As a legal aid union president in New Haven, laboring within shouting distance of a different large research university, I recall how our membership rolled our eyes when Professors Greiner, Pattanayak, and Hennesy of Harvard published their study providing evidence, through a randomized control trial, that law clinic housing work made no difference for clients.1 Representing, as I was, “lawyers, secretaries, and paralegals who have dedicated their careers to serving poor clients in crisis,”2 the authors’ conclusion generated first shock, then denial, and then an anxious realization that somebody’s job was to research and disseminate such conclusions. In a 2013 United States where there was one legal aid lawyer for every 8,893 people who qualified,3 where federal Legal Services Corporation funding had dropped 40% over ten years in real dollars,4 and in an America that spends as much on Halloween costumes for its pets as it does legal aid for the poor,5 the inquiry felt like a pile-on. It made no more sense to us than asking if a teacher is “good for students,” a nurse “good for the sick,” or a chef “good for the hungry.”6

The narrative that banks, government departments and state-owned enterprises are the foremost protagonists in shaping China's outbound capital flows has been a commonplace view. This article seeks to expand the focus to include other under-scrutinised players: lawyers. With reference to exporting industries (such as shipping and natural gas), this article explains how lawyers – in tandem with China's governmental and judicial organs – have shifted from enabling outflows to postponing them, as a result of China's Covid-19 force majeure regime. Even with capital on pause, Covid-19 has also kept lawyers busy, prompting them to think about how to maximise their firm's proximity to the clients they have and to new clients that they want to win. Accordingly, this article also provides an overview of the techniques used by predominantly Anglo-American law firms to gain access to new legal markets during Covid-19, with a view to winning more work from Chinese capital-exporters and their foreign counterparties.

This article explores the process and impact of liberalisation on the legal profession in England and Wales. Liberalisation brings a tendency to consider the profession in market-focused terms, with the professional–client relationship reconfigured in overtly economic fashion as constituting the interaction of supply and demand. The article examines the past and present structure of the profession, arguments for liberalisation and manifestations of liberalisation efforts. Having identified the distinctive dynamics of supply and demand within legal services markets, the article considers the potential implications, both immediate and in broader societal terms, of reconceptualising the legal profession in this manner.

Simon Drane writes that the next decade will see a shift within legal service provision, where it will transition from a model which is predominantly geared around internal work processes to one that is geared around customer outcomes. Law firms will complete their evolution from a bill by the hour service-based model to something closer to a product subscription model. This shift will deliver growth, sustainable recurring revenues at high margins and new higher value service opportunities. At the core of this shift is the changing nature of consumption driven by consumer technology and the inexorable drive for base level information to become free. Law firms are sitting on vast quantities of data, and yet very few are currently harnessing this effectively in their offerings. The effective use of data combined with technology will allow innovative organisations to provide a new form of productised offering which will not only drive new recurring revenues but will allow them to offer higher value business advisory services. Whereas effective use of data within the organisation will lead to better evolutionary efficiency, quality and risk management, the use of data externally for clients will lead to more revolutionary changes. It will also blur the lines further between traditional law firms and LegalTech product businesses, in the way alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) and the Big Four are already exploring.

The development of artificial intelligence has created new opportunities and challenges in industries. The competition between robots and humans has elicited extensive attention among legal researchers. In this exploratory study, we addressed issues regarding the introduction of robots to the practice of legal service through a semistructured interviews with lawyers, judges, artificial intelligence experts, and potential clients. An extended robot lawyer technology acceptance model with five facets and 11 elements is proposed in this study. This model highlights two dimensions: ‘legal use’ and ‘perception of trust.’ In summary, this study provides new specific implications and exhibits three characteristics, namely, derivative, macroscopic, and instructive, in the legal services with artificial intelligence. In addition, artificial intelligence robot lawyers are being developed with some of the abilities necessary to substitute for human beings. Nevertheless, working with human lawyers is imperative to produce benefits from this type of reciprocity.

In Japan, an increasing number of elderly people are facing legal issues. However, whether they have enough access to legal services remains unclear. Therefore, this study used a mixed-methods approach—web and interview surveys—to identify elderly people’s experience with legal problems, factors that affect their decisions to consult lawyers about their problems, and factors that relate to their knowledge about the availability of legal consultation. Results showed that legal problems were related to issues with family or relatives. Second, elderly people did not consult lawyers if they could solve problems on their own, felt helpless, or lacked a connection with legal professionals. Third, respondents who had knowledge about the availability of legal consultation were male or working elderly. The overall results suggest that elderly people are not homogeneous, and more support is needed for those who feel helpless or lack knowledge about legal consultation.

Beyond the esoteric deliberations of Islamic jurists and their exegesis of criminal and private law doctrines, Iranian law lives a life of its own. It is a life of routine practices of judges, court clerks, lawyers and clients, each of whom is striving to turn the law to their own advantage. It is also a life of contested legality, a relentless struggle over the right to determine the law in a juridical field which is infused with strife and hostility. These conflicts are reproduced daily as two competing conceptions of law, and their corresponding perceptions of legality clash in pursuit of justice. The Iranian judiciary’s concept of law, its reconstruction of Islamic jurisprudence and methods of dispensing justice, which on the surface are reminiscent of Max Weber’s “qādi-justice,” collide with the legal profession’s formal rational understanding thereof. However, Iranian judges are not Weberian qādis, and the legal profession is not a homogenous group of attorneys driven by a collective commitment to the rule of law. To understand their conflict, we need to explore the mundane workings of the legal system in the context of the transformation of Iranian society and the unresolved disputes over the direction of its modernity.

This article is written by Clare Cowling, Director, Legal Records at Risk Project, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. Her article explores the hypothesis that modern private sector legal records are more at risk of loss than their historical equivalents. There are many reasons for this, but one factor, detailed in this article, appears to be the indifference or reluctance of legal practitioners themselves. The LRAR project seeks to allay any concerns practitioners may have about confidentiality and to raise their awareness of the potential commercial and historic value of their legal records. It will do this by a combination of case studies, interviews with stakeholders and investigations into the current information management and archiving practices of institutions specialised to law. In so doing it will provide guidance and advice on the more cost-effective management and preservation of legal records so that the history of change to non-governmental legal services in the UK over the past century will be accurately documented.

This piece, by Celine Kelly, is a report on a paper that was presented at the JSI 2013 in Melbourne and explores the key points made by Andrew Godwin on the globalisation and liberalisation of legal services in the Australasia region. The talk included a discussion on the pros and cons of globalisation and case studies of legal services in South Korea, Singapore, Japan, China, India and Australia.

While numerous contemporary studies, in both social psychology and sociology of the law, have addressed legal socialization and legal consciousness on the part of individuals, little work has been done on the complex social construction of the need and demand for legal services. This is by no means a rhetorical question; it involves a number of competing definitions of the relationship between the legal profession and the public, and thus justifies the legal services currently offered. The author shows that policies relating to access to the law and the justice system in France today seek to focus on the user, which means that users must be able to characterize their situation in legal terms and apply to the courts. The process of raising individuals' consciousness of the law is examined against the backdrop of increasing liberalization of social policies.