The Protocol Establishing the East African Community Common Market, 2010 guarantees free movement of services supplied by nationals of Partner States, and the free movement of services and suppliers who are nationals of the Partner States within the EAC. This implies that the persons supplying services should be able to supply the services to the consumers in other Partner States without discrimination. Cross-border legal practice largely involves an advocate performing legal professional work beyond his or her home state. An advocate can offer legal services outside his or…
How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect the Practice of Law
Artificial intelligence is exerting an influence on all professions and industries. We have autonomous vehicles, instantaneous translation among the world’s leading languages, and search engines that rapidly locate information anywhere on the web in a way that is tailored to a user’s interests and past search history. Law is not immune from disruption by new technology. Software tools are beginning to affect various aspects of lawyers’ work, including those tasks…
Platform Economy in Legal Profession: An Empirical Study of Online Legal Service Providers in China
Platform economy breaks into the legal profession by pooling lawyers with different specializations into a simple user-friendly platform, consolidating the lower-tier supply side of the legal market and generating economy of scale. This paper is the very first empirical piece looking into China’s online legal service portals. It is found that, the intermediary functions of the portals as the “matchmaker” between the supply and thedemand side are often commingled with certain substantive legal services, which cannot be easily unbundled from each other. Given the grand information asymmetry…
The Twenty-First Century Delivery of Legal Services: Thoughts for Legal Education
The twenty-first century lawyer will face rapid and unsettling changes in the way legal services are delivered. Legal futurists foresee many aspects of legal services being delivered more efficiently with the use of technology. For example, future breakthroughs in artificial intelligence may expand the ability to automate many tasks that currently require the skill of…
Legal Profession of China in a Globalized World: Innovations and New Challenges
The legal profession is undergoing fundamental changes; and this is the case not just in those established legal markets. Based on a state-of-the-art sketch of China’s legal profession, this paper identifies and analyzes the latest innovation initiatives and alternative business models, which happen simultaneously at the levels of the law firms as incumbents, and the…
Access to Justice: Looking Back, Thinking Ahead
This Article seeks to assess our progress and reassess our goals concerning access to justice. It begins in Part I by summarizing the nature of the challenge. Although there is much we do not know about the scope of the problem, the data available suggest a shameful inadequacy of services for the poor and a…
New Legal Ethics Textbook: Problems in Professional Responsibility for a Changing Profession — Sixth Edition
In this new Sixth Edition, the longest running professional responsibility book on the market, Problems in Professional Responsibility for a Changing Profession, has been thoroughly updated and rearranged by its current and two new authors. New and expanded materials in this Edition address cybersecurity, access to justice, judicial ethics and disqualification, the ABA’s Ethics 20/20…
In Critique of RoboLaw: The Model of SmartLaw
This research consists of four parts. The first part presents the analysis of the standard regulation framework and its elements within the theoretical context of ontology of law and institutions. The second and third parts describe the methodology and illustrative research of the standard regulation framework’s failures. Having indicated the reasons of these failures, the fourth part is used…
Professions and Professional Service Firms in a Global Context: Reframing Narratives
Professions are changing rapidly and profoundly as new technologies, organisational forms, and regulations are introduced into the professional world. As a result, professions are creating new narratives to stake their legitimate claims in the world and justify their positions. This paper examines some of these narratives in the contexts of organisation, globalisation and technology among…
Report from the National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being
A coalition of groups, including the American Bar Association Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs, have released a comprehensive report, The Path to Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change, aimed at addressing the problem of substance use and mental health disorders of lawyers. The report, by the National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being, includes several dozen recommendations…