アメリカのビジネスローの変容と再変容：1980年から現在まで

抄録

This article provides a comparative perspective of how business lawyers have come to represent a critical segment of the legal services industry within the United States. While lawyers with U.S. corporate clients have long played the role of “counselor” and “planner,” several regulatory and legal developments during the 1970s and 1980s resulted in a marked demand for strategic legal advice and deal-making services among U.S. businesses. At the same time, globalization provided U.S. businesses with new opportunities to pursue overseas transactions, in the process allowing U.S. lawyers to export a distinctly American model of legal counsel. Both trends helped make transactional services an increasingly important―and lucrative―domain for U.S. lawyers, prompting the emergence of both global, transaction-oriented “megafirms” and bourgeoning in-house legal departments. Evaluation of the U.S. legal services market also reveals, however, that the same forces that gave rise to its current shape have recently begun to undermine it. As cost-conscious in-house lawyers seek to leverage globalization and technology to reduce expenditures on outside legal counsel, U.S. business lawyers have had to compete all the more intensely for those areas of business law that have remained relatively immune from these pressures, in particular those focusing on capital markets and M&A. The result, as reflected in a recent wave of U.S. law firm mergers and liquidations, has been considerable dislocation within the U.S. legal services industry as firms choose (and have chosen for them) whether they can compete within these more lucrative areas of business law. This process of continual transformation of the U.S. legal services industry thus complicates attempts to discern its ultimate shape, posing significant challenges for U.S. law firms, U.S. lawyers and U.S. legal education more generally.