Brazil | “Foreign Lawyers Represent A Threat to Public Order!

Demarest & Aleida, one of the city’s most cosmopolitan firms, is the anchor tenant of the hideious Tomei Ohtake building, a local landmark.

writing in the legal affairs tabloid Consultor Jurídico, DURVAL DE NORONHA GOYOS says: Gringos go home!

My translation of the headline of the piece is quite accurate and literate. I translate some excerpts.

A number of foreign law firms have been established in Brazil recently to provide legal advice..The pace of this processes has been quickened by the favorable economic conditions that visibly obtain here, but are also explained by the crisis that has befallen some of the traditional providers of foreign legal counsel and the emptying out of their client portfolios.

Strategists from the hegemonic countries have been noting this loss of productivity for 20 years not. During the  Uruguai round of the GATT talks, for example, begun in 1986 and concluded in 1993, the liberalization of outside legal services was on the agenda. At the time, the USA and EU wanted to open up the markets of the developing nations while keeping their own markets closed..

This  this hegemonic aspiration became obvious during the talks, it was never discussed in a multilateral setting.. This did not prevent U.S. and U.K. government agencies to seek privileged access to our markets for their lawyers on a bilateral basis.

Even as they launched these campaign, however, they kept their markets closed to lawyers from abroad, and particularly from countries in development. The main barrier has been a horizontal one: restrictions on the movements of attorneys. That’s how it is in the U.S. and that’s how it is in the EU.

Brazilian firms with offices in the EU send lawyers with dual nationality, one of them being European.  In the U.K., brazilian barristers who wish to pass the bar face many more examinations than we observe in other parts of the world, violating the most favored national clause of the multilateral trade agreements..

In the U.S., some states, such as Flórida, prevent foreign firms from hiring local lawyers. The immigration process presents another major barrier to entry by firms from developing nations like Braxil.

RESOLVED: That the United States hereby quits all claims and disavows all responsibility for the tribal anarchist zones of Texas, Florida and Ohio. Florida and Texas revert to their original owners — Spain and Mexico — whereas Ohio will be treated as a free range territory for militiamen, klanners and other social undesirables.

In some jurisdictions abroad, as in the U.K., those providing legal services are no longer attorneys, despite international conventions on the subject ratified by the European CCBE. Organized as investment banks, they may provide services through personnel who are not trained lawyers.

This is the “litigation hedge-fund” model you hear about, I suppose. .

And so on from the pages of Conjur. Our author concludes

Some unenlightened voices in Brazil believe the phenomenon is an outgrowth of globalization. These people do not realize that in countries where these organizations exist, there is no such thing as globalization, thanks to the institutionalized protectionism driven by self-interest. Worse, they cannot see the enormous threat this trend poses to public order in Brasil.