How Do You Avoid Malpractice When Representing Clients in Foreign and International Matters?
Many attorneys representing domestic clients extend their legal advice to foreign and international matters. Unfortunately, some of these attorneys are ill-prepared to provide this advice. Not only are they not familiar with the basic operation of other legal systems, such as those derived from the Civil Law tradition, they are unfamiliar even with the Common Law systems that vary from the U.S.
Domestically, a lawyer is rarely found to have committed malpractice merely because she or he is unfamiliar with the current state of the law in her or his own state, much less other states or federal law. Rather, the presumption is that she or he has sufficient general familiarity with the law and possesses the skills necessary to collect knowledge about the law to provide effective counsel. This is true even for highly specific legal subject matters such as antitrust or securities law (the one significant exception may be patent law). So, if a practitioner does not commit malpractice when advising a client without knowledge of the specific domestic law, why would the standard differ for foreign and international legal matters?