War, epidemic, commercial uncertainty – how will the legal profession react to deglobalisation?

The last half century witnessed a growth in globalisation (see, among many others, Stiglitz, 2002; Halliday and Osinsky, 2006; Arthurs, 2006, 2009), the diminishing of national and geo-political boundaries: economically, politically and culturally. Law and lawyers have taken a major role, in globalising firms, harmonising of law, cross-jurisdictional legal education, free trade across borders, elision of professional service organisations, ease of immigration and work across borders. More recently the epidemic, Trumpism, Brexit and anti-Putin embargoes have begun an opposing reaction in commerce, economically and politically. Will law and lawyers be similarly affected? It would be good to see research and articles coming forward on whether deglobalisation is affecting the legal professions. Meanwhile, in this last issue of 2022, Gibens et al. report on research into Belgium’s concept of integrated rights, bringing together lawyers, courts and social workers in order to solve the “socio-legal” problems of the community. Using a model looking at Context, Actors, Interventions, Mechanism and Results they find it is necessary to broker relations between the legal ethics of lawyers and the social ethics of social workers and that better training of both would aid cooperation. Goldbarsht argues that in-house general counsel, inside commercial enterprises should be included in the antimoney laundering regulations in the same way as private practice lawyers. Their influence as gatekeepers would enable better attention to the objectives of AML regulation and assist their own sense of legal ethics. Back to Belgium, Mergaerts looks at how criminal defence lawyers identify their clients’ vulnerabilities in order to ensure the procedural safeguards accorded to them by law. Early identification of vulnerabilities is key to assisting criminal defendants in the police station. In a set of semi-structured interviews Mergaerts found that lawyers had a range of diverse factors they considered to show vulnerability and that individual factors predominated over situational factors. The concept as regulated was too vague, needed to be addressed by the police and courts also and “gut feelings” were used as little or no training had been received. Lamkaddem et al. look at how clients with multiple problems are dealt with under legal aid in Dutch Legal Services. The authors carried out a survey of clients which showed that 44% reported multiple problems; these clients tended to be older and with a lower level of education. Many problems were financial, conflictual and related to physical health. The results suggested more systematic collaboration with social services (perhaps of the sort advocated by Gibens). Caserta explores how classical sociological theories address the digitalised world of the legal profession. Functionalism looks at the relationship between new technologies and their deployment in legal matters, critical theory can help to understand the ideology of those actors developing such technologies and Weberian approaches assist in explaining the reaction of legal institutions to digitalisation. Lawyers are not insulated from the surrounding world and evolve in response to broader societal change.