Corporate Lawyers in Emerging Markets

Abstract

The growth of corporate law firms in emerging markets is mainly followed by practitioner journals reporting new offices and mergers, the openness of markets to non-national lawyers, and various rankings of local and transnational law firms. There is a small but growing academic literature that, for the most part, relies on US theoretical models, asking whether the corporate law firms are converging toward a global standard or what form of global/local hybrid is taking root. This literature fits well with the practical concerns about the specific spread of corporate lawyers. A complementary approach looks more into the global processes that produce the expectation that corporate lawyers will evolve into some modern model resembling the US corporate lawyer. For this more general line of research the position of corporate lawyers in relation to the state becomes more important, as do the hierarchical and imperial relationships that are manifested in different roles and statuses for those from the core and those from the periphery.

Professional service firms as agents of economic globalization: A political perspective

“…In pursuing this line of inquiry, attention is also required on the role of GPSFs emerging outside Anglo-America and the West more broadly in 'rising powers' such as China and India. Only very recently have GPSFs begun to grow in these economies and, to date, they have had limited influence on the institutions of economic globalization (Garth, 2016). However, in a context of increasing polycentrism in the world economy, one may expect a more geographically complicated process of GPSF-driven economic globalization.…”

“…Source: based on Fleming and Spicer (2014) and authors' literature review Barrett et al, 2005;Boussebaa et al, 2012Cooper et al, 1998 McKenna, 2006;Raghavan, 2013Hopper et al, 2017Morgan, 2008;Suddaby et al, 2007;Wilkins and Papa, 2013 Systemic Domination Resistance to systems overcome in jurisdictions around the world Systems presented as readymade, efficient solutions to governance challenges that should be replicated Suddaby et al, 2007;Hopper et al, 2017Garth, 2016McKenna, 2006;Raghavan, 2013Arnold, 2012Greenwood et al, 2002;Flood, 2011;Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005;Morgan, 2006Slaughter, 2013Flood, 2007;McDonald, 2014 Subjectification Training and identify regulation in GPSFs…”

Just Like Global Firms: Unintended Gender Parity and Speculative Isomorphism in India's Elite Professions

“…In analyzing this unlikely empirical case, this article engages with a set of interrelated conversations about global organizations and institutional emergence. First, this study adds to the literature in recent decades that has increasingly focused on professional organizations and legal institutions as a way to make sense of the layered relationship between the global and the local (Halliday and Shaffer ; Faulconbridge and Muzio , ; Dezalay and Garth ; Garth ; Klug and Merry ; Liu ; Liu and Halliday ; Muzio and Faulconbrdige ; Plickert and Hagan ). As recent comparative research reveals, India's market liberalization offers an especially useful landscape to investigate many of these questions (Dezalay and Garth ; Krishnan ; Wilkins et al ).…”

Legal Professionals and Development Strategies: Corporate Lawyers and the Construction of the Telecoms Sector in Brazil (1980s–2010s)

“…Corporate lawyers in emerging economies like Brazil, India, and China have recently attracted scholarly attention (Papa and Wilkins 2011; Dezalay 2015; Klaaren 2015; Garth 2016; Liu, Trubek, and Wilkins 2016; Wilkins, Khanna, and Trubek 2017, Cunha et al forthcoming), adding a new chapter to a longer history of investigations about transformations in institutional forms and models of law practice in the Global South 1 . Most of these groundbreaking studies stress the independent effects of changing economic structures on the social organization of lawyering.…”