Law is a vast field with almost every aspect of society having its own set of laws and legally established practices. Attorneys normally choose to specialise in a single major area of law, such as that of a patent infringement lawyer, or in a number of minor, often interconnected, legal areas. Seemingly small areas of law, which large numbers of lawyers will devote their whole career to, include diverse areas from intellectual property law to aviation law all the way to media and military law. In this review we will take a closer look at three major legal subfields: corporate law, employment law and antitrust law.
Corporate Law
Corporate lawyers play a vital role in representing corporations of all sizes across a number of key legal duties. Normally a corporate lawyer will solely represent one company on a full-time basis and will have to handle a range of legal tasks on their behalf. These tasks can include regular meetings with various members of the corporation’s management and board members, supplying legal advice on a range of company issues, contract negotiation, legal document preparation, ensuring legal compliance is met when new products are launched. Corporate law is known to be highly demanding and often requires fast turnaround of high quality legal work to meet the company’s standards and impending deadlines. Key advantages of being a corporate lawyer include very high salaries and the opportunity to grow and become indispensable to a company.
Employment Law
Lawyers who specialise in and operate within the field of employment law can find themselves involved in a wide range of different legal issues. Well-known examples of laws which fall under employment law and are dealt with on a day-to-day basis by legal lawyers include the minimum wage, employment terms, workplace discrimination laws, laws concerning trade unions and the right for workers to organise, as well as laws concerned with dismissing workers. It is a huge field and thus many lawyers choose to specialise on a particular area within it. Lawyers specialising in employment law may represent employees, companies or the government.
Antitrust Law
In the age of global corporations, multinationals and the Internet, and the need for governments to try to enforce competition law across borders, antitrust law has never been a more relevant legal field than it is now. Lawyers in this field often end up trying to determine if a corporation has colluded with other companies in the field to increase profits or engaged in anti-competitive practices. If antitrust law has been breached, then lawyers will also play a role in assessing the financial damage it has caused, which will influence the fine that should be paid. Famous cases in this subfield of law include Microsoft’s business practices and Google’s battle with the EU.
Law is an almost unimaginably large field and because of this lawyers tend to specialise in legal subfields. These subfields can differ dramatically in terms of the legal knowledge required to operate within the area and also in terms of salaries paid. Corporate law, employment law and antitrust law are three major areas of law which lawyers choose to specialise in.