Cultural competence in legal practice - the imperative for cultural effectiveness 220316

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Cross cultural issues in legal practice
Why lawyers need to become culturally effective
Culture was once considered only an issue for public interest lawyers or marginalised populations.
This is where cultural issues still have the greatest profile and impact. But culture is now relevant
across all sectors, as transactions and legal disputes move to a more culturally diverse arena.
We live and work in an extremely culturally complex world. The consequences of this cultural
complexity have long had a bearing in the practice and evolution of the law here in Australia and
globally.
But there’s a greater imperative more than ever to be skilful in navigating through these cultural
complexities. Even as law and culture have been undergoing a process of separation, with the move
from local, moral and social norms through to legislation and the domination of the legal systems of
destination countries, on the other hand culturally diverse groups, people and jurisdictions are
coming together as never before to do business, recreate and co-exist in shifting locations and
collections of people by means of the law and regulation.
The success of all this depends on the capability of the legal profession to respond skilfully to these
changing cultural realities.
In our home environment and globally, from one-person micro legal firms to international
corporations, awareness and flexibility about different cultures and practices is key. In legal practice,
as with any other profession and across business, practitioners’ legal expertise and experience and
sector awareness aren’t enough: cross-cultural understanding is a must.
This means people who work in the law need to be more culturally effective if they’re going to be
effective in achieving outcomes for clients, the firm and for our society and economy.
Across the legal community and the law enforcement community, organisations and practitioners,
particularly in commercial law and law enforcement, have some way to go to step up to today’s
cultural demands. With the current strong focus on cultural diversity in the workplace and better
company culture, the need for legal practitioners to be culturally effective needs to take place as
part of this discourse.
A job to do
Lawyers, paralegal professionals, litigation support officers, support staff and law enforcers in the
community have the immediate task at hand of dealing with the needs and issues arising from a
highly diverse clientele who come from culturally complex contexts which underpin the legal issues
they are involved with.
Lawyers are quick to agree that that grand old description of the legal profession as a slow moving
ship, averse to change, still holds true. But even though the legal profession functions on the past,
with legal precedents from legislature and the courts dictating outcomes, that same past shows us
how the law has been responsive to cultural change. Not only that, the law has provided a steady
anchor that’s allowed practitioners, business, our leaders and statespersons and the community to
manage that change.
Australia is in an especially fortunate position to have that steady anchor together with greater
socio-cultural and political dexterity and stability than elsewhere in adapting to and steering change.
When it comes to dealing with cultural change and cultural issues that have a bearing on legal
practice, all practitioners, whether they are aware of it or not, make constant small adjustments to
how they provide legal services, with changing client and colleague profiles, ever-evolving
technology and different business models. All of this builds on that past and ensures – imperfectly,
it’s true – that the practice and profile of the legal profession aren’t an anachronism.
But one area where the legal community noticeably lags behind other professional communities in
Australia is addressing this question:

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In a culturally diverse world environment how can we be more effective in our legal practice
by becoming more culturally effective?
How can legal practitioners embrace cultural effectiveness as a core professional skill, not a
‘nice to have’?
What do we need to do to develop those skills?
What can the legal community do to provide a supportive space where practitioners can
improve their cultural skills and apply them without fear of making mistakes, fear of dealing
with client and colleague behaviours they see but don’t understand, fear of people who are
‘different’, fear of losing face or the notion that they’re wasting precious billable time?
The case to make here is therefore for why legal practitioners should be more culturally effective in
their practice of the law. The case will be made and argued in broad reference to aspects of legal
practice, and through sharing insights into what legal professionals think about the way culture
impacts on practising the law and how they deal with cultural challenges.
As part of this, participants will be invited to share their own insights and ideas and thoughts about
how culture impacts their own practice and what they have done to overcome cultural challenges in
the everyday process of practising law.
Finally, broad recommendations will be made for how lawyers can realistically build on their cultural
effectiveness.
Culture – what is it?
There are many definitions of definitions of ‘culture’ but for this presentation we will use a definition
coined by the great Geert Hoefstede Dutch social psychologist, well known for his pioneering
research on cross-cultural groups and organisations. Hoefstede defines culture as:
a ‘collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or
category of people from another’.
This definition has a really contemporary ring and also gets to the heart of why people find it so
confronting to deal with cultural difference. It’s because we are wired a certain way and essentially
you can’t unwire yourself.
The core of that collective programming, including the programming of a workplace, is formed by
values, beliefs and principles. These values shape our tendencies to prefer certain state of affairs to
others. You’ll often hear these tendencies referred to as unconscious bias.
Workplace culture combines the structure of the organisation, the personalities of its individual
employees and the methods people use to interact and network with each other.
This unconscious, collective programming forms a sort of internal navigational system for the way
we conduct our social and professional lives. We are surrounded by a multiplicity of behaviours,
signs, and codes (including legal codes) that reinforce those values and tendencies. We instinctively
cling to them when we’re faced with difference or uncertainty.
But increasingly, in our world and in our work, we’re confronted by behaviours, signs and codes that
challenge those values and tendencies. We can bunker down under a Donald Trumpesque, ‘them-
and us’ mental wall against the barbarians at the gates. But that’s not really an option in legal
practice.
The task is therefore to find out how we can best improve our cultural effectiveness in our legal
practice: that is, to have the ability to adapt our behaviours – smoothly and successfully – to the
demands of different cultural encounters without losing ourselves or the integrity of our practice in
the process.
It is challenging to understand one’s own wiring and that of others, then work out how to effectively
manoeuvre between them. Above all, it is a challenge to find the desire and willingness to make
those small, but often confronting, adjustments to do so.

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How do we become more skilled at understanding or being alert to each other’s’ different values,
behaviours and codes so that when we come to applying the legal filter, we can apply that more
effectively?
A useful way to start thinking about the cultural aspects of your legal practice is by constructing a
cultural iceberg. Applying the cultural iceberg concept to the legal community and legal practice,
above the surface are the visible aspects of culture which are easy to see. Because we see them we
can more easily respond to them. But by far the biggest part of culture is hidden below the surface,
the invisible rules and values that define each culture.
To put these aspects of culture into broader perspective before we consider specific cultural issues,
it’s useful to take a quick bird’s eye view of Australia’s legal landscape.
Our legal landscape
Australia’s legal landscape has been described as follows:
‘One of the most ‘structurally diverse, geographically dispersed, and unintegrated’ in the Western
world, with ‘an unusually wide variety of patterns of practice’. The past two decades has seen a
large increase in the number of lawyers, as well as a strong growth in the international trade of
legal services by national and multinational law firms in Australia.
The legal profession is highly stratified and culturally diverse, with differences according to type
of practice, areas of specialisation, clientele, geographical location (urban, suburban or rural),
experience, prestige, income and political influence. Commercial lawyers – both barristers and
solicitors who work in large city law firms – are the professional leaders in status and income. In
spite of this diversity and fragmentation, the culture of the legal profession is, by its tradition of
respecting precedents and established doctrines, often regarded as predominantly conservative
with a predisposition towards preserving the status quo. initiatives of law schools to improve
access to legal education among disadvantaged groups, Australian lawyers are ‘predominantly
drawn from elite social backgrounds in terms of socioeconomic class, private schooling, family
connections and other key indicators’.
This description already identifies some of the challenges for the legal community to work with
cultural difference but also for legal organisations, especially in commercial law, to evolve so they
are more culturally flexible, enriched internally by less culturally narrow behaviours and
professionally stronger as a result of the cultural skills that are brought to their practice.
One way in which Australian legal culture has clearly evolved has been to shift from a more
interpersonal approach to integrating with the corporate culture of the commercial world. Where
the legal profession is still marching to its own tune is that the commercial world is some way ahead
in recognising and starting to act on the need for cultural effectiveness to be effective in business.
Commercial firms’ concern with profit has over time entrenched the culture and behaviours
associated with billable hours and in turn the number of hours worked. As a result, working long
hours, efforts to adapt to the time zones of global clients and colleagues, and efforts the quota of
billable hours have become expected practice in large law firms. This in itself is a manifestation of
culture that has been somewhat resistant to calls to change. We will return to the issue of time, as
the constraints of time and the culture of the billable hour also deeply impacts the way that lawyers
approach and work through the cultural aspects of law, as well as being a significant feature itself of
cultural difference.
Competition is a feature of legal culture, starting from entry into top law firms, to the race for
‘prestige, recognition and key clients’, and ‘performance in terms of revenue, outcomes in court and
retention of key clients’. Cultural effectiveness as a component of performance success is semi-
buried inside all of that, so it needs to be pulled out and given due consideration.

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Changing laws and legislation for a changing world
With the massive displacement of people around the world since the 1500s and the emergence of
legal positivism in the 19th
century, the source of law has shifted over time from local, moral and
social norms to legislation. British, French, Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, to name the
biggest influencers, transplanted foreign legal cultures into the environment of local customs and
legal systems. With global migration the cultural values and legal environments of migrant
communities have been pitted against the majority cultural values that are preserved in the legal
systems of destination countries like Australia. The more recent aspects of global business have
folded over yet another layer where those majority values are juxtaposed against those of partner
jurisdictions and the two are constantly renegotiating a middle ground that can accommodate
both. This also has consequences for ongoing changes to legal systems, around issues such as
corruption and intellectual property.
As a result of this inevitable change, and with gradual recognition and acknowledgement of this
change, successive governments over time have made policy, legislation and constitutional
adjustments. Two major areas have been the abandonment of assimilation policy for
multiculturalism and the recognition of First Australians, including constitutional change granting
Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders the right to vote, the abandonment of the concept of terra
nullius and the recognition of native title as part of common law.
Australia’s legal system has also evolved to adjust to Australia’s evolving cultural profile and the shift
in values and behaviours that this has brought. Australia’s legal system has also responded to the
expanding presence and importance of international law as the country has exerted its presence and
footprint globally.
Over time, therefore, there has been deep responsiveness to change. This says much Australians and
Australian law makers that, overall for the better, they have ‘brought the law along’ with broader
socio-cultural change.
Across the community, in spite of undercurrents of ethnic and racial bias and misunderstanding, there
has been responsiveness to change and the legal community has been part of this responsiveness by
demonstrating cultural sensitivity and listening to two sides of an issue.
This is vividly illustrated by Chuen Lim, of Leem Lawyers, a commercial firm that works across a sizeable
cultural spectrum in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and mainland China. Chuen was
approached by Melbourne City Councillor Wellington Lee as Secretary of Chinese Chamber of
Commerce to speak with a group of Chinese restauranteurs who were appearing before the Melbourne
Magistrates Court for filthy restaurant conditions. At one stage the cascade of court orders was
causing considerable tension and the loss of face and reputation was unbearable.
‘I went to the restaurants and spoke to some of the owners. And I said: ‘What seems to be the
problem? Why can’t you keep it clean?’ And one of the guys, out of frustration he told me, in anger,
‘Mr Lim! Do you know I have been running restaurants for twenty years? This is the cleanest restaurant
in my life!’ And then I realised that expectations were different. Standards were different. The City
Council says ‘You’re not clean’. But as far as he was concerned, in his understanding, it was the
cleanest restaurant he had ever run in his life. And one of problems was the City Council didn’t have
Chinese officers. And I think over the course of time they brought in Chinese officers and that resolved
it. To me, it’s just different understandings, different expectations that created the problem.’
But this diversity and these high-level responses to cultural changes have not been consistently
matched by a focus on developing the cultural skills of lawyers down at the coalface of working in a
culturally complex and diverse world. The legal profession, ponderous as it is, has a lot of catching up
to do.
The legal community has been inconsistent in the way it has applied the awareness that not all
Australians think and behave as white Caucasians, and not all people that we interact with in the

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legal space globally share the same cultural reference points. It speaks volumes about deep
professional and social insularity.
Illustrating the insularity that still characterises Australia’s legal community, a partner in a small
Melbourne law firm commented recently:
‘Before I started in business I didn’t know what these other parts of Melbourne were. It was
like ‘I’m a celebrity get me outta here’, or ‘Wife Swap’. Before I started working with these
Greek people here (at his current practice) - I had no exposure to them. I didn’t know
anything about culture until I went back to legal practice. And I was a Commissioner in the
Victorian Multicultural Commission. I had my first Middle Eastern client, my first Afghani
client, my first Horn of Africa client, and my first Chinese client’.
This lawyer is a male, inner city dwelling, bilingual, non-Anglo Caucasian. He is very involved in his
own ethnic community and he would have been very aware of ‘ethnic issues’ and participated in a
lot of high level discussions. But he hadn’t experienced for himself what it meant to have to navigate
through cultural differences because they impact your business activities, your client relationships,
your professional reputation and your revenue base.
Cultural diversity initiatives – bridges or barriers?
It is not possible to speak about cultural effectiveness without considering cultural diversity in the
legal profession. That is, the profile of the legal profession is glaringly unrepresentative of
Australia’s demographics and the profile of its diverse clientele in Australia and abroad. As a
result, legal practitioners risk being less effective at understanding, representing and serving the
needs of our diverse business and broader community.
You’re representing me but do you represent me?
Statistics on the profile of Australia’s legal community are thin on the ground. Part of this is the way
that statistics are gathered in Australia, including by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and other
organisations that require form filling. What we do know is that Aboriginal people are grossly
underrepresented in the workforce generally. Asian Australians have barely scratched the surface in
the ethnically un-diverse judiciary. On this second finding, the Australian Asian Lawyers Association
had to scrape their findings together from a range of sources but the figures give a stark indication
of a ‘bamboo ceiling’ in the judiciary. Women and men are equally represented as practising
solicitors but we know that they are poorly represented at the partner level – you have only to look
at company websites to see this. People living with a disability seem to be a statistical non-presence
in the legal community.
Limitations of the unconscious bias and cultural diversity focus
Where people talk about culture and the legal profession, they tend to revert to the theme of
cultural diversity in the workplace and the unconscious cultural and structural biases that prevent
more people of different cultural backgrounds from getting into the workforce and progressing in
their career to the partner and board levels. Unconscious bias training is a powerful tool to start
examining these issues and turning the spotlight on our own tendencies.
But by focussing on difference, we run the risk of starting and ending with differences rather than
similarities. This is not a question of being ethnically ‘colour blind’ or about cultural melting pots
where we all emerge the same or having no regard to difference. But we need to be sure that we’re
building bridges and not barriers against to dealing with cultural differences when you’re seeking
satisfactory professional and life outcomes. In short, we get scared off or intimidated by difference,
or by what we think is difference. It can seem like an unbridgeable divide, with finger pointing on
both sides and fear and resistance to taking a step of faith across it.

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Cultural diversity in the workplace is a vital benchmark. There’s no doubt that the structural and
cultural rigidity of company hierarchies that put up barriers to cultural diversity in the workforce are
deep issues. When your leadership doesn’t reflect the diversity of your workforce and your
workforce doesn’t reflect the diversity of your clientele and the real world that legal practice is an
intimate part of, that impinges on your legal effectiveness and it has a financial impact.
Looking at the cultural profile of partners in Australia’s top law firms is not encouraging reading.
Many firms have spearheaded significant international partnerships and they have shared with the
legal community and the public lessons learned from the cultural struggles their people experienced
setting up these partnerships, achieving significant legal wins in unfamiliar environments and
counting the cost of failing to prepare properly and adapt culturally.
Indeed, the lack of cultural diversity at the top of these firms speaks volumes about underlying
reasons for their people’s struggles in an unfamiliar environment.
if you’re not sharing, learning from and applying those insights – if your team members aren’t
empowered, if they’re working in cultural or organisational silos; if they spend their life in the same
social circle doing the same things, then the point of cultural diversity is lost and your business
initiatives could go into retreat.
The message has come through loudly and clearly that fear, bigotry and resistance are holding back
real diversity in the legal profession. Even if you have the volume and fill your cultural diversity
quota, if your entire organisation is full of culturally diverse, fearful bigots, then it doesn’t do much
to promote career opportunities.
And it doesn’t necessarily help you deal with the bread-and-butter, every-day cultural aspects of
practising law.
Cultural diversity needs to be joined with building cultural effectiveness across the legal community.
Cultural competence requires you to carry out a complex processing and understanding of values
and worldviews.
Call to action
Addressing the issue
Ask yourself: how much faith do you put in cultural diversity initiatives? They do need to be part
of the mix. But cultural diversity drives need to be part of a revolving, reinforcing strategy that
addresses the systemic nature of cultural effectiveness, diversity and inclusion across the firm and
in your broader relations with the legal community and your stakeholders.
In a best-case scenario, this strategy would be reinforced regularly with training, mentoring and
support to ensure that diversity is tied in with genuine career opportunities and affirmative
processes to address the cultural element of professional legal outcomes.
If companies are serious about their workforce becoming more culturally effective, diverse and
inclusive right up to the Board level, then they need a continually reinforcing strategy that addresses
cultural effectiveness, diversity and inclusion. This needs to be driven from the top, whether firms
use one of their own partners with the right strategic skills or an external expert to run it.
If you are a typical small legal firm with resource and financial constraints, you can incorporate a
number of feasible approaches using outside expertise and internal support mechanisms – provided
that you have that tied to a strategy that’s getting reinforced over time.
The Law Institute of Victoria, like other member organisations, is a signatory to the Law Council of
Australia’s Diversity and Equality Charter, and they can provide advice on supporting your own
commitment to diversity, inclusion and cultural competency for practitioners and firms.
Practising the law across cultural boundaries
Whether in your own city or whether between different countries with different views on the
same subject based on historical and cultural factors, legal practitioners need to do their cultural

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‘due diligence’ on the different viewpoints that two parties may have that could bring them into
legal dispute.
For instance, two different countries or different jurisdictions within the same country may have the
same approaches on drug trafficking and drink driving. But these same countries or jurisdictions may
have different attitudes about immigration, the official status of languages, decriminalisation of
drugs, gay marriage and the age of consent.
Also to keep in mind that not everything that is legal is necessarily good and not everything that is
illegal is necessarily bad. As an academic point this may seem a non brainer, but in reality this
concept is something that not everyone can easily accept. Australians, Belgians, Koreans, and
Hungarians as a rule can come to terms with this quite easily. Germans, Swiss and Swedes struggle
with the concept. Latin Americans, Arabs, South Pacific Islanders and Sudanese will inherently
understand it.
If as a lawyer you work or intend to work in a strikingly different cultural environment from your
home environment, you need to bring to your work an understanding of the relationship between
business law and issues of civil society, such as internet laws and environmental policies. Since legal
systems (and unwritten rule systems) reflect the culture and societies in which they operate, you
need to build their understanding of different countries’ legal systems and how they have evolved
over time. You also need to be nimble and stay equipped to stay up to speed with relevant changes.
As well as your technical legal and cultural skills, it is valuable to become familiar with Geert
Hofestede’s six dimensions of national cultures. This is helpful to gain a more nuanced
understanding of the values and behaviours underpinning the legal and rule systems that people
work across.
Obviously these dimensions vary from person to person and group to group. The dimensions are:
1. Power distance: describes ‘the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations
institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.’ Individualism
vs. collectivism: This index explores the ‘degree to which people in a society are integrated into
groups.’
2. Uncertainty avoidance: This is defined as ‘a society's tolerance for ambiguity, or aversion to
anything that doesn’t fit the status quo.’
3. Masculinity vs. femininity: which describes masculinity as ‘a preference in society for
achievement, heroism, assertiveness and material rewards for success’ and feminism as ‘a
preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life.’
4. Long-term orientation vs. short-term orientation: This dimension associates the connection of the
past with the current and future actions/challenges. Australia is ranked as a short term orientation
culture.
5. Indulgence vs. restraint: indulgence is described as allowing ‘relatively free gratification of basic
and natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun.’
Cultural effectiveness and the bottom line
Businesses are constantly confronted with risk and a business’s success often depends on its
ability to identify and minimise risk. Does it make financial sense to ignore or underestimate one
of its greatest yet controllable risks, the risk of cultural subjectivity and unconscious bias?
You wouldn’t not think so.
If you fail to factor cultural issues into your legal work you’re failing to risk manage properly.
By just going along with your cultural assumptions, you may miss out on important cultural nuances
of your legal interactions and end up having to crisis manage further down the line.
Your firm may lose market share if you are not up to speed with the cultural profile of your target
client market and understand how best to attract and service them.

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It is not a straightforward task when you try to measure cultural effectiveness against financial
outcomes No wonder culture competency doesn’t usually make it into the company business plan or
the annual team budget. But you can measure it, and the easiest way to start is by putting a dollar
estimate against things that have gone wrong.
Some basic ways to think about cultural effectiveness in terms of financial cost:
 Is your client happy or unhappy? Why?
 Has your cross-border deal come unstuck?
 Has your client been sued?
 Is your client paying the bills?
 Is your client incurring massive costs navigating through a culturally unfamiliar environment
here or internationally?
Call to action
Some small but effective ways to address possible financial implications of cultural effectiveness:
 Put an affirmative process in place to work out the cultural part of problems that arise. This
would help put a dollar value on them as well as put a concrete business value on cultural
effectiveness.
 Spend more time on the ground with your international counterparts. Get some serious ‘skin in
the game’ by learning the language and living for a while overseas.
 Don’t rush off to your plane or next appointment. Factor in ‘cushion’ time to go out to dinner
with your client. This could cement your relationship and those negotiation stonewalls may
suddenly melt away.
 Take some of your client cases and unpack them to work out the cultural issues that arose.
Don’t forget the small issues –the meet and greet at reception, emailing instead of phoning or
the body language you used with your client. Consider what you could improve. Share your
findings with your colleagues.
 Think about how you communicate with your clients. Do you need to take a fresh look at the
way you treat different clients from different cultural backgrounds who bring different cultural
perspectives and backgrounds to the immediate legal issue at hand?
 Analyse the mix of your clients and assess the diversity of your client base to determine if your
firm is losing market share or not capturing share of specific demographic segments.
 Be alert to cultural cues. ASK for advice if you’re not sure. Check and recheck. It could cost you
for not doing your cultural due diligence.
 Make sure your clients are doing their cultural due diligence, for example if they’re doing
business or seeking to expand globally. Are you risking being sued for neglecting crucial advice?
 Or, consider trialling a ‘goals reached within budget and within broader time frames’ approach.
Give it a time frame, report on outcomes. You might possibly end up running this side by side
with a billable hours regime.
The little things make a difference
As a culturally effective lawyer, you can be receptive to cultural differences and nuances without
having to be an expert in one culture or another or know everything about your client. Keep the end
goal in mind of the legal outcome you seek for your client and make small but important
adjustments to support them through that process.
The culturally effective lawyer appreciates the importance of being a cultural guide. The culturally
effective lawyer understands that their French client may require a great deal of analysis (and time)
before making a decision because those cultures may be more risk averse and certainty orientated.
Their client’s Japanese partner may likewise require time but once consensus has been achieved
within the team, they will wish to act quickly.

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The culturally effective lawyer is alive to jurisdictional differences in matters such as compliance,
corporate governance, contractual principles or, for example, concepts such as good faith,
materiality, reasonableness and truth.
Finally, the culturally intelligent lawyer knows that hierarchy and negotiation styles vary greatly
across cultures, as do meetings. Some cultures respect age and seniority, some favour silence in
negotiations, some will be uncomfortable with displays or anger or emotion.
With this in mind, it’s important to be alert to the small things: procedural habits, body language and
behaviours that taken singly, don’t add up to but when those small things accumulate, they can and
do have a major impact on the success of lawyer-client relations or lawyer to lawyer relations. While
you are busy concentrating on major outcomes, it’s these little things that can bring things undone.
One area of never-ending irritation between Chinese professionals and legal practitioners and
support staff who are steeped in Australian business culture is receipts. Commercial lawyer Chuen
Lim is frequently called to walk the two sides through this particular annoyance. Chuen explains to
his Chinese counterparts why certain processes and documentation are required in Australian
professional settings, and explain to his Australian counterparts why this kind of documentation
seems excessive in relationships of trust. Australian lawyers send invoices and expect separate
receipts, which their counterparts feel is totally over the top and even verging on insulting – don’t
you trust us? Chuen instructs his Australian colleagues to treat the invoice as a receipt and write or
stamp ‘paid’ and stamp it with the all-important rubber address stamp. And both sides are
generally satisfied with compromise.
If you start feeling the steam coming out of your ears, get a cup of tea and think about how you can
reset that seemingly intractable failure to communicate or ‘cut through’ with client. Pick up the
phone and take a minute to just unpack the issue with your client. Or get out of your desk and go
over to talk with your colleague.
It should be remembered also that in a culturally diverse professional environment, people
experience exactly the same sorts of small communication issues that they bang their head over
with clients. It reinforces the fundamental importance of cultural effectiveness, and cultural
flexibility. if you take the time to explain and to reassure (and in a time-poor environment this can
take some to-ing and fro-ing), if clients can feel that they’re being listened to and if you feel your
counterpart is listening to you, you will find it easier to get on with the important stuff.
Call to action
 Put in extra non-billed time listening to your client and finding out what really matters to them.
That can help you better determine the course of legal action and make a revenue difference.
 Pick up the phone and talk to your colleague or client. Face to face is best but there’s so much
lost when you put in writing. You can always follow up with an email.
Do no harm
When you have a culturally diverse clientele, particularly in commercial law, there’s also the
question of lawyers’ ethical behaviour with clients who maybe don’t speak much English, don’t
understand the legal process and have to figure it out for themselves – maybe with the help of a
family member or friend. And this includes people who hold the profession in incredibly high
esteem. Fees can be allowed to blow out of proportion, leaving the client severely out of pocket,
often for small affairs.

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An inner-Melbourne commercial lawyer recently had an Egyptian Australian client whose business
had went under. He moved on, changed house, and then woke one day to find that his supplier was
suing him in court, with a 17-page complaint for $280 unpaid. The supplier said that if the business
owner was in default, they could invoke a penalty clause for $3,500. The Egyptian client was
completely taken aback. The Egyptian client didn’t have very good English so it took a while for the
lawyer to through the options The lawyer said to him: You’ve got no money; you can’t afford a
lawyer. Go back to your supplier and explain the situation. Tell him he’s gone through this
expensive legal process. If you can’t get satisfaction, then go on A Current Affair. So there was a
$259 debt, a potential $3500 penalty clause being invoked on the supply agreement, possibly
another $1,000 in legal costs – conservatively. The lawyer was able to persuade him to settle the
debt and the fees.
This is a fairly typical example of people not understanding the legal process (a typical experience
that has cultural implications of its own) but the stakes are so much higher when there is a language
and cultural barrier. People who are exposed to the legal process in these circumstances are much
more vulnerable to poor legal advice. It’s vital to adjust your communication and make sure that
your client understands the options and processes to follow.
Call to action
 Right from the beginning, clients from culturally diverse backgrounds need to understand
expectations. You need to manage the rapport that you establish, because your concept of time,
is different from theirs. They may call at unscheduled hours and expect you to be immediately
available.
 Use plain English and speak slower if necessary
 ‘Unpack’ legal documents with the client; even illustrate it with diagrams
 Show steps and explain worst case scenarios
 Explain the recovery process
An intensifying global challenge – power up your internal GPS
Situation
Cultural effectiveness has become one of the most important skills for lawyers working in a
globalised context. Many practitioners are very familiar with terms like cultural intelligence and
activities like cultural training. Other practitioners from ethnic minorities, having experienced
discrimination and exclusion of some kind during their lives, ‘live’ ethnic diversity and are deeply
aware of the cultural aspect of practising the law. In other ways, however, they may be
judgemental and inflexible in their outlook and behaviours.
Just knowing is not enough…and how much can you possibly know? Even within cultures there are
myriads of tiny differences. So the key is to do your cultural homework learn by doing and
observing, and especially by finding ways to adjust your behaviour so you can be effective in
whatever cultural setting or encounter you find yourself without feeling that you’re losing yourself
in the process. The greatest challenge in being culturally effective is to overcome those deep
psychological challenges.
One important element to consider is the use of the lingua franca, which is predominantly English,
but there’s also Spanish, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic – where we’re speaking
the same language but don’t necessarily understand each other.
‘If I was a lawyer and I’d just landed in Malaysia, imagine I received a letter from a Malaysian
lawyer, couched in Malaysian legal terms and written in Malaysian style? As a lawyer, what would I
understand? I might struggle.’ (Melbourne commercial lawyer)

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A group of Australians, Americans, British lawyers might be part of a multinational team.
Singaporeans might be working with Malaysians or mainland Chinese clients may have a Chinese
Malaysian Australian lawyer. Back on the home front, you might have a truly diverse grouping of
colleagues, or lawyers with clients, all speaking the same language. But there may be big gaps in
how they understand each other. On the one hand, there is enormous value in sharing underlying
cultural belief systems. On the other hand, there is risk of falling into the trap of similarity, where
one assumes that having a baseline similarity (in this case, English) means that everyone
understands each other, will demonstrate more or less the same behaviours and have the same
underlying value systems.
 Firstly, they may be speaking different, formally recognised versions of English (Malaysian,
Singaporean, British, American)
 Secondly, English may not be everyone’s first language
 Thirdly, words alone are not the only issue. There’s a world of different histories, values,
behaviours and codes underlying the way they communicate.
‘Miscommunication’ in our complex working environment, where the velocity of communication, is
recognised as a key obstacle to effective cross-cultural business. And this is in world where high
speed of communication and work turnover is impacting severely our need for quality time to think.
Large law firms may seem alike and branches of the same legal outfit will share similarities – clients’
needs, legal issues, technology, office fittings, personnel, structure. But operationally law firms can
be dramatically different.
If you don’t recognise those differences and if you don’t have the cultural dexterity to adapt to those
differences, you’re at risk of making serious errors. To be clear, understanding differences is about
acquiring a set of cultural understandings that you can consider whoever your working with or for,
or whatever cultural space you’re moving in as a practitioner. From there, you can work on
overcoming psychological barriers you may experience when you have to adjust to cultural
difference on your home turf or in a different environment.
There is a great line which says: ‘Every lawyer has inside them an internal GPS, a cultural Satellite
Navigation System. Our clients are switching theirs on; we should all be doing the same’.
This isn’t about blindly following where your clients are going – it’s about being of and part of the
same world. Your legal practice has to be responsive to that. It’s also encouraging. Legal
practitioners are no less programmed than anyone to be more culturally flexible than they may give
ourselves credit for.
Solution?
So, it’s useful to look at some of these differences, so you can think about how they’ve applied to your
own experiences in your legal practice. And again, in an age of diversity you’re just as likely to these
cultural differences in the person in the desk or office next to you as they are from someone in the
Northern Hemisphere
 History – history of the firm and its personnel, history of the region, history of the country.
 Values – how we prioritise those values and how they’re demonstrated in our work and
socially. Respecting the individual, respecting the group. The importance of harmony. The
importance of modesty or self-promotion. The importance of enthusiasm or self-
effacement. The importance of self-disclosure. The importance of the effort or the
importance of the achievement. The equality of humans or the importance of some over
others.
 How those values are borne out in behaviours and structures – Individual effort and
teamwork, directness or indirectness, reporting structures and organizational hierarchies,
short-term orientation or long-term orientation
Earlier the six dimensions of national culture were described. You can see these dimensions again
and again in clashes and frustrations that you may experience while dealing with clients from a

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different culture from your own, or with colleagues who doesn’t seem to share the same behaviours
or values as you. Here are some examples:
 In a property dispute, your client’s Iranian neighbour constantly changes their story, turns up to
meetings late, refuses to put anything in writing and keeps ‘bending the rules’
 An Australian support staff member may be offended by a Singaporean lawyer’s authoritarian
way of delivering instructions. The Singaporean’s adherence for hierarchy and lack of shared
history and cultural values around ‘egalitarianism’ are stronger than their high context avoidance
of direct language.
 To build bridges with your Chinese legal counterpart, you’ve shared a whole lot of intelligence
with them. They’ve taken it, offered nothing back and you haven’t been able to build that bridge.
If you familiarise yourself with those well-known cultural dimensions, you can mentally refer back to
them in any cultural context that you’re working. You should also ask for cultural insight from
relevant people where you can. This can help you do take four simple steps:
1. identify those small difference that could accumulate into a big impact on your client
communications and legal activities.
2. Understand the cultural dimensions of your own behaviours in the legal encounter
3. Recognise and overcome the resistance you might experience having to adjust your
approaches (like many professionals at the top of their game, you might feel resentful,
inauthentic or incapable of adjusting your approach).
4. Apply strategies to adjust your own behaviours and approaches to improve your
effectiveness in the legal encounter.
Mallesons’ teething issues with becoming the world’s first truly global law firm and integrating into
China is described in an excellent article in the Australian Financial Review. Mallesons’ honesty
about just how much they underestimated the cultural challenges is encouraging because it puts it
all out on the table: ‘We’re the best in the world, and we’ve really struggled with this. However,
Mallesons is doing today what Australia has to do tomorrow. We have to engage.’
Below is a summary of some of King Wood Mallesons struggles, as described in the Financial Review:
 Social faux-pas - getting the dress code wrong at social functions
 Australians’ lack of Mandarin skills and high dependence on interpreters
 Bringing in a ‘fly in, fly out’ mentality to China instead of staying and living there, building up local
knowledge, contacts and credibility
 A significant amount of time was expended working through an interpreter
 Chinese partners guarded their turf like ‘fiefdoms’ and lunched with their subordinates, not their
colleagues, because of the competition
 Australian lawyers where not about to have mutual sharing with their Chinese colleagues
 The Beijing and Shanghai partners wouldn’t step inside each other’s’ offices
 Australian partners’ jetting in spoke too quickly and enthusiastically in idiomatic Australian English
 Australian partners in Chinese visits failed to ‘read the room’ and the underlying ‘political’ context.
However -
 Mallesons now offers ‘cultural awareness tool kits’, trialling a cultural-exchange program for
junior staff where Australian lawyers buddy up with Chinese counterparts.
 Some of the cultural stereotypes have been overcome – meetings in China have often been found
to be more open and sharing in Australia, where politeness has stifled the flow of the meeting.
 Australian lawyers are learning the Chinese way to give and receive – rather than offering
something for free as a way of building trust and rapport (and getting nothing back), they are
holding back in the way they offer something, like information sharing.

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Call to action
The key insights for commercial lawyers if working in an intercultural, international environment
are:
 Get ‘on the ground’ - which means sending more partners and staff across from one
country to another and it also means living in the other country. This is a deep
commitment on the part of the lawyer, their family and their organisation. Proper
preparation and ongoing professional coaching and mentoring support are critical.
 Find ways to be part the networks of your overseas counterparts. That means you need to
spend quality social time together and ‘let it all hang out’ in a social setting to build trust
and connection. In many highly hierarchical, high context cultures this is essential.
 Talk about things other than business. Share interests, ask questions that they’ll be
delighted to answer and share – music, favourite eating places, sport – things that
everyone loves to talk about.
 Australian lawyers need to dedicate time to learning other languages – particularly
Mandarin, Arabic and Indonesian. They should seek support from their firms to make this
professional – and personal – investment.
Be alert to the differences but focus on the similarities
When working with people from a different culture from our own, the first thing people tend to
learn about differences. As stated above, if you don’t recognise differences and if you don’t have the
cultural dexterity to adapt to those differences, you’re at risk of making serious errors.’
In the high-stakes legal environment and when there are multi-millions, sometimes billions, at issue,
cultural errors have a correspondingly high impact. Many of us have done cultural training and
received ‘cultural tool kits’ that do exactly this. It’s a common sense first step. It helps guide you
through your first cultural errors and helps you learn to understand and interpret others’
behaviours.
For instance,
 if you know that telling your new Malaysian colleague all about yourself and your family at
your first encounter will seem too intimate too soon, you can curb your behaviours
 if you know that a lack of enthusiasm at your staff meeting in Melbourne will be interpreted
as standoffish, you can practice your smile.
However, your careful learnings might be wrong. Your Chinese team may be open and warm and
your Emirati client may be more punctual than you.
Concentrating on differences can be an exhausting, impossible task because it’s impossible to keep
all those differences and ‘rules’ in your head. And you’re not meant to adhere rigidly to cultural
stereotypes.
By seeking similarities in others, others will sense that you see them as people and not cultural
stereotypes. By attuning yourself to the unique qualities of others, you’ll open up a space of shared
trust and openness.
The same holds true for any legal client or counterpart. Look beyond your own first reaction and
your own assumptions about ‘people like that’ and allow them to speak for themselves. This makes a
more effective basis for a positive relationship with your client, even if it’s a brief one, and more
satisfactory legal outcomes.

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Deliver an exceptional client experience
The customer experience is widely held as today's business benchmark. Firms are now clearly in
the business of ‘outperforming’ each other with highest quality service to their clients. At the core
of that is developing a client relationship and that includes understanding the cultural context of
your client. Among common errors made by firms who fail to deliver a memorable client
experience are poor cultural competency.
How can lawyers ensure that they provide and maintain outstanding client experience?
Delivering an excellent client experience that factors in culture is all about going back to the two
basic elements of providing a service: the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. The ‘what’ is your technical
expertise in the law. The ‘how’ is your skill in delivering the what. our technical abilities as lawyers;
the ‘how’ is the manner in which we deliver the ‘what’.
Depending on their cultural profiles, your clients may react differently, not just to the same advice
you offer but also to the way you deliver it - those behaviours and communication styles you may
apply to most of your clients without thinking with only minor adjustments.
What does this mean for legal practitioners?
In an increasingly competitive and difficult legal environment, where legal service has often become
very transactional, it’s more than ever the quality of their service delivery that will differentiate one
firm from another. In commercial law, when you consider what a huge financial investment clients
make at all levels when they seek legal advice and embark on a legal relationship that has the
potential to last a long time or end before it’s started.
There’s at least two schools of thought on the draw card of the ‘label’. Former head of the Telstra
legal team, Will Irving, comments: ‘The law is people. You can have whatever badge you want.
They’re not going for the label – they’re going for the service’.
On the other hand, the ‘label’ has different degrees of importance to different people, and in some
cultures labels have enormous ‘face’ significance, communicating a shared cultural value and
authority. The name of the firm you’ve chosen tells the world that you only deal with the best, the
most prestigious. In collectivist cultures, they also send coded messages about group adherence
and loyalty. In more hierarchical societies than Australia’s, these signs of affluence really matter.
But it’s like the Louis Vuitton bag or the Rolex watch – it had better be good. You’re protected by
the long-established reputation for quality. Finally, then, it does come down to legal outcomes and
the quality of the service.
Cultural effectiveness is therefore an integral part of the ‘how’.
Call to action
 Take extra time within your time limitations and factor in some free consultation time
 Think carefully about you can use that time to improve the dialogue with your clients,
recheck for understanding and reinforce expectations. Clients are genuinely appreciative
even if they don’t thank you – and they will not always thank you.
 Really pay attention to what clients are saying. Listen to the cues to find out how they’re
feeling, the broader context for their legal issue.
 Demonstrate empathy
 Mirror your client’s behaviours. If your client is a South Asian who values seriousness and
solemnity in professional encounters, tone down your enthusiasm a little without being
inauthentic.
 Switch from legalese to everyday speech. Also appreciate that legalese is still expected by
many clients as a mark of the lawyer’s authority (like reciting the old Mass in Latin with
almost no congregation comprehension but great reverence).

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This can be HARD! Practise this. Little things like saying ‘in relation to’, nominalising verbs
(‘the practice of the use of legalese’) and putting actions in the passive voice. Be prepared:
switching out of legalese means you might need to take longer to say the same thing.
 Gently elicit from your client what is important to them. The immediate legal issue at hand is
often nested in a much deeper context. Understanding that context may greatly assist in
planning approaches to achieve optimal legal outcomes for your client.
 Speak to a family member or trusted friend if the client is reluctant to disclose. Be mindful
that this person may not be immediately forthcoming but will do so when they feel secure
about doing so.
 Explain the options and explain clearly. Draw diagrams. Use gestures.
In a group conversation between Legal Aid lawyers, support staff and community officers in
Ringwood, the discussion was about how to provide great client service and support within
constraints. One of them said, ‘Sometimes we have a really short time to manage clients’
expectations. Sometimes we can only deal with the legal issue – we try to be empathetic but we have
to do it within our limitations and within the legal framework. Sometimes you can’t overcome that
barrier, sometimes we have to refer them to do it themselves. Sometimes they simply won’t accept
what you say, so you have to refer them to go to the prosecutors. We tell them that we understand
that in your background you do that (e.g. provocation) but in Victorian law you have broken the law.
This is not a personal attack on you. Mostly they’re appreciative that you’ve taken the time – they
really appreciate that someone will simply help them.’
Observing the duty lawyers at the Ringwood Magistrates Court reveals that they quickly and tactfully
piece together deep insights about the broader context of their client’s life that influenced the action
that got them into trouble. In meetings where the clients were surly and abusive, or not able to
communicate fluently in English, the lawyers’ cultural skills and non-judgemental manner helped
them to take effective action. This was more effective than if they’d concentrated only on the legal
issue alone and allowed clients to consider a range of options that combined consequences with
action for learning, empowerment and improvement. These issues included
 assaulting a transit police officer and resisting arrest (history of parental abuse and neglect)
 a domestic violence incident (they had recently lost their business and their savings)
 driving without a licence (lost their P-plate license and had to get their girlfriend, mother,
friend to drive them to their workplace because it changed every day. So one day they took a
chance and got caught)
Preparing new lawyers for a culturally complex environment
Within academia, the cultural aspects of practising law aren’t seen as a pressing need and they
don’t feature in the core curricula. Instead, it’s see that as we have an increasingly diverse student
population, that will change attitudes in the law and the way it’s practice. Also that having a
diverse student population itself is useful and will drive change.
There are massive demographic changes in the student population. The continuing, cross-cultural
prestige of a law degree hasn’t caught up with the overflow in law schools in Australia and
internationally. Whatever the downside to having an overabundance of law schools, this does mean,
however, that valuable legal and analytical skills are spreading throughout the workforce.
There is a large cohort of culturally diverse, and hopefully culturally skilled, people who are taking
that powerful tool which is their law degree into their professional practice wherever that may be.
Also, over time law schools have increased their offerings on certain cultural aspects of legal
knowledge, such as the legal systems of other countries and international law.
Today’s same rich student cultural diversity is not being reflected in the larger commercial law firms,
and even less is it being reflected up the career ladder. There is also evidence that same barriers are
entrenched across medium sized firms. But students and young lawyers are also making different
career choices. In a globalised workforce where legal work is needed where there are ever-stricter
cross-border controls and regulation, due diligence requirements for global commerce initiatives,

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security of supply chains, international commerce and partnerships and so much more, it’s highly
beneficial that law graduates with cultural smarts, language skills and business acumen are taking
that out to industry. This career divergence among law graduates also needs to be factored into the
persistent cultural diversity issues experienced by commercial law firms. Apart from structural
barriers and entrenched insularity, the culture of commercial law firms may simply be an
unattractive option compared with other, emerging professional opportunities and more dynamic
work places.
When asked about cultural competency education in the curriculum, Deakin University law
student Giulia* said: ‘There’s not really anything specifically in the curriculum, but I get a lot out
of the cultural diversity at Deakin so I think that’s just as good, if not better’. Giulia is bilingual in
English and Italian and she’s learning Spanish as her third language. She’s completed a short
internship at King Wood Mallesons and doing a 20-week internment at Legal Aid. Giulia will bring
cultural skill and willingness to embrace change to whatever environment she studies and works
in and that will be a considerable asset to her legal practice. She is unlikely to choose the uber-
charged environment of the big firms.
Gwyneth* another Deakin University student, is a Sri-Lankan born international student who has
lived most of her life in Dubai. Gwyneth aspires firstly to go into commercial law and eventually
go to the bar and become a judge, Gwyneth’s cultural experience and multilingualism will be a
key asset in a globalised, culturally complex professional environment. She will also fulfil many
criteria for ethnic, linguistic and gender diversity in whatever organisations she works for.
Whether she will bring cultural effectiveness and a non-judgemental, culturally dexterous
approach to her profession is not yet clear.
*not original names
To take an example from one university law school with a very culturally diverse law student body,
there is a very strong trend for graduates to want to serve their community. So, a law degree is a
powerful asset, students have thought through what purposes they want to use if for and, when
weighed up, they are not interested in the financial benefits of commercial law.
The implications of this is that the cultural insight and richness aren’t coming consistently through
the commercial sector by means of today’s diverse student populations. When you consider how
self-governing the legal profession is, and the self-preservation that’s associated with decision
making and structural resistance to change, then legal practices will stay – not just resistant to but
less effective in serving the culturally complex professional and social environment they interface
with. They will miss the organisational strengths gained by experiencing the necessary disruption
that comes with more diverse legal workplaces.
Again, while cultural diversity per se doesn’t automatically equate to cultural effectiveness, if we
have a student population with high cultural skill and awareness that makes the choice to stay out of
commercial law, then the burden may fall equally on legal associations to ensure that lawyer acquire
cultural effectiveness.
Where to for the cultural component of the university legal curriculum?
The argument exists – although it seems to fainter in Australia than, for instance, in the United
States, that law students are better served and more employable in whichever profession they
eventually follow if they come out of law school with cultural competency in hand.
At the same time, there is a parallel argument and approach that cultural competency is best
addressed through experience and continuing professional development (CPD).
It is early days on the conversation about higher education providers as places that provide ‘business
skills training’. There is argument for and against this and clearly, professional ‘soft’ skills are not in

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the picture in a serious way as far as law studies are concerned. On the one hand, these skills are
also expected to be picked up during internships and once students are employed they are expected
to ‘hit the ground running. At the same time, Telstra’s Will Irving points out:
‘(W)when it comes to hiring graduates ‘It’s very much about time, how much it takes to complete a
case, and there’s intense competition to get places. Typically, it’s “Can this person articulate
themselves in front of you – brilliant academically but can’t string two words together – and what
have you done that marks you out?” – like debating and other activities. Also, how quickly can you
solve problems on your feet.
Will’s remarks indicate that students need to come to the professional environment with some
degree of business skills, such as time management and problem solving in the workplace (not just in
the rarefied atmosphere of university. Arguably, cultural skills would fit into that milieu.
Since module-driven curriculum are also bound by the requirements of regulatory bodies and by the
constraints of stretched curricula, this subject matter is unlikely to make its way soon into the
curriculum.
However, lecturers’ focus will change over time as the cultural aspects of practising law are driven to
the front of lawyers’ experience. Over time, also, they will feed that back into the educational space
and that will become part of the educational narrative. and
In the meantime, Legal associations and law schools are both part of the equation for helping legal
practitioners develop their professional skills in cultural effectiveness. Legal associations and
continuing professional development providers will continue to play a leading role in helping build
lawyers’ professional skills, including cultural training. They’re on the ground working with their
members to advance their law practice, so that means not just PD and updates on substantive law
practice but also emerging trends or broader social issues that impact legal practice, and that’s
where cultural effectiveness comes in. There are already some PD programs that offer cultural
training and the discussion on cultural diversity and unconscious bias have been going on for some
time. A recent LIV feature took a step further and talked about things lawyers can and should do to
start extending themselves culturally, so that’s another great practical step and a positive for the
legal profession.
Tailored training modules could be developed in dialogue with practitioners across the spectrum of
practice, support staff and law enforcement officers.
A first-year university law student at an inner Melbourne law school campus shared with her
student colleagues the experience of being spat at as she walked along Melbourne’s streets
shortly after the 2015 Paris massacre because she wears hijab. The tutorial topic was the hijab
as a human rights issue. Some of her classmates were shocked – ‘In Melbourne? But we’re so
diverse and we’re so tolerant!’. The student was amused at the notion that hijab is an
expression of oppression. After the tutorial, the student was surrounded by a group of
Caucasian women who wanted to find out more and chat. They had never participated in this
kind of conversation, especially with a hijab-wearing Muslim student.
Constrained by the culture of the workplace
A national survey of nearly 1000 Australian legal practitioners conducted in 2012–13 examined the
working conditions, work experience, and health and wellbeing of solicitors and barristers who
practise in a variety of settings. Excessive job demands, minimal control over workload and spill
over of work commitments into personal life were some of the work-related factors which were
significantly correlated with poorer mental health outcomes, together with concerns about the
structure and culture of legal practice in Australia. In an increasingly culturally complex
environment, it is no wonder then that there may be resistance to addressing cultural issues and a
narrowing of focus to the purely legal elements, to the possible detriment of effectiveness of the
legal process.

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Perceptions of stressors and personal ability to cope are not simply psychological processes within
individuals. Such perceptions are also shaped by organisational cultures, and a workplace’s
‘psychosocial safety climate’. An examination of work culture (shared assumptions, values and
practices in an occupational or work group) is therefore an extremely important part of
understanding work stress among legal practitioners. Some of these issue are:
 Like any other organisation, the law is full of highly intelligent, talented and stoical people who
are driven by a strong work ethic and their own self-belief…but also avoid seeking mentoring and
answers to hidden fears and anxieties about working in culturally complex situations.
 Stiff competition between lawyers is not conducive to confiding anxieties or to admitting to
‘weakness’, not least in feeling stumped by cultural nuances one can’t put a finger on. That
Former head of Telstra’s legal team, Will Irving, shared insights into Telstra’s longstanding
practice on developing lawyers’ cultural experience and effectiveness. Telstra has a strong
mentoring and buddying system for relocating lawyers, ongoing ‘point of time’ cultural
briefing, integrated with client briefing, and a lot of ‘cushioning’ to allow lawyers to just sit
in and observe behaviours in different cultural business contexts.
Despite all this, Will says, ‘cultural competency is a huge issue, and it’s often below the
surface. There’s a lot of people who get hired for what they’re good at but not
understanding that underlying stuff. The really sophisticated law firms use buddy systems
extensively. In our case, it happens on both ends – Filipino lawyers coming out here and
vice versa. It works really well, there’s peer-to-peer support, expat to expat, expat to local.
And the better the experience you have, the less hierarchical it is’- so there’s reinforced
learning and support, and it doesn’t get siloed off into one team or one department.
• Practitioners may feel a lack of control, embarrassment and a sense of being criticised
behind their back. They want to avoid this at all costs.
 Practitioners constantly wonder whether they can manage complex tasks, without the added
dimension of culture to consider – especially where cultural issues can be so hard to identify and
deal with if you are not on the lookout for them
 Working inside a cone of silence – there is culture of non-disclosure to colleagues and feelings of
being trapped inside the office. This is counterproductive to the professional sharing and
mentoring that is promoted to foster culture effectiveness
 ‘Competitiveness can be a gateway drug that hooks people into unethical behaviour.’ This can
also sap individuals of the will to deal with the psychological challenges of adjusting their
behaviours in different cultural situations
It comes back to what Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Robert Millikan, referred to as the need to
understand and acknowledge ‘the depths of our ignorance’.
By conceding that we’re struggling to grasp something that we can sense but can’t master or aren’t
willing to adjust to, that we don’t know as much as we think we do, that brings professionals back to
earth and helps make them more effective in their work.
Recently Dr Antonio Argandona, a professor from the IESE Business School published an exploration
of humility in business leadership and I’ve reworked his suggestions for acquiring humility, because
humility is at the core of becoming culturally effective. And they are:
 First, recognise the importance of cultural effectiveness in the workplace;
 Notice others who have a culturally diverse range of work friendships and interests and
emulate them
 Take responsibility for your cultural errors, learn from them and share your learnings

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 Be cognisant of the limitations of your cultural understanding and skills. Be kind to
yourself about them.
 Seek advice, and
 Don't look down on others.
Call to action
It’s suggested that better health and wellbeing outcomes in the workplace can be achieved by
making structural and cultural changes.
Structurally, they involve designing and implementing better systems for managing workload,
deadlines, client demands and expectations, and charging practices. For example, it has been
recommended that organisations should have in place effective processes for addressing any
‘inappropriate behaviour by customers or clients’ or for ensuring that the amount of work that
staff are expected to do is appropriate for their positions. Culturally they call for valuing people
over profit, supporting a safe psychological environment, encouraging work-life balance, and
sustaining respectful, collaborative working relationships.
What can the individual or the firm do?
 First of all – accept that you’re not alone.
 Does your firm have a mentor/buddy system? Good. Use it. If it doesn’t, explore the
options to instigate one (even informally with trusted colleagues and otherwise seek
people within your firm whom you can trust and confide in.
 Use ‘face time’ in which you have no tasks to do, to catch up on some PD on culture.
 Keep doing the things that you love and keep up your outside interests. Always keep your
professional options open. One legal practitioner left her top Melbourne law firm to open
her own business crafting miniature furniture and selling it online. She lectures in
property law at Melbourne University and is doing postgraduate studies in architecture.
What do firms and law schools need to do?
 Instigate mentor/buddy system, or encourage informal mentorship
 Offer cultural competency training as part of PD, as well as other non-corporate law
professional options that allow you to build skills, experience and confidence in different
cultural environments – be they work cultures or ethnic cultures
Let’s talk about time
In a post-industrial world, anyone would agree with you that time has to be accurate or
systems will collapse and people will die. The world will grind to a halt.
In Australia, the UK, the United States and other countries with strong shared cultural traits,
even though we agonise about time management, there’s an unspoken consensus that we’ve
have world’s best practice on how to manage our time. Other powerful economies with
different underlying philosophies about time (such as China, Japan, Indonesia and Brazil), and
anywhere where industry, transport and other sectors require activities, schedules and
targets certainly have to be synchronised. But scratch just beneath that calibrated surface
there’s a vastly different story.
The underlying philosophies about the best and most appropriate use of time — and you should
spend time – are still radically different. Time is a massive issue in a culturally complex world
and it all starts from different concepts of time, how you employ it and the dollar value that
lawyers have given time.
Time plays a vital role in framing and driving business relationships. It’s useful to do some
detective work on the cultural profile of your client or even colleague, if they’re from a different

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ethnic background from your own, because the way that people understand and use time can
give you key insights into their values and behaviours more generally in professional
relationships.
Misunderstandings over time cause constant friction across the professional world, where
people with different values and behaviours about time don’t establish expectations with each
other and end up with bitter resentment, nail-biting frustration and endless irritation. This can
torpedo promising relationships and harm relations.
Culture and business expert, the British sociologist Richard Lewis, has identified three kinds
cultural orientations around time. These are:
Linear-active cultures (cool, factual, decisive planners). These people perceive time and
organise activities in an orderly, compartmentalised, linear, one-after-the-other fashion. They
prefer fixed hours and highly value punctuality. They make up about 600 million of the world’s
population.
Multi-active cultures (warm, emotional, loquacious and impulsive). They may work non-fixed
hours and don’t tend to be punctual. These make up about 3.3 billion of the world’s population
and include Latin Americans, Middle East and Iranian people, Southern Europeans and African
Reactive cultures (courteous, amiable, compromisers, good listeners). They are flexible about
hours but value punctuality. They make up about 1.7 billion people and include Japanese,
Chinese, Vietnamese and Singaporeans.
Hybrid reactive-multi active cultures. These people include our neighbours Indonesia and the
Philippines and make up about 290 million people.
Many people from multi-active and reactive cultures, including powerful global economies,
allow the linear-oriented concept of time to dictate their behaviour to a limited degree. For the
rest, it’s fair to say that these completely different worldviews, coming together on a world
stage, pose an enormous challenge in a globalised world with soaring international business and
trade aspirations. With greater movement and diversity of populations than ever before, this
increases the communication challenge.
If you’re from Australia and you place a high value on punctuality but can make small allowance
for slight lateness you might have been dismayed at being locked out of the offices of your new
German client because you arrived five minutes over time.
You might have been frustrated by being kept waiting for over an hour by your Dubai client who
places a much higher value on finishing a conversation and honouring the relationship and
therefore sees nothing wrong in finishing that conversation and meeting you when he’s ready
to. Of course, he is likely to extend the same courtesy to you but if you’ve already booked
another appointment you’ll have to cut the meeting short and risk offending him.
Call to action
Accommodating people’s time orientations
As legal practitioners, you would frequently find yourself having to accommodate different
approaches to time with your clients and also with your own colleagues in the home environment
and internationally. This can be frustrating when you run to a highly structured environment.
Suggestions:
 Establish and reinforce your expectations about time and explain your approach
 Go online and find out about the time orientation of your client of colleague. To paraphrase
Julia Gillard, ‘It won’t mean everything, it won’t mean nothing…but it will mean something’.
And it might just explain a lot of your frustrations.
 Check and recheck for understanding and agreement.

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 If overseas, adjust your program. Plan your travel time in advance in Germany or Switzerland
so you’re punctual. Allow lots of ‘cushion time’ with your Middle East, Latin American or
Filipino client. Don’t load your schedule up with appointments and bring a book, your Kindle,
a game to fill in the time if you need to.
The billable hour fee structure
The billable hour fee structure contributes to legal practice being seen as a financial concern and a
transactional undertaking.
Apart from other issues, where culture is concerned it means that it puts constraints around legal
practitioners around the following:
 Legal-client relations are precisely that: relationship based. Within given limitations, you
need some flexibility in time to learn about your client, their approach, expectations and
broader desired outcomes, not just the specifics relating to narrow legal outcomes.
 In a culturally diverse environment, lawyers work with clients who have very different
concepts of time. Stresses will arise when lawyers either seek to shoehorn clients into rigid
timeframes or when they cause financial burden to their clients by billing them for the
necessary extended time that’s often needed to understand context, set out expectations
and work through issues. This also can feed into adverse outcomes if a client is antagonised
in the process.
 The billable hour culture in commercial law firms has caused well-documented frustrations
about constraining the extra time lawyers may need to spend with clients or, on the other
hand, forcing lawyers to spend unnecessary face time with clients. The top Australian firms
have clung to this practice but many law firms have already started to offer different
arrangements, such as fixed fees and retainers, and clients have been following the change.
For example, between 2010 and 2013 the rate of corporate clients spending their legal
budget on hourly billing dropped from 77 percent to 59 percent.
 This cultural change also makes allowances for the extra time needed to accommodate
culturally diverse clientele or possible cultural complexities related to the work being done.
How can lawyers be culture detectives when they’re busy being worker
ants?
How can lawyers gain and improve their cultural skills in the reality of their work and life
environments?
You don’t need to acquire a PhD in other cultures, but spending a little time doing cultural ‘due
diligence’ will help you to improve your skills in the cultural aspects of practising law or for working
in unfamiliar cultural environments. There are plenty of excellent business resources available.
Your own cultural tendencies are more flexible than you might think, so it’s not as hard as you might
anticipate to ease into improving your cultural effectiveness.
Call to action
Many commercial law firms have already taken action and have ongoing training and support
programs. If you have a work environment of continuous learning, where the more experienced
people in this area are continually teaching others, and they have a method for bringing back their
teaching and learnings to each other and building on that regularly, find out how you could tap into
those avenues of learning and support.
Invest small, manageable ‘chunks’ of your time into building your cultural effectiveness. Team
up with a colleague or sub groups within your company.
Developing cultural effectiveness doesn’t need to interrupt your regular work. Do it incrementally.

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Getting culturally effective - theory to (legal) practice
Call to action
First and foremost, get out of your comfort zone.
In theory that sounds easy. The desire to take action is always there. But in the real world, things
get in the way. There’s a big difference between knowing what to do and being too scared or lazy
to actually do it. That requires initiative, moral courage, managing your fears until taking initiative
is second nature.
Other behavioural adjustments you can make
Listen and know when not to talk. As lawyers, you’re the source of information, you’re the talkers.
This should be easy. If we’re not talking, we’re listening, yes? No. Often, we think we’re listening, but
we’re actually planning what we’re going to say next. True listening means focusing solely on what
the other person is saying. It’s about understanding, not rebuttal or input. Knowing how to suspend
judgment and focus on understanding the other person’s input is one of the most important skills
you can have. It’s a fundamental part of becoming more culturally effective.
Ask for help. It might seem counterintuitive to suggest that asking for help is a skill, but it is. It takes
a tremendous amount of confidence and humility to admit that you need assistance. This skill is
critical because the last thing a leader wants are employees who keep on trucking down the wrong
path because they are too embarrassed or proud to admit that they don’t know what they’re doing.
The ability to recognise when you need help, summon up the courage to ask for it, and follow
through on that help is another highly valuable skill.
It also relates to that other quality of being culturally effective: humility.
Establish and continually reinforce expectations Put your expectations on the table at the
beginning and keep them there. Listen to your client to understand their expectations. Check,
reinforce. Explain your expectations. Check, reinforce continually. Along the way, all parties
involved will often changing expectations and you will need to check in about these.
Out and about in your everyday life
 Get the bus to work instead of driving
 Go out to Dandenong, Footscray, Northland or Point Cook. Hang out where the locals
hang out. Shop at the local markets shops. Just sit and watch people. Absorb.
 When you hear yourself starting to
 say a snide remark,
 sneer at someone/something that’s different from you or that you feel
uncomfortable about, or
 make a casual put down…
Stop. Think about what you were about to say and reflect on your own attitude. There
might be room for improvement.
 When you go travelling, think of something you can do that’s out of your comfort zone
 Stay at a less posh hotel. Get out and walk. Talk to people. You might have some more
interesting tales to tell when you get home.
 Read more. Social media has fantastic news and opinion piece feeds from all around
the world that give you insights into the cultural, business, legal and social
environments that form part of your world.
In the workplace
 Find a mentor with a different demographic from your own

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 Join your organisation’s volunteering initiative. Better still – volunteer outside our
organisation, so you’re not ‘cocooned’ by your colleagues as you rub shoulders with
people who are different from you.
 Share a coffee or lunch with a colleague or acquaintance who’s not in your inner
cultural circle. You’ll learn a lot.
Conclusion
Cultural effectiveness is not about saying or doing everything right. Instead it is about
heightening our awareness, broadening our sensitivities and being a good world citizen. Our
actions will speak for themselves and efforts that are made to genuinely listen and understand
one another will build trust which is the foundation of any great relationship, legal or otherwise.
If doing the right thing is not incentive enough, consider what implementing these practices can
mean to your firm’s bottom line. If you aren’t seriously looking at these issues in your firm and
your competition is, you risk losing employees, clients and revenue. Cultural competency is here
to stay, so consider leading the field and embracing the new paradigm.
Anna Ridgway
InterMondo, 22 March 2016

Cultural competence in legal practice - the imperative for cultural effectiveness 220316

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