The Rise of the Corporate Legal Elite in the BRICS: Implications for Global Governance

IntroductionThe BRICS-Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa-have been at the center of recent debates about the economic and political power shift from the traditional centers in the Global North to the rising pow- ers of the Global South. This transformation began in the 1990s as each of the BRICS undertook economic reforms through which each coun- try has more or less opened its markets to become more deeply inte- grated into the world economy.1 Since 2000, the BRICS deepened their connection-and their impact on the world economy-by shifting from a model of globalization based primarily on inbound investment, to one in which companies based in these jurisdictions are also significant sources of outward investment.2 The economic and political effects of these efforts are dramatic. By 2020, the combined economic output of Brazil, China, and India alone will surpass the aggregate production of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.3 As a political cooperation mechanism, BRICS has gone beyond being an acronym to emerge as a force for advancing the countries' joint interests, promoting multi-polarity and coordinating responses to key global challenges.4Predictably, the opening of the BRICS markets and their increas- ing influence on the world stage has fueled a growing demand within each country for new laws, regulations, and administrative apparatus to govern this new economic activity and to interface with the broader economic and political environment.5 This, in turn has created the need for lawyers who are capable of practicing law within this new legal and regulatory environment, particularly in corporate law fields such as mergers and acquisitions, project finance, securities, and initial public offerings which have been fueled by the rapid rise in the number of foreign and domestic companies operating in the BRICS.6 Although each of the BRICS countries has, to a greater or lesser extent, called on the growing number of international law firms seeking to serve these new markets to provide this necessary expertise-a subject to which we will return below7-each has also developed an important domestic corporate legal sector as well. Today, this new BRICS corporate legal elite, by which we mean lawyers who work in law firms based in these jurisdictions that serve a clientele composed primarily of foreign and domestic corporations, and lawyers who work in the internal legal de- partments of the growing number of corporations based in the BRICS, has significantly increased in size and importance in each of these ju- risdictions.8 Each country can now boast of several law firms comprised of hundreds-and in the case of China, more than one thousand- lawyers, as well as corporate legal departments, such as the five- hundred-lawyer general counsel office of India's Tata Group, that are almost as large.9Both the rise of the BRICS as important economic powers and the resulting creation of a new and increasingly vibrant corporate legal sec- tor in these countries have been the subject of significant scholarly in- quiry by both international relations scholars and academics writing about the sociology of the legal profession. Not surprisingly, the former have tended to focus on the BRICS countries as rising powers in global governance, while the latter have concentrated on how the new corpo- rate legal sector in these countries has emerged, and the resulting struggle between these "domestic" providers and the "foreign" lawyers who also seek to serve these lucrative legal markets.10 Relatively little of this rich literature, however, addresses the intersection of these two de- velopments by examining the possible implications of the rising corpo- rate legal elite in the BRICS for global governance itself.This lack of attention is particularly noteworthy given the long tra- dition across multiple disciplines of studying the important role played by lawyers in the United States and other Western democracies in do- mestic governance. …