On the basis of a hand-collected sample of 123 Chinese law firms, this article offers a comprehensive empirical examination into their globalization efforts. It finds that the majority of the firms have endeavoured to expand overseas than not. The most frequently used strategies are international offices and formal cross-border referral networks. While all law firms are enthusiastic to echo and tag along the government-led ‘Going Out’ initiatives so as to claim legitimacy for their activities, the firms with secondary or lower tier reputation tend to implement it on a more substantive level. Overall, Chinese law firms are still at the initial stage of their internationalization process, and there are considerable discrepancies between actual practices and the formal structures. This is most evident when many of the international offices are in fact associated or merged but subtly marketed as directly invested, thus illustrating that internationalization often carries symbolic value in the eyes of clients. This said, a closer look at the overseas offices with resident lawyers reveals that Chinese law firms are often also calculative entrepreneurs, who know where their competitiveness lies. They purposefully organize their offices to focus on trade route underpinned work, especially the niche market of the outbound Chinese SMEs. As such, pragmatism, entrepreneurship, and state power dynamically interact with each other in shaping the internationalization trajectories of Chinese law firms.

The legal profession is undergoing fundamental changes; and this is the case not just in established legal markets. Based on a state-of-the-art sketch, this paper identifies and analyzes the latest innovation initiatives and alternative business models in China's legal profession. It finds that, propelled by market demands and benefiting from technological advancements, the provision of legal services has become highly versatile today, giving rise to various alternative service providers, especially the rapidly rising online legal service portals. Because they are technically not law firms, the exclusivity requirements on lawyer ownership and legal service provision are not applicable to them. In the meantime, the competition for large corporate clients and lucrative business transactions is fierce and will continue to be so, not only within the club of big Chinese corporate law firms, but also between Chinese law firms and international law firms globally. In this course, some leading big corporate law firms in China are observed to have creatively incorporated key corporate features in running their business and compensating their partners, effectively deviating from the partnership + pure legal services regulation. Such market realities question the necessity and effect of the regulatory restrictions on law firm legal form and ownership structure, and call for an agenda for related research in the future.There are three types of baseball players: those who make it happen, those who watch it happen and those who wonder what happens. (Tommy Lasorda)