Author ORCID iD

0000-0003-4105-9562

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2017

Abstract

This Transnational Legal Practice (TLP) Year-in-Review article continues the tradition of collecting and publicizing the developments that occurred during the past year. It focuses on developments that occurred during 2016.

The 2014 TLP Year-in-Review provided a departure from the Year-in-Review’s typical method of presentation by identifying two categories of what that article called “TLP-Nets.” See Laurel S. Terry and Carole Silver, Transnational Legal Practice [2014], 49 ABA/SIL (n.s.) 413 (2015). One group of TLP-Nets is nationally based and the other is inherently transnational.

This article uses the TLP-Nets structure set forth in the 2014 TLP Year-in-Review article by dividing its discussion into U.S.-based developments that involve transnational legal practice and international developments. This article also refers to initiatives by entities that were described in the TLP [2014] Year-in-Review article.

The first section of this article focuses on international trade negotiations in which the U.S. was involved. Among other things, this section documents interactions among the Conference of Chief Justices, the ABA, and the CCBE concerning the U.S.-EU trade negotiations known as T-TIP. Additional U.S.-based developments include the 2016 changes to ABA Model Rule of Professional Conduct 5.5 that are relevant to foreign in-house counsel mobility issues, the U.S.-hosted 2016 International Conference of Legal Ethics (ILEC), and the 5ht International Conference of Legal Regulators, which took place in September 2016 in Washington, D.C. This section also describes the “association roundtable” that the ABA hosted in August 2016. Last, but not least, this article discusses the ABA’s adoption of model regulatory objectives, which were inspired, at least in part, by international developments. The article observes that in April 2016, Colorado became one of the first states to adopt regulatory objectives when it added them as a preamble to the Colorado Supreme Court’s rules regarding lawyer regulation.

This article also includes a discussion of international-based TLP developments. It explains the significance of the 2016 International Bar Association Directory of Regulators, where it can be located, and the relationship of this document to the 2014 IBA Global Legal Services report. This article also identifies a number of important 2016 developments in Canada that have been characterized as PMBR – proactive management based regulation; it cites a Colorado webpage that contains links to U.S. and international PMBR developments. As a result of the increased interactions among U.S. and Canadian regulators, which are documented in this article, U.S. regulators are familiar with these Canadian PMBR developments.

Although the discussion in this article was limited by space and timing constraints, the article identifies a number of additional transnational legal practice developments and provides citations for further research. The topics that are addressed in this article include the impact on the legal profession of Brexit, the Panama Papers leak, FATF’s ongoing round of 4th Mutual Evaluations, the U.S. response to Korea’s revision of its foreign legal consultant rules and its implementation of the KORUS agreement, the 2016 IBA capacity-building workshop in Zimbabwe, and the global legal profession’s response to the mass dismissal of judges in Turkey. The article also notes the change in status of the ABA Task Force on International Trade in Legal Services (ITILS) which became a standing committee during 2016.

Publication Title

Int'l Law.

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