In Conversation With John B. Quinn, Founder And Chairman, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP

Mr. Quinn, your visit to India Coincides with the Bar Council Of India’s recently framed rules allowing foreign firms and foreign lawyers to set up shop in India. This seems like a nice surprise. 

It was a nice surprise and it certainly gave us a lot to talk about when we got here because the whole legal profession is buzzing about this development.

What do you make of this development? Do you think this would raise the level of service? Also, there are people opposing it saying that there is no level playing field. What do you think would be the impact of this change and what’s in it for the Indian law firms and Indian Lawyers?

I think there are a lot of questions when talking of Indian lawyers and about this new regime as to how it will be rolled out and what it actually means. I think it remains to be seen what the contours of it will be. But I think it has the potential to be very positive and there’s a potential to learn from each other. It's not going to be one way that foreign firms are coming here and will take business or will dominate the market. There’s a lot for the foreign firms to learn about doing business or practicing law in this region. And this is a step that many others have taken.

When Japan first opened up its legal industry, there was a huge hue and cry among the large Japanese law firms that this would decimate their business and the foreign firms would take over.. But guess what? That has not happened. The market in Tokyo is still dominated by the same Japanese firms and some other Japanese firms that have emerged. So, I don’t think this necessarily means a loss of market share for Indian firms and there will be opportunities, depending upon how this develops opportunities for Indian lawyers to join foreign firms and potentially for foreign lawyers to join Indian firms. There will be a cross pollination and sharing of best practices which could potentially raise the level of practice for everyone and make this a more hospitable environment for investment in general. So, I think this has the potential of being very positive.

As you talked about the entry of foreign law firms in Japan, is there a playbook to follow the entry of law firms in a new country, especially a country like India? How would you expect it to play out?

Well, we need to learn what this is really growing to be, what the Bar Council is comfortable with and what the practicing lawyers are comfortable with. My guess is that there will be an evolution. As it is described, my understanding is that it is not very different from what we encountered in China. We have offices in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. In China, most of our lawyers are Chinese nationals. They are admitted in China to practice law but when they joined our firm, an international firm, they had to stop practicing Chinese law. So the rule is that in China when you join an international firm, you cannot give advice in Chinese law. We also cannot appear in court so we are not litigating cases in Chinese courts. Those are both, as I understand, features of the regime in India. But yet we found that there’s plenty for us to do such as helping western companies in China and we work with Chinese law firms. We partner with them to help our clients from the West. We suggest to them what’s the best firm for a particular matter and we have our associates in China who facilitate Chinese companies with the problems they have in the West. In both kinds of issues we are working with the Chinese law firms. So, it doesn't mean that every piece of work that a foreign firm gets is like work taken away from an India firm.

There’s a story in American legal folklore that in a village if there is one lawyer, he starves. A second lawyer comes in and they start to make some money and when the third lawyer comes to the village, they get rich. So we see a lot of advantages to cooperation and lawyers working together.

So, you have a law firm that functions in multiple parts of the world and you have more than a thousand lawyers working within the firm. So how do you maintain the quality of work and services in all your offices? Also how do you embrace diversity?

In terms of maintaining quality of work, it has to start with what decisions you make about what lawyers join your company. They have to be outstanding lawyers to begin with, who would be great representatives of the firm. Every lawyer you hire is a message to the marketplace about who you are, who you think you are and what your standards are. So that's the most important thing. If you are hiring the right people and you have confidence that they do excellent work, they have a track record of doing excellent work, then you are on the right path to maintain the quality.

Law firms are by and large, very horizontal organisations and it’s not hierarchical. You do not have partners looking over the shoulders of other partners to check in their work. That's not how it’s done. That's especially not how it's done with trial lawyers and litigators who tend to be very independent in their thinking and don’t need somebody telling to adjust their strategy, or you need to assert this opinion or you need these documents. That’s simply not how it’s done. So I think that the paradigm that people check each other’s work does not work.

We need to share best practices and share our learning. We certainly do that in our firms where we share information about what we have learned, be it information about judges, lawyers, jurisdictions or approaches to different kinds of cases. In our firms, everyday people are sending around emails, Request for Exemplars (RFEs), Request for Information (RFI) asking if someone has seen something before, or if anybody has any idea about something. We are constantly brainstorming and challenging each other. It’s kind of a hawk house atmosphere in the firm of ideas and best practices. That’s how we maintain quality.

From your experience, I would like to ask you if foreign law firms operating in India will also buy into the Indian law firms or do you see the foreign firms coming on their own and hiring big leagues?

In the United States, a non lawyer cannot have an ownership interest in a law firm. You can in the UK, you can in Australia. So you have non lawyers who are investors in law firms but you cannot do that in the US except bizarrely in Arizona. So when you say buying into law firms, I don't know what are the rules here in the legal culture and if law firms can be seen as investments. What you may be referring to is the potential combinations and mergers. That's really hard to do. You would think that the UK and US’s lawfirms practices are similar enough so somewhere there would be examples where the UK firms have merged with the American law firms and were successful. There aren’t any, maybe Hogan Lovells is the one you might point to. There have been a number of UK firms that have negotiated the mergers. Allen & Overy had long negotiations with O'Melveny & Myers about combining. However, it is hard to do it in cross cultures.

Are you alluding that it is more likely that firms like your own would set up on their own and they would loosely partner with other law firms?

Well that’s one model but that is not our model. We don't like to have best friends. We like to work with a number of different firms, get to know them, get to know their specialties and their capabilities and work with other firms in particular cases, types of problems based on their strength. That's one model of sort of alliances and another is depending on what the Bar Council rules permit, you might try and recruit a leading practitioner in an Indian law firm. You can recruit them into your firm to bolster a growing new India law practice.

There’s a use of technology in every sphere of life, in every area of work. How are law firms embracing technology and has it impacted your work or your craft and do you see it impacting your work in a bigger way going forward?

It is just the beginning but it will revolutionise law practice. ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionise the law practice. In the US, we have rules and here maybe they are called disclosure rules where we share information. We have to disclose to the other side the enormous amount of data and information on discovery. And a lot of times what is to be produced is identified by search terms and you negotiate with the other side what search terms they are going to run on their data and that becomes the subject of negotiation. So you get this power of information and you may query that with additional search terms.

But in the ChatGPT technology and others like it, you can straight away put in a quarry like the breach of contract case. For instance, in a breach of contract case relating to the capacity of a plant or a facility or a case involving force majeure where someone is trying to say they don't have to put their excuse from the performance of a contract. You can query that datacell and ask what was the capacity of this plant as of this date and time and you get a narrative answer with citations. That is a total revolution. I can see this completely changing the legal practice. And then you can get into analyzing judge’s decisions, what judges have decided in what way, with which advocates, what style of writing seems to work with this particular judge. You can write a brief and then you can tell the programme to rewrite the brief in the style that this judge seems to like and with the press of a button you can change that to something that you may think might have a great chance of success. I think we have not yet fully understood all the vocations of this technology but it will be revolutionary.

How do you think the legal profession has changed in the last few years and where do you think it is headed? What are the changes do you see in the way law firms work or the ways in which they should change to be in pace with the future?

Mobility of lawyers. I can remember when the law firms would not hire associates who worked in law firms for two to three years right after their law school education. Law firms say that we groom our own and we want to train them right out of law school in our way of doing things and we are not interested in recruiting associates who have been in other law firms. That actually is completely wrong. Then the idea of mobile partners came. It used to be that if you become a partner in a law firm, you are going to  stay there till you retire.

That has completely changed. You see partners changing law firms all the time. So it is always sort of a business proposition and practice optimisation proposition that if I join this other firm is it gonna be better for me and my clients. It's a completely different attitude. The mobility of lawyers has completely changed. And then in the details of how we practice as litigators, I talked about search terms in documents that are exchanged. It used to be that you have to have eyeballs on millions of documents. You would have contract lawyers, paralegals and young lawyers spending all their time on documents, originally in hard copy. Technology has completely changed that. You don't need to use eyeballs on the hard copies of documents or otherwise any longer. Now we can search terms and see what that yields and then you may change the search terms based on what you get based on logic because you realize where the best documents are likely going to be. It's going to be revolutionary. Technology is going to completely change the profession.

I must say that one thing that I don't see is robots going to the courtrooms and arguing to the jury. I think we are the last ones to go. You will still always need that human being, that person making a connection with the decision maker.

Do you think law firms should be tied up to the success outcomes?

In our country, we have contingency agreements. That’s unusual, I am told that you cannot do that in India. In the UK you can have some upside participation and also in Australia. I am pretty sure it is unlawful in Japan, Germany and France. I don't understand the objection to it. What’s wrong with the idea that if I have an agreement with my client where if we lose I get nothing but if we win I get the upside and it's all subject to negotiation. I don't see the issue with that as it seems like a good way of doing things where the lawyer is completely aligned with the client. So most of the world doesn't see it that way. But there is an opportunity I gather to manipulate the client. In my experience it is the other way around.

So, say we have a contingency agreement with the client that we get a third of the upside and we get a great result and have huge settlement officer in which the client gets a lot of money but the client says that I am not gonna accept this unless you reduce your portion of the contingency fees that we agreed to, say from 30 % to 20%. So the leverage in my experience goes the other way. The client tries to leverage you back because the lawyer wants the payment. He has been working on this case maybe for years without getting paid as it is a contingency fee case. He has bills to take care of as he has rent and other expenses. He wants the case to be resolved and get paid but the client can say that “you know I am not very happy and I think you should reduce your fee, if you reduce your fee I will accept this otherwise you keep working”. You see what happens? It's said that the lawyer manipulates the client but it’s the other way around.

In India, firms are choosing top tier talent. In fact all the in-house legal departments are choosing top tier firms. How do you see this playing out in the near future and how is this in contrast with what happens in the US or UK in your experience?

Well it's the same thing in the US or the UK. The law firms, typically, are training grounds for lawyers who decide that they would rather have a different life working for one client and rarely sometimes they go back to private practice in the firms. It is not dissimilar to the practice in India.

The foreign law firms have been allowed in the Indian market in a limited manner but do you see a further opening up? What do you think is the logic being opened up in a limited manner and do you think it is a sound logic? 

There are two answers. Obviously the bar has an interest in maintaining quality in the interest of the development of Indian law and the quality of professionals provided to Indian clients in India to practice in Indian courts. These are completely understandable concerns and you would want some control over who does that. Just because someone is a successful litigator in another jurisdiction does not mean that their career has prepared them properly to professionally litigate in India.

The Indian Bar, like in many other countries, is protective of their license. There is an attitude here like elsewhere that this is a threat to our practice and that is completely understandable. If someone from New York wants to practice in New Jersey, you can litigate before the court but there are certain hoops you have to go through. The lawyers in New Jersey don’t want to be intimidated by lawyers who have come over to practice part time. We have a process where lawyers can appear for one offs i.e. particular cases. But there will be a limit on those leading to three to four instances in a year. In Nevada, they don’t want to see California lawyers coming to Las Vegas and taking all the juicy cases so you can appear in Nevada with prior permission but it would be limited to a few instances in a year. Same is the case with Florida. So, this is not an unusual attitude. Like every other professional, lawyers too, are protective of what they do.

So which law firms according to you are the natural partners for foreign law firms? 

Look, I have been in India for 24 hours now, so it would be premature for me to identify or name any such firms. I think the answer is less likely to be law firms and more importantly, the kind of lawyers that we need in a particular problem who can help out the client in the best particular manner. We have relationships with law firms in other jurisdictions and we work with marvel law firms so I don't think it's a useful sort of thought or exercise to think in those terms.

Recently, the BW Legal World conducted 30 under 30 legal awards where we appreciated young lawyers who are five to seven years in their profession. What advice would you give to those lawyers?

First of all, practicing law at the highest level is a labour intensive practice. There are no shortcuts, they cannot just cut through things and have these visions that here’s how we are going to win this case and we’ll not have to put in 60 hours a week. That doesn't happen. Practicing law at the highest level requires concentration and sustained effort.

Second advice would be to keep your eyes open and see what is happening around you and be opportunistic. One needs to look at what other lawyers in other law firms are doing. Pay attention to how the law is developing and try to get there first. We have a saying in our firm, that the side which figures out first what will ultimately matter, wins. We spend a lot of time on things but it later turns out that they do not matter at all. We scour the boiling ocean and turn all the stones. It's not until the end of the case that you realize that only two or three things ultimately matter in most cases. If you can figure that out early, it’s enormously powerful. It gives you a great advantage in litigating the case and directing your efforts. It’s less expensive so your client is happier.

In the last few years, there has been an increase in the branding of law firms and lawyers. Do you think it is a good thing or a bad thing?

Law Firms are businesses and they want to get the market share, they want the client share and therefore they want something which distinguishes them so the clients would think of them. So, it is totally understandable that they would want this type of branding like any business would. You want the consumers of legal services to be thinking about you and what you stand for. 

How do you feel about India becoming an important seat of arbitration in the world?

Well, it's challenging and several countries have tried to do that such as Korea, Australia, Japan and Australia and others. There's a lot of inertia in the international arbitration community. It's a very insular group of people who work together. They sometimes appoint each other to panels and sometimes the advocate and sometimes the panelists have conferences together. They speak to each other. They write and read each other's work. It's kind of a club. And somehow, you have to get ownership and participation.Those are really the people that have to be persuaded that there's a case for India to become an international arbitration centre.

Arbitration practitioners don't like that. They want to be left alone to do their arbitration thing, the way they want to do it. They don't want the other side to be able to run into the local court. And then the judge is looking over the shoulder and changing the rules. So you need  a judiciary that's hospitable to arbitration. So I think it's a challenge, and it would require some vision. 

Like what you see in Singapore, when Singapore has, you know, the government there has promoted it. Singapore is becoming an arbitration center. It didn't used to be and it's now as important or more important than Hong Kong, but I think it can be done, but it's really going to take a concerted effort from the top.

In addition to being successful in your career and having five children, you also do a lot of adventure activities. So why do you do those?

For new experiences and challenges. Maybe I like to suffer.