10 - The Rise of Transnational Legal Experts: Two Lessons from Research on Private Practitioners As Euro-Lawyers

Summary

This chapter aims to give some insights into how a group of transnational experts, Euro-lawyers, was formed and consolidated. According to most of the studies on the legal profession in the EU, the very existence of a set of European rules, and its both quantitative and qualitative development in the 1980s, would have produced a body of specialised professionals. Moving away from this narrative of an almost mechanical response by lawyers and law firms to external incentives, this chapter analyses how the legal profession has seized European law to offer new services and, in doing so, has made a new jurisdictional claim. Over the course of six decades of European integration, this chapter follow the emergence and development of this group of European legal experts. My findings are twofold: first, transnational legal experts did not come out of a vacuum and their engagement with European law must be contextualised by their national professional positions. Second, they actively participated in the building of the demand for their services.