, at least for American law. And this "civil" means "not criminal"--confusing, I know, rather than referring to "civil law" as in European statutory schemes. Man, lawyers are annoying. ;-)