Editorial

Welcome to the final Issue of 2019. Semple’s work on the difficulties of “personal plight” clients in finding and assessing appropriate lawyers in Ontario shows how competition is suppressed by high search costs, difficulties in comparing price and quality and contingency-based prices in tortious cases. Alternatives to attempts in increasing competition by Regulators are discussed, and the UK attempt to foster demand-side competition is mentioned. Li, on the other hand, questions the need for regulation of lawyers in a fast-changing environment in which online information is increasingly available and not subject to regulation, and business and managerial forms are transforming to satisfy the needs especially of corporate clients, who are much more in the driving seat with their lawyers, in what Li describes as a “buyers market”. Surveying the latest innovation initiatives and alternative business models in China, with its highly regulated profession, Li asks whether and where more liberal approaches might be applied to appropriate client services. Continuing the theme of more sensitively designed regulation Moore, Forster, Diesfeld and Rychert research into how New Zealand lawyer disciplinary tribunals face up to the needs of vulnerable clients. They suggest that disciplinary bodies need to take the nature of the clients into account and that risk-reducing lawyers need to be more client-centred in their work. Bogdanova researched how Russian Law Schools understand their objectives in producing the “ideal lawyer”. Reacting to the post-Soviet legal education reforms and dealing with regulations governing higher legal education, law schools are forced to balance the state standards of higher education and external legal, social, economic, and political challenges. This seems to challenge the revival of the Soviet model of the “ideal jurist”. Kisilowski shows how the formalist approaches of the Polish legal profession assisted them under the Communist regime, but left them open to being undermined by major changes under the government of the populist Law and Justice Party. We hope you enjoy this issue which concludes with a Book Review of “White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century”.