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Globalization as Boundary-Blurring: International and Local Law Firms in China's Corporate Law Market

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Sida Liu
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Abstract

The worldwide expansion of international law firms has generated regulatory battles and workplace conflicts in advanced market economies as well as developing countries. This article uses the case of China to explore the changing global–local relationship in the globalization of the legal profession and to understand the role of the government in constituting the corporate law market. The author argues that the globalization of the Chinese corporate law market is a process of boundary-blurring and hybridization, by which local firms become structurally global-looking and global firms receive localized expertise. Boundary-blurring occurs in law firms' workplaces, in lawyers' career trajectories, and in state regulatory policies. It has produced a localized expertise that can be diffused conversely from local firms to global firms and has partially changed their relationship from collaboration to competition. Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult for the government to make or enforce any substantive policy to clarify the market boundary between these two types of law firms.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , December 2008 , pp. 771 - 804
Copyright
© 2008 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

Financial support for this project was provided by research fellowships from the University of Chicago, the American Bar Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I would like to thank Andrew Abbott, Ellen C. Berrey, Robert Dingwall, John Hagan, Terence C. Halliday, John P. Heinz, Elizabeth Mertz, Robert L. Nelson, Randall Peerenboom, Christopher W. Schmidt, Carole Silver, and anonymous reviewers of the Law & Society Review for their comments on earlier drafts. The fieldwork benefited from the enormously helpful support from many of my alumni at Peking University School of Law and other colleagues in Beijing and Shanghai, whose names have to remain anonymous. The American Bar Foundation Research Seminar provided excellent ideas and suggestions for the revision of the article. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for all the errors and problems in the text.

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