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Abstract: The increasingly international reach of law owes part of its momentum to individual lawyers and law firms that function as carriers of ideas, processes and policies. U.S. lawyers are important participants in this expanding influence of law, as they educate, train and deploy individuals educated and licensed in the U.S. and abroad. This article examines the ways in which law firms internationalize, and considers the regulatory environment governing crucial interactions between U.S. and foreign-educated lawyers. It builds upon prior work that investigated the impact on U.S. law firms of the development of an international market for legal services and the roles of foreign lawyers in the U.S. Regulation of the interaction between foreign and U.S. lawyers shapes the ways in which U.S. firms participate in the developing international market for legal services; it may well determine the placement and extent of that participation through U.S.-based activities. The article examines regulation of non-U.S. lawyers in state bar admission and foreign legal consultant rules, analyzes these rules and compares them to an ideal regulatory regime. It also reports on data illustrating the ways in which the regulatory status of foreign legal consultant is used by non-U.S. lawyers. The foreign legal consultant title has been adopted for use apart from the licensed status, which results in confusion. The article combines an empirical and theoretical approach, and proposes a new regulatory overlay for international law firms and lawyers.
International, legal profession, law firms, regulation, foreign legal consultant
Abstract: This article takes an empirical approach to the issue of how the U.S. legal services market is responding to globalization. It begins by considering the ways in which the domestic legal services market has internationalized by focusing on changes in legal education and examines the disconnection between U.S. legal education and practice opportunities in the U.S. The article proceeds to consider the ways in which U.S. law firms have become global organizations by offshoring their international identities, through the staffing of their non-U.S. offices with non-U.S. lawyers. Based on a database of more than 5,000 lawyers working in the offshore offices of 60 U.S.-based law firms, this article reveals this globalization strategy. Internationalization has been accomplished at local levels by most U.S. law firms. One consequence of this method of internationalization through offshoring is that the need for dual trained lawyers is minimal. While U.S. law schools attract increasing numbers of foreign lawyer students, U.S. law firms remain disinterested in hiring and training them. U.S. law firms have succeeded in going global by going local. As a result, the traditional power dynamics of most U.S. law firms, favoring domestic lawyers to the exclusion of those with foreign expertise and experience, has been preserved.
legal profession, globalization, offshore services
Abstract: This article contriubtes a new perspective to existing scholarship on internationalization of the legal profession by focusing on the increasing presence of foreign lawyers in U.S. law schools and law firms. It analyzes the interaction between foreign-educated lawyers and the legal profession in the U.S. based upon two sources of information: first, a series of interviews with foreign-educated lawyers and U.S. law firm hiring partners regarding experiences in law school and in firms, and second, a database comprised of biographical information for more than 300 foreign-educated lawyers who were working in New York during 1999 and 2000. The various roles occupied by foreign lawyers in U.S. law schools and law firms are considered, including serving as substitutes for U.S. J.D. graduates and as connections to foreign legal markets. Despite their rhetoric of internationalization, U.S. law firms remain essentially domestic institutions; they have rarely integrated foreign-educated lawyers into their structures in the U.S. However, in order to meet the growing competition from accounting and consulting firms as well as from foreign law firms, U.S. lawyers may need to reconsider their reliance upon this domestic mindset.
legal profession, internationalization, foreign lawyers, legal education
Abstract: This article examines offshore outsourcing of legal and law-related services as the newest twist in the international market for legal services. We consider the impact of offshore outsourcing on the profession generally and analyze the ethical issues raised by offshore outsourcing, both as it exists today and as the practice may develop in the future. The article begins by situating offshore outsourcing in the framework of relationships created in the context of delivery of legal services. This framework is used, in turn, to construct a structure of analysis for the ethical implications of offshore outsourcing. Lawyers who outsource to offshore providers must conduct an investigation to ensure that the referral is appropriate. We also consider the potential reputation and economic benefits and disadvantages to law firms and legal departments in outsourcing offshore. We find that offshore outsourcing creates new opportunities for non-U.S. lawyers without putting them on equal footing with lawyers trained and licensed in the U.S. Instead, as with many aspects of globalization, offshore outsourcing emphasizes the divisions already present in the legal profession.
outsourcing legal services, globalization, legal profession
Abstract: The article examines the international activities of various segments of the U.S. legal profession and analyzes the impact of these activities on the domestic market in legal services. It takes an empirical approach to the question of how international activities have shaped the profession by chronicling the foreign office activity of more than 70 of the largest U.S. firms. The data presented facilitates new insight into the ways in which U.S. lawyers participate in the international market in legal services. The article reveals that internationalization has resulted in the homogenization of the largest U.S. firms, as they increasingly compete for a limited group of clients and lawyers. Globalization has increased and facilitated competition between Wall Street firms and law firms originally based outside of New York. The non-New York firms have reshaped their identities to respond to internationalization and the resulting competition, which has affected their domestic identities as well.
legal profession, globalization
Abstract: This article reviews developments in transnational legal practice during 2006 and 2007, including international developments, U.S. developments and regional developments in Australia and Europe. The primary focus of the international developments section is the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). This article discusses GATS Track 1 Activities related to legal services, including the Legal Services Collective Requests and issues related to GATS Track 2 and the potential development of GATS disciplines. This section also surveys GATS-related initiatives of the American Bar Association and the International Bar Association and U.S. implementation of foreign lawyer multi-jurisdictional practice rules. In other areas, the international developments section addresses the development of a code of conduct for defense counsel practicing before the International Criminal Court and developments in the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). With respect to U.S. transnational legal practice developments, the article reviews U.S. bilateral free trade initiatives, lawyer discipline cooperation initiatives and significant litigation. The regional developments section documents the emergence in Australia of the first publicly-traded law firm and Australia's efforts to promote greater multijurisdictional practice for Australian lawyers in the U.S. This section also reviews various European developments, including European competition law initiatives, the Akzo Nobel case currently pending before the European Court of Justice, and developments related to the free movement of lawyers, codes of conduct, money laundering and lawyer education.
legal services, GATS, Akzo Nobel, ABA, legal education
Abstract: This article analyses the role of U.S. law schools in educating foreign lawyers and the increasingly competitive global market for graduate legal education. U.S. law schools have been at the forefront of this competition, but little has been reported about their graduate programs. This article presents original research on the programs and their students, drawn from interviews with directors of graduate programs at 35 U.S. law schools, information available on law school web sites about the programs, and interviews with graduates of U.S. graduate programs. Finally, the article considers the responses of U.S. law schools to new competition from foreign universities for the job of educating the world's lawyers.
legal education, globalization, legal profession
Abstract: This article reviews developments in transnational legal practice during 2008, including international developments, U.S. developments, and regional developments in Australia and Europe. The article begins by reviewing international legal services statistics and information about legal education developments. The next section focuses on legal services developments related to the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), including the status of the 2008 negotiations regarding GATS Track #1 (market access) and Track #2 (domestic disciplines). This section also introduces the International Bar Association’s September 2008 “market access-skills transfer” resolution and reviews the state implementation status of the ABA’s foreign lawyer multijurisdictional practice resolutions and state rules permitting foreign in-house counsel. The article highlights other international developments including the resolutions by the Conference of Chief Justices and the Council of the Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) regarding lawyer discipline cooperation, the European Court of Justice’s attorney-client privilege case called Akzo Nobel, the October 2008 adoption of the Risk-Based Guidance for Legal Professionals by the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the ongoing implementation of the 2007 U.K. Legal Services Act, including the adoption of rules that took effect in March 2009 that permit legal disciplinary practices by solicitors in England and Wales. The article also discusses a number of new developments, including the Legal Services Initiative of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), various ABA “summits,” the Conference of Chief Justices’ adoption of a resolution endorsing ABA MJP Recommendation #9 regarding temporary practice by foreign lawyers, and the issuance of a report on Global Professional Responsibility by an American Society of International Law task force. The article concludes with a review of some of the recent resources and conferences that had focused on the topic of legal outsourcing.
legal services, GATS, Akzo Nobel, ABA, legal education, FATF, CCBE, CCJ, international legal ethics, legal profession
Abstract: Whether working for global or local organizations, lawyers today are increasingly faced with the prospect of working with colleagues and competitors who are diverse in terms of nationality, education and training, and with clients whose problems may be as locally-focused as a Chicago zoning matter or as distant as the acquisition of one non-U.S. company by another. The global forces shaping business and the practice of law are felt in legal education, too, and U.S. law schools occupy a leading role in educating domestic and non-U.S. students for practice in the transnational marketplace. In spite of this, however, the core educational experience at nearly all U.S. law schools remains distinctly domestic in terms of substantive focus. The first year curriculum generally emphasizes exclusively U.S. law, and even most "core" upper level courses are jurisdictionally limited to U.S. law. While this U.S.-centric approach may continue to be appropriate in terms of the substantive focus of the curriculum, it may not adequately prepare students to work across national boundaries, both as collaborators and competitors with lawyers and clients from diverse jurisdictions and disciplinary backgrounds. Certainly, a strong education in substantive U.S. law is a necessity, but it is insufficient. In addition, what we might term "global sensitivity" is crucial, as is the need to understand business and apply its lessons to legal practice. If law schools can educate students to be globally sensitive as well as provide training in basic business concepts, they will strengthen the competitiveness of U.S. law graduates in the global market for legal services as well as the enhance the value of U.S. legal education.
globalization, legal education, legal profession
Abstract: There is widespread agreement that law firms have embraced globalization, but what this means and why it matters are subjects still cloaked with uncertainty. Do law firms follow the models and processes of globalization characteristic of other businesses? Or are law firms forced to take a different approach because of the nature of law and its basis in a particular national system? In this article, we consider these questions as they apply to U.S. law firms, and offer a new lens to interpret the role of globalization in the activities of law firms and their lawyers. We use data relating to the overseas offices of 64 leading U.S.-based law firms - among the largest and most globally-oriented U.S. firms - to learn how the firms transform themselves into global organizations. Our investigation reveals that U.S. law firms take a glocal or hybrid approach to globalization.
globalization, law firms, legal education
Abstract: Scholarship on the U.S. legal profession has excluded international students who earn the popular one-year graduate degree offered by many U.S. law schools, the LL.M. This might have made sense when LL.M. programs were marginal in terms of size and the relationship of their graduates to the practicing bar. But today’s LL.M.s occupy a more substantial position in U.S. legal education because of sheer numbers, as well as their importance both to the global identities of their U.S. law schools and to their home country legal markets. At the same time, the global expansion of legal practice lends significance to international legal education and LL.M. programs as an aspect of such a movement. The absence of information about LL.M. graduates and the role of the LL.M. in their careers no longer makes sense. This paper begins to fill the information gap. It describes the results of a survey of LL.M. graduates of 11 U.S. law schools that provide insight into questions about the identities of LL.M.s and their motivations for studying in the United States. The survey is part of an ongoing research project investigating the LL.M. experience and its role in shaping the careers of LL.M. graduates. This paper examines the value of the LL.M. experience and credential and its relation to globalization of the profession.
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