Welcome to Michigan Law Today -- A free resource guide to the many areas of Michigan law. The work lawyers do generally falls into two areas of legal practice: litigation and transactional work.

Litigation can be further divided into civil litigation and criminal litigation. Civil litigation involves filing a lawsuit in court. The plaintiff is the person who files the lawsuit and the defendant is the one who the lawsuit is filed against. Civil lawsuits range from breach of contract to custody battles to wrongful termination and to personal injury lawsuits, among many others.

Criminal litigation involves the state or local government, as the prosecutor, filing a criminal charge against the defendant for committing a criminal offense.

Transactional work, on the other hand, does not involve going to court. Rather you can think of it as the "paperwork" area of law. Transactional lawyers generally form corporations, handle estate planning, draft contracts and leases, etc. You could say that to a certain extent, transactional law is the precursor to litigation since a lot of business litigation, for example, involves interpretation and breaches of corporate policies, contracts, etc.

Learn about the many areas of Michigan law here. Start by clicking on an area of Michigan law to the left.