Liberalisation will put City ahead

The success of City law firms in spreading their expertise across the world and being at the top of the global legal tree is an achievement more taken for granted than celebrated, which is a pity.

We live in a corporate world where most UK financial institutions have been gobbled up by much larger foreign predators, yet in the legal sector, City firms go head to head with overseas competitors and win more often than not.

With overseas earnings by UK lawyers topping the 1 billion mark, they are now a significant contributor to gross domestic product, a fact the Lord Chancellor's Department has cottoned onto in recent times through a more concerted push to advance the work of solicitors and barristers internationally.

Law firms have also featured regularly as winners of Queen's Awards for international trade in recent years, with Simmons & Simmons the latest.

So the Doha round of trade negotiations under the General Agreement on Trade in Services - well under way now the European Union has made its offer of concessions in return for liberalisation elsewhere - can only be good news for the profession.

England and Wales already has one of the world's most liberal regimes for foreign lawyers, which seems to have worked only to the benefit of London as an international legal centre.

This means the horse trading over concessions should throw up no problems over here.

By contrast, the effect of opening up other countries - including key jurisdictions such as Japan, Korea and India - will mean opportunities City firms are capable of exploiting better than anyone.