The Complete Lawyer

The globalization of the legal industry is changing the skills lawyers need to succeed in practice. Thanks to technology, travel, and global business expansion, lawyers increasingly operate in a world of disappearing borders. A growing number of law firms have offices, lawyers and operations worldwide. The National Law Journal’s largest 250 US law firms employed 15,231 lawyers in their foreign offices in 2007, an increase of more than 11% from the year before.1

Even sole practitioners may represent clients with international problems and international clients with problems in the US. Today it is common for lawyers in every kind of firm to work with clients and agencies in other countries, deal with vendors around the world, and have co-workers or employees from different countries. In this practice environment, lawyers must be culturally competent—to operate effectively with people in other cultures.

Cultural Competence Needs To Be Clearly Defined

Cultural competence (sometimes referred to as “cultural intelligence”) is the ability to adapt, work and manage successfully in new and unfamiliar cultural settings. Culturally competent people can “grasp, reason and behave effectively” when faced with culturally diverse situations, where assumptions, values and traditions differ from those to which they are accustomed.2 They recognize that culture may impact the way people from different backgrounds perceive the same facts. When several competing interpretations of a situation may be valid, they can place apparent contradictions in cultural contexts and deal with the ambiguity.

Cultural competence has particular importance for lawyers:

• Whose practice involves interactions with clients, lawyers, agencies or vendors in other countries
• Who represent multinational or foreign clients
• Who manage or participate in global client teams or project teams
• Who take expatriate assignments, internal secondments (i.e., short-term assignments to one of the firm’s offices in another country), or extended business travel to other countries
• Who hire lawyers or manage law offices in other countries
• Who evaluate the performance of or make promotion decisions about lawyers in other countries.

It is also becoming critical for in-house counsel to be culturally intelligent. At a recent meeting of more than 100 senior corporate counsel, 38.2% said that readiness to meet the demands of global growth was the greatest challenge facing their legal departments.3 Today’s corporate counsel need to “think beyond the perspectives of the home country,” and many corporations are actively recruiting lawyers who have international work experience and multicultural points of view.4

Understand Cultural Competence—Which Goes Beyond Diversity

While the legal profession now devotes considerable resources to diversity training and initiatives, cultural competence goes beyond the kind of diversity that is usually addressed. American diversity programming deals with cultural differences but the focus is on diversity within the context of American culture. Cultural competence places diversity in a global framework. It involves the ability to function in settings where American values and norms do not prevail, and refers to the ability to navigate through a strange environment when you are the cultural outsider.

Employers who recognize the value of cultural competence and develop their lawyers’ cultural intelligence can have a distinct competitive advantage in the marketplace. By preparing lawyers to meet the especially demanding nature of working and managing in a global environment, employers can minimize culture-based misunderstandings and errors, leading to better quality legal work and higher satisfaction for both clients and lawyers.

Improving cultural competence can also result in greater profitability. In a survey of 450 managers in multi-national companies, McKinsey found that effective management of cultural diversity in a global setting was highly correlated with financial success as measured by profit per employee.5 In companies with proficient cross-cultural management, they found that foreign office profits increased through higher productivity, more cross-selling, client expansion, work referrals from other offices, and leveraging of global resources.