Launching the Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies (GLEE) Project in ASEAN

ASEAN ESG Future of law GLEE

Insight August 24, 2023

On August 5 following “The Next Frontier of Lawyering” conference at Singapore Management University, the Center on the Legal Profession hosted an invite-only workshop in Singapore to launch the Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies (GLEE) project in the ASEAN region (comprising Brunei Darussalam, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam). Previous GLEE research projects have focused on India, Brazil, China, and South Africa.

During the event, academics and practitioners from across the ASEAN region considered the development of new corporate legal systems in the 1990s across Asia, Latin America, and Africa. ASEAN is already set to be a hub for legal innovation, GLEE is guided by four primary research questions:

How have “global” models of corporate legal practice shaped the development of a new corporate legal ecosystem in each country, and what factors have contributed to this process?
How has each country’s unique political, economic, professional, and social environment shaped these global transplants and the corporate ecosystem generally to produce distinctly indigenous institutions and practices?
How is this new corporate ecosystem influencing developments in other sectors of the legal profession e.g. legal education, professional regulation, innovation and technology, the role of lawyers in the state, etc?
How is it transforming each country’s economic, political, and social development and and growing influence in the world?

During the workshop, participants were divided into working groups where they investigated topics such as regulation, the corporate core, technology, public policy, and legal education.

View the workshop opening presentation here

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