This book explains the changes that have occurred in the provision of high-end corporate legal services in 15 Latin American countries and Spain between 1990 and 2015. We use the term high end to denote sophisticated, complex, and generally costly legal work demanded by multinationals, large domestic corporations, and other business clients. This type of work is usually performed by teams of prestigious lawyers and other professionals through large or mid-sized multiservice or highly specialized firms with more than one office and an internal organizational hierarchy. Other lawyers offer their professional services through small and highly specialized (boutique) law firms. These lawyers and the law firms to which they belong are the main providers of legal services in the corporate world and are precisely the focus of this collective work.
The modern infrastructure, visibility and corporate image, organizational arrangement, and client management strategies employed by these Latin American law firms resemble the so-called “Big Law” of the United States. As a result, this book uses the term “Big Law” to also refer to the Latin American firms that share those same features. The chapters that comprise this volume address the evolution and recent changes affecting the corporate legal sector providers in the selected countries, taking into account their specific social, political, and economic context.
The research presented here is drawn from a combination of interview and quantitative data, historical records, and other sources, which enabled the authors to paint a dense and contextualized sketch of the corporate legal services sector, and more generally about the legal profession of each country. This book covers the majority of countries in Latin America. It includes studies about countries ranging from the main economies like Brazil and Mexico to smaller ones like Nicaragua. This book also includes a chapter on Spain, given the strong historical, economic and political ties between Latin America and Spain, and the recent expansion of Spanish law firms into Latin America. This book pays special attention to the heightened interaction between Spanish and Latin American enterprises and their lawyers during recent times.
The time span covered in this book (1990–2015) has been a period of intensification of cross-border trade, migratory movements, the rise of different forms of communication, and other technological advancements. These are also times of important social, political, and cultural transformations, not only in the Americas and Spain but also globally. On the other hand, during these years, the world has faced unique challenges regarding threats to the protection of human rights, the legitimacy of democratic institutions, the preservation of the environment, and the attainment of equality, peace, and security.
Concern for these issues is not confined to the geographical boundaries of a single country, but has rather crossed over to the regional and global arenas. The term globalization is generally used to convey this phenomenon. Globalization means diffusion, influence, and movement, but not always in the physical sense. The dissemination and movement can also be of ideas, images, thought processes, and patterns of behavior. In this sense, globalization is undoubtedly a cultural phenomenon (Friedman 2001; Giddens 1999).
Whether directly or indirectly, globalization has had an impact on the role of lawyers in society, and more generally on the function of law. Some areas such as international trade and business law are more susceptible to be affected by globalization than, say, tenant-landlord regulations. The same occurs to the lawyers and other legal professionals who practice or specialize in those areas. Legal professionals who handle cross-border transactions or working for multinational corporate clients tend to be more familiar with foreign and international laws, practices, and global trends, than those representing juvenile offenders in local courts. However, the world is not neatly divided between globalized and non-globalized law, or between fully globalized and fully domestic lawyers. What occurs in reality is that both the international/globalized and the domestic/local dimensions of the law are generally intertwined, or, at the very least, exist and operate in parallel. Friedman (2001) has used the term “legal diglossia” to identify this phenomenon, which seems to be common in the high-end corporate legal sector of most Latin American countries and Spain, and demands practitioners with both local and international competence.
The bulk of the official law enacted by the national legislatures has remained domestic both in content and scope, and legal education continues to primarily train students to practice law in their own countries. Notwithstanding, the law firms that provide services to multinational corporate clients—which is the subset that occupies our attention—appear to have become “boundaryless” regarding their organizational structures, their relationship with their clients, and the type of services they offer. Many of the law firms whose members were interviewed for this book exemplify this trend.
The globalization of Latin American and Spanish business lawyers should come as no surprise if one takes into account the fact that their clientele is comprised mainly of large corporations, national, foreign, or multinational. The way in which these lawyers organize their practices, carry out their activities, and business relationships is consistent with a rapidly expanding transnational reality. As a result, the lawyers that serve such clients are obviously pressured to meet the increasingly complex demands of the market, and to align or synchronize their structure with that of their clients. At the same time, those lawyers are expected to stay attuned to their domestic legal landscape and the changes affecting their own legal system.
The corporate legal sector of the United States is the most common and certainly the best- documented reference of this phenomenon. After all, it is where many of the multi-service, multi-office law firms originated, developed, and continue to exist. The fact that the United States is the benchmark should come as no surprise because many of the important players in the business world, who demand the services of the aforementioned lawyers, are also American corporations with a worldwide presence.
As mentioned earlier, the term Big Law was precisely coined to identify the American firms that fit this bill, and more generally the stratum where they operate. Needless to say, Big Law does not mean that the type of law practiced by their members is bigger or more important than the law handled by solo practitioners that represent the rest of us mortals. In this sense, there is no substantive difference between small law and Big Law. There are instead different work styles, client management strategies, organizational arrangements, and levels of expertise and experience needed from the lawyers and other professionals, depending on the complexity of the relevant legal issues, the parties involved, and the financial stake.
More than 30 years ago, Galanter (1983) aptly called mega-lawyering the occupation of the legal professionals operating in complex, transnational, and high-stake environments. What appears to have occurred since then, though, is that mega-lawyering is not confined anymore to large high-end corporate law firms, but has also permeated—to varying degrees—the realm of NGOs, in-house legal departments, and other organizations. For this book, we undertook the task to investigate the lawyers whose services are demanded by large and mid-size corporate clients in the selected countries or transnationally. We were particularly interested in learning how those lawyers are organized, and ho...