Cross-Border Legal Work

Posted By: Norka M. Schell 
October 15, 2010

I have observed that law practice is being reinvented at an ever-accelerating speed the world over. " Legal services are being routinized, commoditized, outsourced, disaggregated, reassembled, computerized, and unbundled-among associates, law firm partners, solo practitioners, contract lawyers, paralegals, law consultants, temporary law workers, websites, and online share platforms...

The field of the legal profession has been benefitting from a proliferation of research by scholars seeking to understand the many changing dimensions of the legal profession. Researchers have been drawing on a broad range of social science disciplines, methodological approaches, and multilingual proficiencies to investigate legal practice(s) in a wide variety of geographic settings...

There is a growing body of literature on what lawyers actually do and the ways in which legal services are delivered. Robert Rosen has argued that  "we're all consultants now" as clients motive lawyers to alter their organizational strategies.(1)"

"The legal profession is now being impacted by the WTO and GATS regulations. Lawyers and other members of the legal profession are not  immune from the forces of modernization and globalization.  Yet to date limited attention has been paid to the peculiarities of the global law firms and the foreign consultants despite the fact that the effective organizations of global law firms and the foreign lawyer are essential to deal with regulatory challenges and to allow transactional lawyering, the opening up of cross-border business opportunities and ultimately the diffusion of Anglo-America styles of legal service.(2)"

There are a number of countries including Japan, Brazil, France, Belgium, Israel, England, Canada, Federal Republic of Germany, and United States which permit foreign consultant to engage in a limited form of practice of law in these countries.

In May 2007, the American Bar Association (ABA) published "Eye on Ethics" article addressing the Formal Opinion 01-423 Forming Partnerships With Foreign Lawyers. The headline opinion states:   " It is permissible under the Model Rules for U.S. lawyers to form partnerships or other entities to practice law in which foreign lawyers are partners or owners, as long as the foreign lawyers are members of a recognized legal profession in a foreign jurisdiction and the arrangement is in compliance with the law of jurisdictions where the firm practices..."(3) 

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(1)Tanina Rostain and John Flood 
(2) Jonathan Beaverstock, Daniel Muzio, Peter J. Taylor, James Faulconbridge
(3)htt://www.abanet.org/media/vouraba/200705/article11.html last visited 10/10/2008