Definition
ADVICE carries two distinct legal meanings that operate in largely separate areas of practice.
1. Legal counsel or opinion. In the professional sense, advice is the guidance, opinion, or recommendation a lawyer gives to a client regarding rights, obligations, or the wisdom of a proposed course of action. This meaning underlies attorney-client privilege, legal malpractice liability, and the distinction between legal advice (reserved to licensed attorneys) and legal information (which anyone may provide).
2. Commercial notice. In mercantile and banking law, advice is a formal written notice — typically a letter — sent by one merchant, banker, or correspondent to another, informing the recipient of a transaction that concerns them: a shipment dispatched, a bill of exchange drawn, a draft issued. The advice identifies the date, amount, payee, and other particulars. A bill or draft presented "as per advice" signals to the drawee that a confirming letter has been sent; if no such letter has arrived, the drawee may properly withhold payment until the advice is received.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Wiktionary's primary entry treats "advice" as a noun meaning a recommendation or opinion offered for guidance — essentially the lay sense most readers would recognize.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 captures three senses: (1) an opinion recommended as worthy to be followed; (2) deliberate consideration or knowledge (marked as obsolete); and (3) information or intelligence, often in the plural — as in "late advices from France."
The gap that matters for legal research: The common meaning maps comfortably onto Meaning 1 above but entirely misses Meaning 2. A researcher encountering "advice" in 18th- or 19th-century commercial correspondence, banking records, or bills-of-exchange litigation should not default to the counseling sense. Webster's third sense — "intelligence or notice, commonly in the plural" — is the closest common-language bridge to the commercial meaning, but it faded from ordinary usage long before it disappeared from commercial law documents.
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Common Confusion
ADVICE vs. ADVISE. These are frequently conflated in legal documents and secondary sources, partly because both derive from the same root and partly because historical legal Latin (advisare, advisari) collapses the distinction. In modern English, advice is the noun; advise is the verb. The Latin phrase curia advisari vult (the court wishes to consider the matter) — abbreviated cur. adv. vult or C.A.V. — uses the verbal form but often appears in English summaries rendered as "the court took advice." Researchers working with law reports from the 17th through 19th centuries should watch for this Latin phrase as a signal that judgment was reserved, not that counsel was received.
ADVICE vs. LEGAL INFORMATION. In modern professional responsibility and unauthorized-practice-of-law contexts, a significant line runs between legal advice (applying law to a specific person's facts, restricted to licensed attorneys) and legal information (general statements of law, permissible for non-attorneys). Historical sources do not maintain this distinction; they use "advice" freely regardless of who gave it.
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Why It Matters in Research
The dual meaning creates real navigational hazards in the Law Mind corpus.
In commercial law sources — especially pre-20th-century treatises on bills of exchange, letters of credit, and banking — "advice" almost always means commercial notice, not legal counsel. Chitty on Bills, cited by both Burrill and Bouvier, uses "advice" almost exclusively in the commercial sense. Researchers approaching those sources expecting the professional-counsel meaning will misread the material.
In privilege and professional responsibility materials, "advice" means legal counsel, and the question of whether something constitutes "legal advice" as opposed to business guidance or mere information has significant consequences for privilege claims. The corpus distinction between these two meanings is rarely flagged by the sources themselves.
Anderson's Dictionary is the most careful of the shelf sources on this: it explicitly distinguishes the general sense ("counsel, opinion") from the commercial-document sense ("as per advice") and flags the relationship to Anderson's own ADVISE entry. Researchers who find the Anderson entry incomplete should follow that cross-reference.
The phrase "as per advice" on a bill of exchange is a term of art that appears in litigation records and banking documents from the 18th century onward. Its meaning — that the drawee is not authorized to pay until the confirming letter is received — has a specific legal consequence that neither Black's edition cleanly spells out.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The shelf sources converge on both meanings but weight them differently. Black's (both editions) leads with the professional/opinion sense and treats the commercial meaning as secondary. Bouvier and Burrill lead with or emphasize the commercial/mercantile meaning, which reflects their closer attention to commercial practice. Anderson occupies a middle position, giving a general definition first and then drilling into the commercial sense with unusual precision.
All sources draw on Chitty on Bills for the commercial meaning, suggesting a common reference point rather than independent analysis. None of the historical sources engage with the unauthorized-practice dimension of "legal advice" — that is a 20th-century development invisible to the shelf dictionaries.
Bouvier's inclusion of advisare and advisari under this entry is a useful signal: researchers working in early common-law records who encounter those Latin terms (or curia advisari vult in English reports) are in the procedural domain, not the commercial or professional-counsel domain.
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Jurisdictional Note
The commercial-notice meaning of advice is largely uniform across common-law jurisdictions because it derives from mercantile custom codified in bills-of-exchange law (the Bills of Exchange Act 1882 in England; Article 3 of the UCC in the United States). The professional-counsel meaning varies in application — particularly in unauthorized-practice-of-law rules — because each U.S. state defines the boundary between legal advice and legal information independently.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Legal Advice (for the privilege and professional responsibility dimensions); Commercial Paper (for the bills-of-exchange and banking context); Privilege (for attorney-client privilege and its advice-of-counsel defense applications).
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