Educating Lawyers for the Global Economy: National Challenges

How should law schools and faculties participate in preparing their students to work in a global economy? This presents a complicated question for several reasons. First, the nature of law itself challenges the notion of educating lawyers to work in a global context. There is no single “global law” to teach, despite evidence of convergence in certain areas. And we surely cannot teach the law of each nation; there are too many and too many differences among them. We probably cannot even accurately anticipate which national legal regimes will assume importance in the career of any particular student. * Visiting Professor of Law, Executive Director, Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, Georgetown University Law Center. A second complication arises because legal education itself plays different roles in different societies. In thinking about how legal education might best prepare students to work in a global environment, we need to anticipate the ways in which globalization will intersect with their work, which in turn requires knowledge of the roles our graduates assume. Legal education, however, produces quite different opportunities for graduates depending upon where the education occurs. In the US, nearly all graduates become qualified as lawyers and approximately three-quarters of all lawyers work in private practice settings. This common experience informs much of our thinking about how globalization will matter in lawyers’ careers because we can focus on the private practice context. It allows us to consider categories of clients and issues likely to raise globalization’s relevance and to aim our efforts to educate in those directions. In contrast, in Korea, at least until recently, where law was taught as an undergraduate course of study and most law students realistically expect to pass the bar examination, the role of law graduates is much less uniform and determined. This calls for a different approach to thinking about how globalization might shape the curriculum in school and assume importance in the work of law graduates. It would not make as much sense in Korea to focus on the nature of global clients if too few graduates worked in representative capacities where clients were the focus of their activities. The variety of outcomes that students make of their legal education, then, complicates how globalization matters. A third challenge relates to national differences in the role of lawyers in society. In the US, lawyers assume a central role in terms of politics and governance, but this is not the norm worldwide. While these challenges complicate the question of how best to educate law students to participate in a global economy, they do not limit or undermine the significance of globalization. The influence of globalization reaches to the role of lawyers and legal education as well as to the nature of law itself, and instigates change at national and local levels on each front. In order to engage with the forces that exert globalization’s influence and become actors on the global stage, students must become globally literate. At the same time, the national foundation of law requires that lawyers be expert in a national legal regime and language, too. This dichotomy suggests that we interpret globalization through a national lens that considers the role of law, lawyers and legal education in the particular national context. For the US, the lessons of globalization can be drawn from the structural approaches to globalization of US-based law firms. These firms pursue their international practices by integrating lawyers educated and licensed in the firm’s home country (the US) and in the host jurisdictions in which the firm has offices. As a result, the success of the firm in its international practice depends upon the ability of its lawyers to develop strong and effective cross-national relationships. These cross-national relationships inform not just colleagues within a firm, but also relationships with local counsel and counterparts who may take adversarial roles. To be successful working in a global context, lawyers must develop a global legal literacy. This includes at least four elements: language, cultural fluency, an appreciation for the role of lawyers, and law itself. While courses in comparative, international and transnational law have proliferated in US law schools and certainly are useful background for international practice, they miss the mark in teaching global legal literacy, which requires expertise in developing and using relationships that cross borders. Even clinical programs and intern- and externships maintain the boundaries around American JD students, on the one hand, and international students (typically enrolled in LLM programs), on the other hand. But these boundaries are exactly the challenge: by integrating their American JD and international student populations, schools might structure opportunities for each group to learn from the other. With existing resources, then, US law schools could expose their domestic students to the challenges of communicating in a global context, offer them an opportunity to learn from peers whose first degree in law was earned in a different national legal system, and facilitate lessons involving variations in the role of lawyers in different countries. These lessons might be offered in any substantive law course in which American JD students and international LLM students must work together, and in which at least one part of their collaboration depends upon the knowledge of one being shared with the other. A negotiations course is the most common example of this sort of experiential learning environment, and it is the course that elicits the most positive comments from international LLMs (regardless of school), precisely because of the lessons learned about how their negotiating partners communicate and approach problem-solving. The meaning of global legal literacy varies across national contexts, but the need for law graduates to have it does not. Law graduates compete in an increasingly connected market for talent in which their competitors include graduates of business schools and other disciplines; the competition, that is, is over individuals and their abilities but also about law itself. The buyers in this market include law firms, businesses and governments, among others. To maintain a position of value in the global war for talent, law schools must prepare their graduates to capitalize on globalization and become fluent in “speaking international.”