Author ORCID iD
0000-0003-4105-9562
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2003
Abstract
The ABA Section of International Law’s Transnational Legal Practice [TLP] Committee prepared this summary of the most significant TLP developments in 2002. The bulk of this article focused on two sets of developments; 1) the work of the ABA Commission on Multijurisdictional Practice or ABA MJP Commission; and 2) developments related to the treatment of legal services in the World Trade Organization under the General Agreement on Trade in Services or GATS. (Additional developments that were mentioned included initiation of U.S. free trade agreements with Chile and Singapore, Japan’s new joint enterprise law, which allowed certain types of association among U.S. and Japanese lawyers, and the adoption of Section 307 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which partially preempts state ethics rules regarding confidentiality and attorney-client privilege.
Among other things, the article described several significant legal services-related developments that were part of the GATS 2000 [services] negotiations. The first set of developments concerned legal services “requests,” which were submitted as part of the “request-offer” negotiating process. In February 2002, the American Bar Association approved a resolution that urged the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to seek for U.S. lawyers rights consistent with those afforded to foreign lawyers in states that had adopted the ABA Model Rule for the Licensing of Legal Consultants (ABA Model FLC Rule). The article noted that although the U.S.’ legal services “requests” to specific countries were confidential, the ABA was advised that the U.S. “requests” were consistent with Recommendation 8 of the ABA MJP Report. The article also noted that the United States had submitted a reference paper on legal services that closely tracked the ABA Model FLC Rule. The article described the information that was available concerning the legal services “requests” the United States received from other WTO Member States. This included a description of some of the state-based regulatory rules that some WTO Member States had identified in their legal services “requests.” The WTO-GATS section of the article concluded by offering an update on the efforts of the WTO Working Party on Domestic Regulation, which was studying whether the WTO Disciplines for the Accountancy Sector should be expanded horizontally to cover other service sectors, including legal services.
With respect to the work of the ABA MJP Commission, this article reviewed those aspects of the ABA MJP Report and Recommendations that addressed transnational legal practice. This included the ABA Model Foreign Legal Consultant Rule, which was found in ABA MJP Commission Recommendation 8 and the ABA Model Rule on Temporary Practice for Foreign Lawyers, which is sometimes called the FIFO rule (for fly-in, fly-out), and which was found in MJP Commission Recommendation 9. This article also discussed the status of foreign lawyer full admission rules, which were not addressed in the ABA MJP Commission’s report. (For additional information on the ABA MJP Commission, see the “Testimony and Comments” section of Professor Laurel Terry’s personal webpage, available here: https://sites.psu.edu/laurelterry/publications/testimony-and-comments/.
Publication Title
Int'l L.
Recommended Citation
Robert E. Lutz, Philip T. von Mehren, Laurel S. Terry, Peter Ehrenhaft, and Carole Silver, Transnational Legal Practice: Cross-Border Legal Services: 2002 Year-in-Review, 37 Int'l L. 987 (2003). Available at: https://ideas.dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/fac-works/194/ Available at: https://ideas.dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/fac-works/194/
