LOCAL COUNSEL

How can your knowledge of the local jurisdiction you practice in be an advantage to your law firm in the global economy that you compete in? Prima facie, it appears a bit silly but it has happened quite frequently that locals get nothing or the barest minimum from all investments in their local space so your law firm needs to address the matter of local advantage.

In the beginning the first step must be some sort of protectionism while local capacity to perform and to compete with foreign players is being built but that is more the establishment's work.
So what can your law firm do? The answer to this has really been to mobilize your resources for the work ahead, to go and see how others are practising their own law e.g. the Arabs found oil in the 60's and evolved into sophisticated negotiators for it so that they were able to capture most of the benefits to improve existing infrastructure and provide for future development while African states largely failed to achieve this so going over the approach the Arabs used and working to adapt it to local circumstances is one benefit of seeing how others have solved the same problems your law firms face from foreign competition.

It is essential to organize how your law firm does its work so it does not throw away its competitive edge (local know-how) in a bid to integrate and compete with the larger legal environment. But most importantly, you need to build your own organic approach to the way the law firm is organised because this is what will sell your legal services. Organic means embracing the peculiarities of your local environment as an advantage and using it as an edge to promote your work and not dismissing your home court advantage as inadequate.

Local knowledge means that you can navigate the system, you understand it and are paying attention to it. The good news for you is that all this comes to you as being part of your local legal space and the bad news is that you have to deliberately appreciate it, specifically sharpen it and see it as special for it to translate into an edge when you compete with outsiders.
The reason is this: No man does well in a business he does not respect.

One more challenge as a local is having capacity in terms of sufficient money, skills and strategies to compete or to turn your tools to strengths. So if you have low levels of finance, skills and strategies you will have to make up for it with lots of thinking and creative ways of making the most of what you have.