single-word-requests
I want an English word for an attorney (lawyer)'s client, i.e. someone who employs a lawyer to defend them in court. Client might actually be just fine, but I am looking for a word more consistent with its counterpart.
By counterpart I mean its opposing position e.g. employer -> employee, caller->callee, etc. The word might be used like this (using the non-existent counterpart lawyer -> lawyee to illustrate):
She'd had a distinguished career as a lawyer, but now she was the
lawyee.
Prospect and prospective client are commonly used in sales, which sounds appropriate for your situation.
According to "Construction Grammar" (schema-based grammar), they are a type of constructional idiom [X's X]. Their concreteness level is almost abstract because they are not that lexically specified.
From the book "Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics: General papers" edited by Mike Darnell:
Another explanation from the book "The Reality of Linguistic Rules" By Susan D. Lima, Roberta Corrigan, Gregory K. Iverson:
They can also be a representation of formal (schematic) idiom.
From the article "Language and Cognition II Construction Grammar" by Prof. Holger Diessel:
They fall under "genitive compounds" (descriptive genitives) also. So it can be called an "idiomatic genitive compound" as well.
Here is another passage along with the description of "constructional idiom": (from the book "The Grammar of Words: An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology By Geert Booij"
Best Answer
Following the idea of counterparts, the appropriate pair is:
See this answer for initial reference. The following provides more detail, as I found that both terms are somewhat ambiguously defined in the standard online resources.
Litigant is defined by ODO as "A person involved in a lawsuit." Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster offer a similar definition. Now, I'd always thought of a litigant as strictly the plaintiff, in the sense that they are the one who litigates, but it seems my reliance on the suffix -ant to denote the agent of the action (e.g. propel/propellant, defend/defendant) was misplaced.
To dispel any doubt, this source makes it clear that litigant means "plaintiff, defendant, petitioner, respondent, cross-complainant, and cross-defendant, but not a witness or attorney" [my emphasis].
Litigator has two meanings according to Dictionary.com (but read on to see why this can't be trusted):
It cites the word origin as
Unhelpfully, it also notes that "litigator" can be confused with "litigant".
Two other sources are even less useful: ODO simply defines it as the noun derivative of "litigate", which means "Resort to legal action to settle a matter; be involved in a lawsuit", and similarly Merriam-Webster goes no further than naming it as the noun form, along with "litigation".
The Free Dictionary is equally unhelpful, defining litigator as "a person who litigates" but failing to specify whether the lawyer involved in the lawsuit is "litigating".
Thankfully, however, the same site has a "legal" tab. This definition, citing Burton's Legal Thesaurus, is quite explicit:
TL;DR: On the basis of all the above, I think I can confidently declare that a litigator is a lawyer, and the counterpart - the litigant - is their client.