GLEE India

The GLEE India research team is pursuing the first comprehensive set of studies examining the changes in the Indian corporate legal sector and its effects throughout the legal profession.

Since the Project on Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies inception, a large percentage of its focus and research has been on the interaction between globalization and the legal profession in the Indian context. India’s recent impressive economic growth has been accompanied by substantial economic and legal reforms that have brought about seismic changes to the Indian corporate sector, legal system and the legal profession. Indeed, over the last two decades India’s lawyers have grappled with the changes wrought by globalization and liberalization against the background of the world’s largest and most heterogeneous democracy.

Has India’s global shift since 1991 produced a distinct corporate hemisphere of the Indian bar, and if so what are its central attributes?
Introduction, The Indian Legal Profession in the Age of Globalization

The GLEE India research team is pursuing the first comprehensive set of studies examining the changes in the Indian corporate legal sector and its effects throughout the legal profession. This includes studying Indian and foreign law firms, in house counsel, legal process outsourcing, trade law capacity and capacity building, senior advocates, legal profession regulation, legal education, the role of gender, small town lawyers, diversity concerns, and pro bono and public interest lawyering. Using surveys, interviews, participant observation, and archival research, GLEE’s India research contributes to a richer and more textured understanding of the substantial changes to the corporate sector of the Indian legal profession as well as its relationship to the developments in the legal professions in Brazil, China, and other emerging economies.

GLEE’s research in India has yielded over 20 high-quality academic papers which were recently published by Cambridge University Press in The Indian Legal Profession in the Age of Globalization: The Rise of the Corporate Legal Sector and its Impact on Lawyers and Society (David B. Wilkins, Vikramaditya S. Khanna and David M. Trubek, eds.)