And that has resulted in the world being drenched in legal publications covering all the developed jurisdictions and ranging from daily and weekly newspapers to highly specific, black-letter law journals targeted at specialists who could probably be counted on the fingers of two hands.

Time poor

Why on earth, then, asks any reasonable person, do we need another player in what is already such a crowded field?
The answer is: precisely because the market is so overflowing. Today’s top flight business lawyers – whether in private practice or as part of corporate in-house teams – have demands on their time that their predecessors of only a generation ago couldn’t have imagined. Globalisation, the explosion in cross-border trade and deals and the resultant rise of international dispute resolution, and modern communication technology have combined to make the practice of modern business law a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation.
So while lawyers may love to read, increasingly they haven’t got anything like the time required to read all the publications available that are of potentially vital interest to their practices.

Contentious commentary

The Global Lawyer -- which launches this week -- is the filter those lawyers and other legal sector professionals need.
Every fortnight in hard copy, and every day on line, we highlight the main issues that top flight lawyers need to have on their radar screens, ranging from legal practice developments, to sector-specific updates.
But we do more than that. The Global Lawyer analyses the main issues, putting them into a wider context, as well as providing original, thought-provoking and contentious commentary from the world’s most influential lawyers and others connected to the legal world.
For example, in this launch issue, two leading sport law specialists warn that one of the jewels of the international sporting crown, the Olympic Games, is potentially wide open to cheating and corruption. It’s not a line that the image-paranoid London organisers of this summer’s games will want to hear, but it is a crucial message nonetheless.

Outright threats

The international legal profession is experiencing a period of monumental change. On the one hand, it is arguably more successful than ever, if the booming number of practising lawyers in North America, Europe and Asia is a reliable measure.

However, there are significant uncertainties and outright threats facing lawyers. Not least are the on-going ramifications of the global financial crisis and the downwards fee pressure being piled on private practice law firms by their corporate clients. Linked to that is a growing interest on the part of multi-national corporations and other businesses in the outsourcing of some legal functions to some of the world’s cheaper jurisdictions.
And perhaps the most profound development is currently emerging from England, where the creation of alternative business structures is on the brink of spawning the first publically listed international law firm. Indeed, external investment in law firms triggers the most volatile of debates within the legal profession.
Those debates will only increase in volume over the coming months, and The Global Lawyer will be here to sift through the verbiage to provide the nuggets of wisdom.