Hiring Teams,Firms, and Lawyers: Evidence of the Evolving Relationships in the Corporate Legal Market

How are relationships between corporate clients and law firms evolving? Drawing on interview and survey data from 166 chief legal officers of S&P 500 companies from 2006–2007, we find that—contrary to standard depictions of corporate client‐provider relationships—(1) large companies have relationships with ten to twenty preferred providers; (2) these relationships continue to be enduring; and (3) clients focus not only on law firm platforms and lead partners, but also on teams and departments within preferred providers, allocating work to these subunits at rival firms over time and following “star” lawyers, especially if they move as part of a team. The combination of long‐term relationships and subunit rivalry provides law firms with steady work flows and allows companies to keep cost pressure on firms while preserving relationship‐specific capital, quality assurance, and soft forms of legal capacity insurance. Our findings have implications for law firms, corporate departments, and law schools.     

Private Law Firms in the Public Interest: The Organizational and Institutional Determinants of Pro Bono Participation, 1994–2005

Despite longstanding concern that the commercialization of legal practice is antithetical to professionalism, corporate law firms have dramatically increased their pro bono participation over the past few decades. What explains this paradox? This article examines the organizational and institutional determinants of pro bono participation across an elite field of large law firms. I find that pro bono work is only partly rooted in internal organizational dynamics and that the institutional environment appears more important for explaining variation in pro bono participation. These findings indicate that large firms may be more drawn to pro bono work as a social process tied to professional status and legitimacy than to concrete, rational organizational goals. Moreover, these findings point to the importance of the interstitial space that these firms inhabit between the legal profession and corporate market as an especially important factor in facilitating, rather than dampening, pro bono participation.     

公司法结构性改革总体思路

在资源配置由市场起决定性作用的经济体制下,公司这种无论何种经济成分出资设立、最契合市场经济运行机制的商事主体必然会在国民经济中占据更加重要的地位.为此,有必要重新考虑公司法结构性改革的总体思路.在科斯法律经济学的视野下,改革方案的顶层设计应当立足于公司法在我国当前整个商事主体立法中的实际地位,认清商事主体经济分类和法律分类双轨制所带来的种种矛盾和弊病,围绕对各种经济成分实行同等待遇,促进国内统一市场形成,提高国际竞争能力的制度设计目标,尽可能吸收消化世界各国晚近公司法修改乃至整个商事主体立法全面整合的新经验新成果,形成和国际趋同的现代公司法和内外资统一、以法律分类中的责任形式及主体资格标准为依据的、以公司为主导的商事主体体系和商事主体法体系.     

The legal profession of China in a globalized world: innovations and new challenges

ABSTRACT

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.     

Global Banks as Global Sustainability Regulators?: The Equator Principles

Banks might now seem odd candidates for the role of global sustainability regulator. Nonetheless, in limited areas of their operation, where global banks kept risk on their balance sheets and were financially exposed to many types of risk often otherwise treated as “externalities,” banks began to enact policies to encourage what they construe as “sustainable” banking. A small number of these banks have started to extend these principles of responsible action more broadly, across many of their business lines, as conditions of lending to their corporate clients. To this extent, it is possible to talk about (some) global banks as global sustainability regulators. The “law of unintended consequences” as used in the legal literature almost always refers to the unintended negative consequences of a regulation or policy. In this article, however, we discuss a potentially positive unintended consequence of the deregulatory and privatization trend of the 1980s and 1990s that was fueled by neoliberal political commitments: some private banks have taken a leadership role in regulating development. Specifically, these banks are enacting policies that attempt to mitigate the potentially negative social and environmental consequences of infrastructure development in politically unstable or environmentally fragile landscapes. The vehicle for doing this is a voluntary agreement called the Equator Principles (EPs). The article describes and analyzes the EPs and reports the initial results from an interview‐based study of the various EPs stakeholders, including bankers, government officials, lawyers, consultants, and critics from nongovernmental organizations. We address—from the perspective of these stakeholders—such questions as why the participating banks decided to join the EPs, what effects, if any, the EPs are having on development practice, and whether the EPs will ultimately prove to be more than a public relations exercise.     

Globalization as Boundary‐Blurring: International and Local Law Firms in China's Corporate Law Market

The worldwide expansion of international law firms has generated regulatory battles and workplace conflicts in advanced market economies as well as developing countries. This article uses the case of China to explore the changing global–local relationship in the globalization of the legal profession and to understand the role of the government in constituting the corporate law market. The author argues that the globalization of the Chinese corporate law market is a process of boundary‐blurring and hybridization, by which local firms become structurally global‐looking and global firms receive localized expertise. Boundary‐blurring occurs in law firms' workplaces, in lawyers' career trajectories, and in state regulatory policies. It has produced a localized expertise that can be diffused conversely from local firms to global firms and has partially changed their relationship from collaboration to competition. Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult for the government to make or enforce any substantive policy to clarify the market boundary between these two types of law firms.     

Governing Globalization? The State,Law, and Structural Change in Corporate Governance

Current analysis of the 'globalization' of the activity of capitalist corporations tends to argue that the legal institutional frameworks of the nation state are of little importance in determining the governance of those corporations, and that the regulation of those corporations therefore is impossible. This view simply ignores the role that those frameworks do in fact play. In this paper, various styles of corporate governance are analysed in terms of the influence of the company law, financial market regulation, and employment law promulgated by nations or nation state groupings. Rather than the globalization of corporate governance reflecting the unimportance of the nation state, it reflects a change in the style of regulation.     

Performing Power: The Deal, Corporate Rule, and the Constitution of Global Legal Order

This article presents a stylized account of legal work involved in doing a corporate deal transnationally, drawing inspiration from the work of American legal realist, Robert Hale. In so doing, it seeks to show that legal institutions on which transnational corporate power depends are far more plastic, discordant, and irresolute than commonly recorded. By tethering global legal order to the decisive interiority of the transnational corporation, while taking that interior for granted, recent accounts (such as those of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri or A. Claire Cutler) may do more to fortify than query the contemporary 'rule' of global capital.     

法律视域外的公司犯罪治理路径

公司犯罪的治理既要有法律的对策，还应探索法律视域外的路径。在市场导向上。可采取规制市场无序竞争、完善信息合理流动机制、营建公司信用评价体系与合理分配公司社会责任的路径；在伦理规制上，可针对公司的自身伦理、经济行为伦理与环境伦理采取相应的对策。     

Constitutionalising the Market,Marketising the Constitution,and to Tell the Difference: On the Horizontal Application of the Free Movement Provisions in EU Law

Ever since the Court's judgment in Walrave, there has been a concerted effort in caselaw and doctrine to limit the horizontal direct effect of free movement provisions to exceptional circumstances. This article suggests that this effort has always been incoherent, and is simply untenable after Viking and Laval. The implications are far reaching, especially in the sphere of the free movement of capital and corporate governance where the Court is well on its way of imposing a model of shareholder primacy on European company law. Full direct horizontal effect will also have important repercussions for private law and its ability to resolve conflicts between economic freedoms and fundamental rights. Given the nature of the free movement provisions, their horizontal effect will sometimes lead to a constitutionalised market and sometimes to a marketised constitution, without there being any principled way of distinguishing between the two. In that light, horizontal direct effect is very unlikely to enhance the effectiveness of internal market law—whichever model of the social market economy it is thought to embody—and is best abandoned.     

Trajectory of Reform: Catholicism,the State and the Civil Society in the Developments of LGBT Rights

This paper examines legislative variations in LGBT identities, addressing the question: why and how do two largely Catholic states—Italy and Spain—endow different legal treatment to LGBT identities? Italy and Spain present important similarities in their legal, social and historical backgrounds. The legal cultures of both of these states have legal frameworks decriminalizing homosexuality. Nevertheless, they have approached same-sex unions in quite different ways. Spain has introduced same-sex marriage. Italy has hindered, consequently legal recognition remains fiercely contested and unrealized. Overall, it is argued that it is in the area of same-sex unions that some of the most significant changes have taken place in family law over the past decade in a number of jurisdictions. The paper argues that legal reforms in family law must be understood in terms of relation between society and law and must draw upon the concept of “culture”. The two jurisdictions appear to support the theoretical perspective that reforms and lack of reforms in family law are inspired by a number of contexts such as religious values, ideas of political morality and State interests.     

Law,ideology and social change: An analysis of the role of law in the construction of corporate crime

This paper explores recent efforts to theorize the potential of law as an agency for progressive social change in the context of the debate over corporate crime. Drawing on feminist experience with criminal law reform in the area of domestic violence, the author argues that the strategy of criminalizing corporate violations needs to be problematized, and that attention should also be focussed on exploring other avenues for progressive legal and political struggles aimed at the control of corporate crime.     

The Confrontation between the Big Five and Big Law: Turf Battles and Ethical Debates as Contests for Professional Credibility

This article uses interviews and comparative professional histories to explore the stakes of the battle- pre-Enron and seen in reactions to the Enron crisis - between the organized bar and the multidisciplinary practices (MDPs) associated with the Big Five accounting firms and their law firms. The paper examines modes of professional practice - family, Continental corporate law, and the Cravath model – to describe the tensions and potential solutions to maintaining professional legitimacy without appearing too close to business or economic power. The paper then seeks to explain preliminarily why the MDP debate became so strong in the United States despite the fact that the actual threat to U.S. corporate lawyers appeared relatively small. It suggests that the interjection of the Big Five potentially threatened a relatively precarious professional legitimacy with different impacts for different sectors of the bar.     

The Continuing Relevance of Ars Poetica to Legal Scholarship and the Modern Lawyer

In this late modern era within which the basic values of life have been reordered (driven by globalisation, the corporate agenda and mass communication technologies), the individual has effectively been reduced to a mere abstraction. It might be argued that the rational, moral and humanistic concept of freedom has, to a great extent, been compromised by a consequent crisis within the intelligentsia. These groups, in particular the gatekeepers of a classical liberal approach to legal scholarship, are caught between the twin evils of increased unreflective populism and pragmatism evident within many law schools and modern legal institutions. Although a contested term, defenders of the ‘socio-legal’ tradition, who place the humanities at the heart of legal research and education, are obliged to restate with increased determination the utility of the liberal arts and literature to the law profession and wider legal community. In a normative environment, law and narrative are inextricably linked and narrative poetry is not only invaluable to explaining the origins and location of the legal tradition, but also elicits a mode of understanding which transcends the boundaries of narrowlydefined legal hermeneutics—which often only addresses issues of an operational nature. French novelist Flaubert claimed “chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d’un poète” (Flaubert in Madame bovary (trans: Wall, G.), Penguin Classics, London, 1960: 269), paraphrased by American civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, as “inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet” (Lukas in Big trouble: a murder in a small western town sets off a struggle for the soul of America, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997: 323). In an age of disenchantment, this paper explores the poetic form as an important medium within which to understand the nature and function of law in a society of differentiated individuals.     

European Corporate Laws, Regulatory Competition and Path Dependence

Beyond the well-known discussion in regard to the Cassis de Dijon of the European Court of Justice, implying the mutual recognition of national product regulations, the topic of mutual recognition and regulatory competition has emerged again in the realm of European corporate laws (“Centros” of the ECJ in 1999). Can effective competition among European corporate laws be expected? In the US a broad discussion has developed whether the existing competition process among US corporate laws leads to permanent legal improvements by legal innovations or to a race to the bottom. Beyond this discussion a new point has been raised recently: the possibility and importance of path dependence as a potential problem for the efficacy of competition among corporate laws (lock-ins). For the analysis of this problem we apply the concept of technological paradigms and trajectories to legal rules in corporate law and introduce “legal paradigms,” which direct the search for better legal solutions in certain directions and might be stabilized by certain factors (esp. complementarities to other legal rules) leading to considerable path dependence effects. Our results show that path dependence might play a crucial role for competition among European corporate laws, even if the principle of mutual recognition would be introduced to corporate laws in the EU, implying that competition among European corporate laws might be difficult and sluggish. Consequently the question arises whether additional meta-rules should be established that might mitigate the problem of path dependence and lock-ins in regulatory competition in corporate law.     

Genealogy and Jurisprudence: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Social Scientification of Law

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche presents a history of metaphysics that can also be read as a history of jurisprudence. Nietzsche shows how—via Platonism, Christendom, Kantianism, and utilitarianism—the “real” or “true” world of ideals gives way to an “apparent” phenomenal world that is itself ultimately brought into question. This article shows how 20th-century legal thought, broadly construed, also moves away from “ideals” of law toward an understanding of law as observable social phenomena. It suggests that the move to the “apparent” world in legal thought raises questions similar to those raised by Nietzsche's work: Does sociological law point to a nihilistic destruction of the legal tradition or to a joyous possibility of overcoming that tradition?     

Advancing Direct Corporate Accountability in International Human Rights Law: The Role of State-Owned Enterprises

Resorting to the immensely state-centric international legal system to regulate corporate human rights abuses is often viewed as inadequate. Among many proposals aiming at filling the international regulatory gaps, imposing international human rights obligations directly on corporations is a bold one, which, due to profound doctrinal and practical challenges, is yet to be materialized. However, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), given their prima facie “state–business nexus” that blurs the traditional public–private divide, might provide a renewed opportunity to push forward the “direct international corporate accountability” campaign. This study investigates whether SOEs represent a golden chance for direct corporate accountability in the international legal regime. This study provides a legal analysis supported by case law, and by comparative and empirical research when appropriate. After providing a definitional account of SOEs, it examines the legal status of SOEs under international law. Then, in the reverse direction, it proceeds to explore if the state–business nexus of SOEs as non-state actors could render the argument toward direct international corporation accountability more convincing. Major findings reveal that SOEs, to a limited extent, represent a renewed opportunity to rethink direct corporate accountability under international law.     

In Dependence: The Paradox of Professional Independence and Taking Seriously the Vulnerabilities of Lawyers in Large Corporate Law Firms

In this article, and drawing on the work of Martha Fineman and others, we deploy a vulnerability lens as an heuristic device to push against the concept of professional lawyer independence as enshrined in statute and promoted by legal services regulators. Using interviews with 53 senior partners and others from 20 large corporate law firms, we show how the meaning and practice of independence are profoundly mediated by the contexts, relationships, and interactions of corporate lawyers’ everyday working lives. Vulnerable to competition from other firms, the demands of clients, the shift over time from ‘trusted advisor’ to ‘service provider', regulatory requirements, pressures to make profit, and so on, these corporate lawyers appeared prone to developing and normalizing potentially risky and irresponsible practices. We therefore argue that a debate about corporate legal regulation is better based upon a richly theorized concept of interdependence that takes seriously the causes and effects of practitioner vulnerabilities in particular circumstances.     

国际航空犯罪法人刑事责任及其国内立法转化研究

2010年《北京公约》和《北京议定书》首次规定了国际航空犯罪法人责任,法人责任以法人的高级管理人员代表法人实施劫持航空器等国际航空犯罪为要件,法人为此承担刑事、民事或行政责任。公约对法人犯罪及其责任的立法需要转化为国内法才能适用。世界各国国内法对法人犯罪及其责任的态度差别较大,英国、加拿大、法国等国刑法规定有航空犯罪的法人刑事责任,德国国内法规定有航空犯罪的法人行政责任,意大利刑法规定有航空犯罪的法人民事责任,我国仅在个别航空犯罪中规定有法人犯罪及其刑事责任。我国法人犯罪及其刑事责任的立法和理论具有较强的包容性,可在我国刑法中取消法人犯罪法定化限制,全面规定包括航空犯罪在内的法人犯罪及其刑事责任。     

The Question Concerning the Common Frame of Reference

The many directives on private consumer law enacted in the last three decades have met with considerable neglect and resistance amongst domestic judges, legislatures and scholars, bringing about less legal unity and more ‘legal fragmentation'—to say it in the words of the Commission. The Draft Common Frame of Reference is one more attempt, on the part of certain strands of European private law scholarship, at imposing a formal break on, and at overcoming, such fragmentation. Presented as a ‘comprehensive and self‐standing’ document, its ambition is to definitively implement the Commission‐generated, market‐orientated agenda of private law reform, so much resisted at the national level. The article argues that the EU legislative institutions should not go ahead with the plan of incorporating the Draft's content in EU law, by adopting a CFR. A CFR would confer an unprecedented degree of authority on a range of contested directive‐generated rules, from the test of fairness to the risk development defence in product liability. In creating a climate in which CFR‐based legalistic arguments promote unity over fragmentation, a CFR would emasculate public debate by implementing, under the spell of legal necessity, exactly those partisan, Commission‐initiated policies that have been, and still are, openly opposed in domestic legal circles. The Draft embodies a grammar of imposition that should be questioned.