Nicholas Scown <br/>In contrast, common law lawyers have traditionally regulated themselves through institutions where the influence of non-lawyers, if any, was weak and indirect (despite nominal state control). Such institutions have been traditionally dominated by private practitioners who opposed strong state control of the profession on the grounds that it would endanger the ability of lawyers to zealously and competently advocate their clients' causes in the adversarial system of justice. <br/> <br/>However, the concept of the self-regulating profession has been criticized as a sham which serves to legitimize the professional monopoly while protecting the profession from public scrutiny. Disciplinary mechanisms have been astonishingly ineffective, and penalties have been light or nonexistent <br/> <br/>Nicholas Scown : * In England and Wales, &quot;lawyer&quot; is used loosely to refer to a broad variety of law-trained persons. It includes practitioners such as barristers, solicitors, legal executives and licensed conveyancers; and people who are involved with the law but do not practise it on behalf of individual clients, such as judges, court clerks, and drafters of legislation. <br/>* In India, the term &quot;lawyer&quot; is often colloquially used, but the official term is &quot;advocate&quot; as prescribed under the Advocates Act, 1961. <br/>* In Scotland, the word &quot;lawyer&quot; refers to a more specific group of legally trained people. It specifically includes advocates and solicitors. In a generic sense, it may also include judges and law-trained support staff. <br/>* In the United States, the term generally refers to attorneys who may practice law; it is never used to refer to patent agents or paralegals. <br/>* Other nations tend to have comparable terms for the analogous concept. <br/> <br/>Nicholas Scown <br/>An important aspect of a lawyer's job is developing and managing relationships with clients (or the client's employees, if the lawyer works in-house for a government or corporation). The client-lawyer relationship often begins with an intake interview where the lawyer gets to know the