There are the following differences between them:
1. Law firm is a social intermediary organization that can provide legal services to the society in an all-round way. The staff in a law firm are the only people in the society who can provide legal services as lawyers after passing the rigorous examination, the national unified judicial examination, practicing in the law firm for one year and obtaining the qualification of lawyers. The staff of the legal service office have no lawyer qualification, so they can only do some consulting, write documents and represent a small number of civil cases. It is very important that legal services cannot represent and defend criminal cases.
2. Law firms are lawyers' practice institutions, while legal service offices can only carry out general legal service activities, which are equivalent to citizens' agencies in nature and do not enjoy the rights given to law firms and lawyers by law;
3. The employees of law firms are all qualified as lawyers except paralegals and clerical workers, while the employees of legal service offices can be lawyers or ordinary citizens, but they are generally ordinary citizens.
Article 28 of the Lawyers Law of People's Republic of China (PRC), lawyers may engage in the following businesses:
(a) to accept the entrustment of natural persons, legal persons or other organizations as legal advisers;
(two) to accept the entrustment of the parties in civil cases and administrative cases, to act as agents and to participate in litigation;
(3) Accepting the entrustment of criminal suspects and defendants in criminal cases or legal aid agencies to act as defenders according to law, accepting the entrustment of private prosecutors in private prosecution cases, victims in public prosecution cases or their close relatives to participate in litigation as agents;
(four) to accept the entrustment and represent the complaints of various litigation cases;
(five) to accept the entrustment and participate in mediation and arbitration activities;
(6) Accepting entrustment to provide non-litigation legal services;
(seven) to answer questions about the law and write litigation documents and other documents related to legal affairs.