Articles
Not long ago, a law school friend of mine was walking with her father in New York City’s crowded diamond district. Entering a showroom, she watched as her father warmly greeted another man and handed him some gems. The man examined the goods, put them in a drawer and shook her father’s hand with a quick exchange in Yiddish.
As they left the store, my friend asked, “Where’s the contract, back at the office?” Her father explained that transactions were memorialized on a handshake. It’s how it had always been done. The business was based on trust and relationships. He had known this man’s father and this man had known his. Their handshakes were their word, which was as good as gold.
As she told me this story, I could see that she was struggling with the idea of doing business on such informal terms. It was a foreign concept given its blatant disregard of what we had been schooled to view as the bedrock of all business deals—the written contract. To reconcile what she had witnessed, she likened the transaction to one occurring in another country with its own legal system.
In his 2005 bestseller, The World Is Flat, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman informs us that globalization is not a new trend: ever since 1492, Friedman explains, our world has been shrinking from small to tiny. “We are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together,” he writes, and, as a result, “we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South.”
Relationship Skills Are More Important Than Ever
The U.S. legal profession and its constituents are at the epicenter of this new global marketplace. This is due to client demand and the practical realities of flatism—survival in a flattened competitive arena. While globalization touches a range of areas—political, economic, religious, social and cultural, among others—the one set of skills that the global lawyer simply can’t survive and thrive without is relationship building skills.
Relationships are essential to business success in the law. In the U.S., lawyers have grown accustomed to fostering and nurturing human-to-human connections through text messaging, email and various modes of networking. These exchanges are often fast-paced and fairly informal. They also typically include candid (though, perhaps, not completely unbiased or rational) accounts of our superior abilities and services. In other words, we tend to take the hard-and-fast sell approach to cultivating business relationships.
While this standard relationship building approach may work well in the U.S., it frequently doesn’t translate across cultural and social boundaries. I learned this first-hand when I recently presented a training and development program in Ghent, Belgium. Sixty lawyers from four continents (representing countries as diverse as Brazil, the U.S., the U.K., France, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Russia, China and Japan) participated. Before the program a European friend told me that I needed to temper my speaking style and content for this primarily European audience. In the U.S., he explained, it’s acceptable to speak of personal successes. But in certain parts of the world, people are very put off by self-promotion. Fortunately, my friend helped me avoid creating an obstacle to connecting with some of my program attendees.
It takes time to build client and key strategic relationships in the global arena. Some points along the learning curve that need to be addressed include:
Communication Gaps
Cultural Sensibilities
Legal Principles
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