Module 6

Legal cultures and professional norms: how lawyers, contracts and courts differ across systems

Lawyers carry their legal system around with them. A lawyer trained in a tradition that favours long, detailed contracts expects a contract to answer every question in advance. A lawyer trained in a tradition with comprehensive codes expects the code to supply the answers, so that the contract can be short. One expects to find facts by questioning witnesses in court, another by studying the file. In one system a lawyer’s conversations with a client are protected from disclosure, in another the protection is narrower, wider or different in kind. None of this is a flaw, but it causes friction, and sometimes serious harm, when lawyers from different traditions meet and each assumes that the other shares the same defaults. This module describes common differences in legal culture and professional norms, in the form of tendencies, with the warning that no legal system is a single thing: every country has its own variants, its own mixture of traditions and its own individuals. The aim is to ask better questions and not to hold a stereotype of a system. See Comparative Law and the Legal Families Atlas on this site for the legal systems themselves.

General education on communicating across cultures, using invented people, companies and places. It is not legal advice and does not describe any nation or group as a whole. Rules on bribery, privilege, confidentiality, data protection and professional conduct differ between countries and change: check the rules that apply to you.