There has been talk in recent years, at conferences or in committee discussions within international legal organisations, about the need for a global legal profession. Harvard Law School has been the latest to climb on the band-wagon with a mid-April conference on the subject.

Personally, I think such talk needs to be resisted strongly. Has nobody learned anything about the European experience (about which more below)? Regardless, it is not the global citizen - the person on the street in India who needs a will, or the abused wife in Brazil who needs a divorce, let alone the man or woman on the Clapham omnibus in the UK - who is talking about a global legal profession. In fact, I am not aware of anyone specifically calling for it. People very rarely call for governance at the global level - we all know that we like things to be as local as possible. If at all, it is the representatives of global companies who are leading on the question. But we need to step carefully when we begin to readjust governing structures to the demands of multinationals, as if they are more powerful or reasonable than voting citizens and the governments which represent them.

There are fundamental problems with global governance of a profession as nuanced and locally specific as a legal profession. It is true that there are lawyers everywhere (or practically everywhere). It is also true that the core values of the profession are more or less universal. Finally, on the side of globalisation, Anglo-Saxon lawyers have penetrated most countries to offer corporate services to clients in a more or less uniform way. Nevertheless, despite this ubiquity and universality, legal professions are translated into different local visions. In some countries, for instance, the duty to the client is absolute and trumps the duty to the court. In others, the duty of confidentiality is absolute and cannot be waived by the client.

We all know that independence is interpreted differently when it comes to in-house counsel, allowing them to be members of the bar in some places and not in others. All these would need to be resolved before a global legal profession can be established. Having participated in European debates on some aspects of them, I can tell you that the differences run very deep, right into the culture and world-view of national structures. Resolution by consent would take years, if not forever.

That does not deal with a further problem: not cultural, but linguistic. Phrases like ‘the rule of law’ and ‘the public interest’, not to mention ‘professional secrecy’ and ‘officer of the court’, which have a clear meaning within the common law, mean different things in other legal systems, and do not always translate over. I know this because I was responsible for editing the International Bar Association’s recent commentary on its ‘General Principles for the Legal Profession’. Even common law lawyers from different countries disagreed over their meaning. Yet exact translation is what is needed in the law and codes of conduct, particularly if there is to be global governance.

The EU has come the closest to producing the building blocks necessary for a global profession, albeit for a regional enterprise of 27 countries. There is a regional treaty with enforceable provisions, including the free movement of lawyers, together with specific laws and a court to enforce them. Despite this - that is, despite two sectoral directives for lawyers (the Services Directive of 1977 and the Establishment Directive of 1998) together with other directives which apply partly to lawyers, such as the E-commerce directive of 2003, and despite a string of court cases ruling on the finer points of the conduct of lawyers and bars under EU law - there is still no such thing as a single European legal profession.

We have an organisation bringing together all the bars and law societies of the EU - the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), which has existed for the last 50 years. Nevertheless, although we might be moving towards a European legal profession, the truth is that lawyers in the EU continue to be regulated by national, sometimes even city-based, structures with differing codes of conduct from member state to member state. So what hope for the global, where the same enforcement mechanisms as the European Commission and the Court of Justice do not exist?

Our sister profession, accountancy, has internationally agreed standards, promulgated by the International Accounting Standards Board among others. But the rules are still enforced at national level by local accounting bodies. So there is a global code of conduct, rather than a global profession. I am not sufficiently an expert on accounting to be certain, but I imagine that the same national cultural obstacles which face the globalisation of the legal profession or even its code of conduct, such as those listed above, are not found in the accounting profession, where figures are figures in whatever language or country they might be counted.

The only plausible reason for calling for a global legal profession would be if the current national-based structures were not working. The reason usually given for claiming dysfunction is that conflicts arise in codes of conduct and regulation when lawyers are working across borders. But I have never seen any evidence that the conflicts that exist are either of such number or gravity that they require a complete restructuring of the profession.

Usually, they are settled by the application of common sense. If something further is needed, then it should be along the lines of universally accepted conflict rules, which is a much lesser task than restructuring the profession itself. So I hope that, for the foreseeable future, the adjective ‘global’ will be detached from the phrase ‘legal profession’.

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents around a million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs.