legal-terms
What is the term for the contentious/non-contentious property of a lawyer?
<p>If I were to summarize a given lawyer based on their work, what would be the name of the property that describes whether their work is contentious or non-contentious?</p>

<p>For example, if Susan works in Commercial Litigation (a contentious practice) and also Corporate Commercial (a non-contentious practice), her summary would be:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Name</strong>: Susan</li>
<li><strong>Practice</strong>: Commercial Litigation, Corporate Commercial</li>
<li><strong>[X]</strong>: contentious <em>and</em> non-contentious</li>
</ul>

<p>What is the property name [X]?</p>

<p>As a further example, to provide a use-case: imagine a situation where a CEO might want search their employee database for all the lawyers who practice in non-contentious fields within their firm to assign them to a particular case. If we want to give the CEO a single search box (so they don't have to type a list of <em>every</em> possible non-contentious practice area), what would the name of that search box be?</p>

<p>One of the main divisions, as a practical matter, is between lawyers who have a "litigation" practice, lawyers who have a "transactional" practice, and lawyers who have a "general" practice which means that they do both litigation and transactional work. These would be forms of "practice type".</p>

<p>Litigation would be "contentious", while transactional work would be "non-contentious". You normally wouldn't separately identify contentious v. non-contentious in addition to a type of practice, it would be superfluous to do so. It sounds as if the contentious v. non-contentious distinction is just a British English distinction between litigation and transactional work, which would still just be called practice type and would be pretty much superfluous.</p>

<p>There actually are a few kinds of litigation which are predominantly non-contentious, such as adoption petitions, uncontested probates, name change applications, petitions to approve the formation of municipalities, and so on, but often these types of work would be done by someone who would describe their practice area as "adoption" or "probate" or "government law" or "family law" that would speak for themselves.</p>

<p>It wouldn't make any sense to have a field that allows someone with a "commercial litigation" practice to mark "non-contentious" or to allow someone who negotiated business deals to mark "contentious" in the common use of the term.</p>
