Abstract
Lawyers have been handling purely domestic legal matters as sole practitioners in many countries around the world. However, in recent years, as commercial transactions have spanned international borders and have increased in size, the legal work done by lawyers has also become global in nature, with practices expanding to cover the laws of several countries at once. As a result, law firms have adapted in order to accommodate such changes. Several firms with their origins in America and Great Britain have established offices worldwide, and in doing so they have become truly global law firms, with so many lawyers scattered across so many different offices in different countries that it is no longer appropriate to call such firms “American” or “British.”
However, when legal work is conducted globally, lawyers may encounter potential conflicts in the ethical rules of the country in which they work in comparison to norms of their home countries. Solving such a deontological problem will be difficult.
As legal work is increasingly globalized, disparities between solo practitioners and the lawyers working for large, international law firms in terms of skills, income, etc. have become more stark than they were before. However, because all lawyers should share a common set of core values, such as a duty to protect confidentiality and a duty to avoid conflicts of interests, efforts should be made to try to keep the legal profession unified in relation to its core values.
