How Foreign Lawyers Failed to Colonise India


Recently the big corporate law firm of Amarchand Mangaldas split between two brothers, Cyril and Shardul Shroff. The settlement is published above. The division allowed outsiders in to the strange world of Indian law firms, generally private and very profitable. Although the number of corporate law firms in India is small they are powerful. The number of lawyers in India is huge, however. Together both have resisted and repelled attempts by foreign law firms (UK and US) to set up offices in India.

As part of the GLEE project at Harvard Law School under the direction of David Wilkins, I've written a chapter for a forthcoming book The Indian Legal Profession in an Age of Globalization (eds) David B. Wilkins, Vikramaditya Khanna and David M. Trubek, Cambridge University Press. The paper is available on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2629429.

My chapter is "Theories of Law Firm Globalization in the Shadow of Colonialism: A Cultural and Institutional Analysis of English and Indian Corporate Law Firms in the 20th and 21st Centuries".

The abstract reads: For many years foreign law firms have been trying to establish themselves in India. But the resistance from the Indian legal profession is so strong they have successfully prevented any establishment. The Indian government has from time to time tried to enable foreign law firms to enter the Indian legal market but without success. The paper examines the legal cultural and institutional reasons for this predicament. I argue that although India has a highly regulated market its corporate law firms are antithetical in their organisation and culture to the way the big global UK law firms are organised. In order to aspire to the 'single firm' ideal UK law firms have invested heavily in developing their normative and cultural positions. This enables UK law firms to exist almost independently of regulation because they have shifted the burden of organisational control from outside to within the firm. In these respects Indian law firms are weakly organised because they hew to kinship, family based structures that resemble the 19th century iteration of the UK law firm. There is also the colonial legacy that lives on in India and the struggles of the new international law firms appears very much like a new imperialism, hence the fear and rejection.


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