Welcome to The Legal Edge!
This is our very first post! And hopefully the first of many, many more to come, in which we aim to show how diverse systems of law have integrated to become part of a Global Village.
It is beyond a reasonable doubt, that we as human beings are more closely connected and integrated than ever before. We jet around the world, holiday and do business in opposite ends of the world, and think nothing of a meeting in London one day of the week and another in Sydney. Language is hardly a barrier, and different cultures are more readily accessible. We exist in cosmopolitan cities where our neighbor to the left might be a German investment banker, and to our right an Indian web programmer. Technology allows us to play virtually with friends across the world, long lost but not forgotten, and get support for technology we hardly understand, in an accent we hardly understand, from a service technician in Dublin or Delhi.
But when one talks about the law and the people who practise it, somehow the walls come up. Law student are often reminded of how transportable their profession isn’t, and if you choose to write the California Bar, you, we are told, are stuck in that State for life. After all, who would want to even think of another Bar exam after that behemoth!
A lawyer licensed in Alabama, cannot practise law in Louisiana, nor for that matter, in Montana. A foreign law school pedigree wont be tolerated in Tenessee, and a court in North Carolina wont get you far in China.
And dont even think of trying to franchise your legal knowledge in places far and wide or reap any capital gain in your legal lifetime’s work. Or for that matter buy into a legal practice if you are not blessed with a legal license from your local Bar or Law Society. Law is as static and as provincial as one could imagine; how dare we think of law as a fluid system and part of our integrated, virtual 21 Century lives?
This all may be true, but the world of law has become much more liquid than we would first think. Lawyers in London are teaming with counsel in Moscow, and cross continent mergers these days are de rigueur. Hogan & Hartson and Lovells becomes the new trans-atlantic giant of Hogan Lovells (or perhaps what would have been a better name for this type of marital bliss, Hartson Lovells!) and suddenly US firms are finding their way to deepest (but not yet darkest) Africa chasing legal dollars of less than developing nations. Solicitors in London are outsourcing to India and South Africa, and technology now means that I can sit in Tel-Aviv and advise a client in London on issues of Wyoming law (assuming, of course, I am licensed in Wyoming!). In Sydney, I can float my law firm and sell it to Joe Public (or Joe The Plumber) and London will likely follow quickly on its antipodean fellow’s heels.
And so the world of law is not so disparate after all! Borders and barriers to entry melt and jurisdictions tumble with lawyers trampling on others’ toes and generating pure regulator confusion and panic.
But there is something further beyond geographical or technological integration that binds the players, both lawyer and client alike, in the legal world together. This something more goes to the heart of who the lawyer is and the stresses and strains, joys and rewards, disdain and devotion which equally pepper the lawyers life experience. Once we delve more deeply into the space that the lawyer and his client inhabit, whether it be in Cape Town or Canberra, Cardiff or Calabassis, we see trials and tribulations, stresses and expectations which are strikingly similar.
The law student who battles though the tricks of tort or the niceties of nuisance, the hard working, underpaid law graduate who battles for a job, only to find that the life of a newby lawyer is no LA Law (see A Law School Carol in this post, the creation of a disaffected law grad), the high flying rain maker, and the low flying ambulance chaser, the biased judge, the overreaching lawyer and the impossible client are all the same, or strikingly similar, no matter where on this planet you are. Lawyer jokes, after all, win universal currency, and the lawyer, wherever he or she may be, is generally treated with the same mix of scorn and aspiration, resentment and admiration.
Through these posts, we aim to show you elements of this Global Village of law. From serious, to the point and easy to digest reviews of points of law, to personal, and often comical experiences of practitioners and clients alike, to new ways in which the world of law is being pulled together and existing legal structures and ways of delivering legal services are being revolutionized. Through differences in approaches among systems of laws, we will show you commonality of reasoning and understanding, and how lawyers and their clients really have many similar, if not the same, gripes, expectations, war stories and frustrations. Our contributors will be lawyer and non-lawyers alike and we encourage you to submit both your rants and your raves of your experiences with the law, whether it be with a lawyer in Los Angeles or a Judge in Jamaica.
Our first ‘point of law’ post is contributed by Johannesburg, South Africa based firm, Winston Miller Attorneys, in the area of Private Client, Charities & Trusts, and deals with new developments under the newly passed South African Taxation Law Amendment Act allowing for a window of opportunity to transfer real estate out of trust free from transfer duty and capital gains tax. We will follow this with a couple of interesting anecdotes from practice in various states within the United States and an interesting overview of what costs you can expect to recover when succesful in litigation in the US.
We look forward to your comments and ratings on our articles and suggestions for topics to discuss. Please feel fee to submit any articles, interesting or amusing anecdotes of the life of law in your part of the world. We hope to make this a forum for Global Village of law and thank you for your support!!
All the best,
The Legal Edge Management Team
