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DEAN KRAMER:
At Tulane, for several years now, and it depends on the number of students every year, we
have tried to offer legal Spanish, French, Italian and German, because clearly the
deficiency in this country is the arrogance of relying exclusively upon English. Perhaps
the English are even more arrogant than we are about that. Phil, is English going to
remain the language of international law or is that going to change?
PHILLIP SYCAMORE:
I think it's probably going to remain -- I would not predict what the position will be in
ten years' time. We need to look at the curriculum of the future, to make the students
aware of the major, wider range of ways of resolving cases such as arbitration and
mediation that are beyond the traditional civil litigation process. This is a way of
preparing students for the changing world in which they will practice.
DEAN KRAMER:
David do you put any requirements on the kinds of people you are hiring, or the kinds of
courses they're taking, or the specialties they have that would involve international
trade?
DAVID STRETCH:
We find at Baker, and I'm sure some of the other firms, the people who gravitate to such
firms are almost always from some sort of special background. They were in the Peace Corps
after college, they grew up as children of missionaries in China, they were language
experts in college. There's always something unique in their background. Since they're
skilled, they think that this is a firm that could utilize their skills. Those are the
people who tend to do best at our firm in the first place. Our standard or requirement is
that every lawyer has to be able to speak and write in English, do business in English.
It's a very high standard, very difficult. We found that it is much easier to recruit
people that speak English than to teach Spanish speaking to get there, although we do try
this both ways. I would venture, frankly, that English is a global standard. You can go
almost anywhere and find people who speak English.
WALTER WHITE:
In a way, we have won that battle. It's not necessarily over, though.
DEAN KRAMER:
We'll get to that in just a second. I just want to make a comment. I read in the American
Lawyer this last month something that startled me because we would assume the opposite,
that since in Western Europe and South America the governing law is the Civil Code that
civil law would dominate. But the French firm that is described, that has a major Eastern
European practice, said that it is now only English law that is the basis of the
transactions. Is that correct, Walter?
WALTER WHITE:
In part. Let me work my way through that, if I may. We hold many of our meetings in
Russia, in Moscow, and our contact office, and we don't have any written policy. We want
the best lawyers that we can find. We have staff, we have secretaries who speak better
English than Russian because of our lawyers. In general, the standard is very high. What I
find difficult and what I can't get through to my partners and associates in the United
States, is for them to think in concepts. I need somebody to deal with concepts. I
represent, I think, the largest corporation in France and the largest corporation in Spain
and they both deal in Latin America and in Eastern Europe in English. There is no question
that when you get a German banker and a French company and an Italian advisor together,
the language is English. As of right now, New York and London are leading the bulk of
these new financings that are taking place in the rest of the world and, if that continues
to happen, it will be in the an interest of the people who are providing the money to have
these things done in U.S. law or Europe law.
DEAN KRAMER:
Bob Berring, you gave an earlier vision of technology. West has next to nothing and Lexis
seems to have taken the field in international material. The reason on-line came on, as
John Sexton says, it was driven by business, it was the market that drove all the
materials to West and Lexis. What is going to happen internationally unless the market
drives them to put international material on-line?
PROFESSOR ROBERT
BERRING: I think you'll see an increasing array of international sources
available to the data bases. I think that one of the problems that we have, which Walter
expressed very well, is to stop thinking about it from an American context. I think we are
even going to stop thinking about it in the context we always have. I think that as we go
into other systems around the world, you'll find a different array of documents as you get
into the international agreements and you look beyond what we would define as the world of
factual, business, and transactional-related information. I do know many countries are
looking to bypass the technical distribution of their legal information that they've
always adhered to in one form or another. It's interesting to me that the two legal
publishers that now control American legal information are not domestic. West is owned by
a Canadian conglomerate, Lexis is owned by a Dutch-English conglomerate. They are both
plugged into information systems around the world. I think that you will see that it is
possible that English will not prevail. French once dominated. Another language can
dominate. Others speak our language because it makes economic sense. German, French and
Argentinean, and Chinese and Japanese business people and lawyers speak English because
that's the language they had to learn. They can learn another language. I think we would
be making a big mistake going into the twenty-first century, to assume it has to be
English.
DEAN KRAMER:
John, is the process of having a Japanese professor in the back of the class sufficient to
do what Walter wants to do with the culture and the context? Or do we have to revamp the
curriculum?
DEAN JOHN SEXTON:
Well, I think that the curriculum will be changed dramatically over the next ten years,
both in terms of the 5 bookshelves of Charles Elliott, and Christopher
Langdell, and in
terms of the way we teach it before we apply this technology. I think that there will be a
change in directions that will be effected by what we're talking about. It will be
impossible to speak about intellectual property, or environmental law or regulation, or
even constitutional law, without putting it into a global context. The curriculum will
change. It's one thing to observe the change and another to say,"Will that be
sufficient to get where Walter wants us in terms of the cultural sophistication?" I
mean, I do think we move in that direction when we bring in new perspectives, and when you
take diversity, and say, hey we don't have any students here from Africa, or we don't have
any students here from South America. Let's get them. If you're really going to educate
your students you've got to have them in those conversations. That's why the Baker &
McKenzie's and world law firms are looking for people that are the sons and daughters of
missionaries, because they bring that extra bit to the table in their experiences.
DEAN KRAMER:
David, actually, we can't do it all. We're talking about doing it in the future. I don't
think any of us have really changed the curriculum this way yet. But, you've got a
curriculum which you use in preparing your people. What kinds of things do you plan?
DAVID STRETCH:
How to write in English. Actually, we've had several discussions in the firm of what
should law schools should be doing and what can we expect from their graduates. And in
some of these areas, in the business international global transactional areas, I think
things are moving far too quickly for most law schools to keep up. Most people who even
practice in the area are out of date within weeks of what's going on. There is a
difficulty in keeping up-to-date. And my crude analysis of law schools is that they teach
how to gather information, extract it and pull up the structure and describe it very
nicely. That process is a very lengthy process -- it takes years, even decades in some
cases, to figure out what's going on. International business is moving at lightning speed
and some of the law schools do not attempt to even teach that, but simply withdraw. I
think we do have difficulty in training our associates in legal analysis. It is not so
much substantive law, they can pick that up on the job fairly quickly, but it is basic
legal analysis and logic. It goes back to how do you put together a logical document.
Being able to do that ought to work in any way, within any culture. Trying to assemble, to
send a letter to a Brit client about a transaction that's going on in Germany -- it better
be logical or else nobody is going to understand. Our associates in foreign offices are
very bright, they come from the best schools we can get them from and, working with them,
they're very fast. And talking with them verbally, you have no doubt about their mental
capacity, they can even speak English reasonably well. But when they're asked to sit down
and analyze a foreign statute, a foreign practice and country, and write a letter to the
client, they're stumped. To me it's a fairly logical and clear analysis of what's going
on. That can be taught, I believe.
[ADDRESSING THE AUDIENCE]
DEAN KRAMER: I think it's time to go to you and
see what you want to ask and find out. There's one clear moral here, which is we all have
to re-think who we are and whether we ought to be here and what we ought to be doing --
what we're doing and the way we're doing it. That's true whether we're accreditors or
professors or bar examiners or other kinds of regulators.
DEAN ROBERT WALSH [Wake
Forest University School of Law]: I'd like to go back to David
and Walter. You brought up -- and this goes into the sort of ethics, professional
responsibility rules -- there are, at this point in time, conflicts between the systems.
Consider, for example, France and the United States. There's an issue of client
confidentiality, what can be revealed to a client or what should be revealed to a client.
The view is very different. And if your lawyers are, say, applying the Model Rule, they
would be disbarred in France for disclosing information to the client that the lawyer said
in confidential negotiations between the lawyers and aren't supposed to disclose. So,
you've got a conflict of models there. How do you deal with that in your district offices
around the world? And are you looking more towards a model, an international model, that
would somehow translate between cultures and legal morals?
DAVID STRETCH: I do know about citing to the
local jurisdictional rule in France. Most of the lawyers in our Paris Office are French
and they turn to their own rules, we own system primarily. The American rules are mobile.
The Model Rules of the ABA are minimal, aspirational stuff. Looking at the ABA model rules
gives a minimum view, and we'd look at the local rule sometimes for a higher standard.
WALTER WHITE:
Between France and the U.S. it's not necessarily a higher standard, it's a different
standard. Could a U.S. client, when you are dealing in France, sue your firm for
malpractice because you've kept things confidential from them which you were doing in
compliance with French law, regarding the status of the transaction or something. It's not
that it's a higher standard, it's a different standard. So that's an issue that comes up.
JOHN AUCOTT [Vice
Chair, International Committee, Law Society of England and Wales]:
I'm an English Solicitor and would like to talk about licensing. I would like you to learn
from our experience with the Establishment Directive relating to the European countries.
This has been on the agenda for discussion for twenty years, twenty-one years to be
precise. For seventeen or eighteen years we've said it can't be done. We can never trade
with the French. We've been at war with them for nine hundred years, how can we now trade
with them? The Greeks have got no law at all and the Spanish you've merely got to know the
daughter of the local official. So, we said, "too different." We blamed
everybody, we blamed the courts, we blamed the judges, we blamed the legislature, and then
we thought, what the heck? Our system's being taken over by accountants, the competition
is really out there, not within. For goodness sake, we're all brothers under the skin. I
have never been able to understand why you can't practice in all your states. You go to
the same law schools. There's just a little bit of protectionism that's been creeping in
here. Eleven foreign lawyers [foreign legal consultants] in California? That's just a
disgrace. A big disgrace . . . the market will prevail. Learn from the twenty years! In
the last three years we've made huge progress because we've accepted it, our mindset has
changed, and the problems that you have discussed about disclosure, we will resolve them.
I don't know how. We will resolve them. Seventeen years ago, we would have said,
"toodle."
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