Obstacles And Challenges Ahead For The Legal Services Due To Globalization

Globalization has not only affected the business sector in a positive manner but it has also affected the legal profession as well. It is true that globalization has brought  a revolution in international trade and there is an increasing involvement and participation of foreign countries in the domestic economies. It has provided greater and easy access of foreign investors and business entities but the implication of it on the legal service marketplace cannot be overlooked. Such implications in the corporate legal arena have been both qualitative and quantitative and in the past decade this impact of revolution is the strongest.
 
Need For Professional Legal Services
 
The legal service marketplace has been facing a lot of challenges due to such revolutionary impact in their activities that includes project financing, competition law, intellectual property protection, corporate taxation, environmental protection, infrastructure contract, insurance, investment law and corporate governance. However, this wide variety of services was hardly known before 1990’s and most of the law firms were incapable of dealing with such jobs. Therefore, it became evident that the need of professional legal service was tremendous which is why in the last few years several Litigation firm in Delhi, individuals and in-house firms in large numbers came into existence.
 
Engagement Of The Law Firms
 
The periphery of work of the law firms is now not restricted to resolving disputes and partitions of assets any more. Their service and engagement now includes dealing with loan instruments, power and vendor contracts, writing the infrastructural contracts, drafting of project finance, reports and contract analysis. They also work on finalizing transnational investments and technology transfer and joint venture contracts. This is an astute shift that helps a lot in easy and effective disposition of the emerging legal sectors. It helps in settling different disputes in more innovative and effective way such as the ADRS instead of using the conventional method of adversarial litigation mode for resolving disputes.
 
Meeting The Expanded Demand
 
The Legal firm in India must now meet the expanded demand of legal services both internally and externally that has been brought in by globalization of industries and rise in international trade and commerce. It is significant for progressive development in this age of globalization. The future of the Indian law firms is bright enough provided they know how to tackle and keep up with such ever increasing demand to ensure growth and expansion. Managing talent, creating better business strategies and implementing them, instituting business support system and proper processes is the need of the hour.
 
Prospect Of Liberalisation
 
The most significant challenge faced especially by the Legal services for startups is to face and adapt the prospect of liberalization. Most of the firms do not encourage such liberalisation and worry about its impact on the legal industry. These firms anticipate that it will have the same impact on them as it has on the accounting firms of the country. On the other hand, there are a few firms that are cautious about such alliances with the foreign companies. They fear that it will lead to loss of referrals.
 
Loss of opportunity
 
This anticipation is not unnatural and therefore it is required to consider the likelihood of any lost opportunities before building any relationship. The cultural differences and its impact on expectations and relationships are significant. Apart from that foreign law firms often recruit Indian lawyers as their partners, trainees or associates in their branch offices. This results in a significant ‘brain drain’ from India. This is why the Indian government and BCI have decided to decline or delay liberalization of legal services making it difficult by the Indian law firms to compete at international level.