Grass-roots legal service workers in judicial administrative departments are essentially different from lawyers in China's Lawyers Law. Members of the public are advised to check their professional qualification certificates when hiring lawyers. Those who do not have a lawyer's qualification certificate are likely to be legal workers or other non-lawyers.
(1) The difference in name: the lawyer's practice institution is called "a law firm", and the external practice is collectively called a lawyer, and the lawyer holds a lawyer's practice certificate. The practice organization of grassroots legal service workers is called "a legal service office", and the external practice is collectively referred to as legal service workers. The practitioners hold the practice certificate of legal service workers.
(2) Business differences: lawyers can engage in criminal litigation business, and legal service workers are not allowed to engage in this business.
(3) Legal workers are not lawyers and cannot handle cases across provinces.
(4) At present, lawyers are not allowed to appear in court to participate in litigation activities in developed places such as Guangdong, Shanghai and Beijing.
(5) Lawyers are required to have a bachelor's degree in law. The requirements for judges and prosecutors are the same. They must pass the national judicial examination, and the passing rate of judicial examination is very low, and they must have a bachelor's degree or above.
Compared with lawyers, grass-roots legal workers are of low quality, unable to meet the high-quality requirements of society for legal talents, and unable to be competent for the legal profession with extremely high professionalism, extremely complex technical requirements and extremely high policy requirements.
According to the departmental regulations of the Ministry of Justice of China, the conditions for becoming a legal worker are:
1, with high school education;
2. Master basic legal knowledge.
Legal workers can only obtain certificates through examinations or assessments organized by local judicial organs, and the passing rate is over 99%, which is far from meeting the requirements of becoming lawyers as stipulated in the Lawyers Law. Such conditions are no longer competent for increasingly complex and highly technical legal work.