Rural communities benefit when they have local lawyers. Lawyers do volunteer work in communities by serving on boards, putting on events, and in many other ways. Lawyers also volunteer in another important way, by providing free legal services within their communities. While the pro bono work done by rural lawyers cannot close the justice gap, it helps many individual clients. Lawyers also help whole communities, making rural communities more vibrant and resilient. While local governments spend money on lawyers, those governments also financially benefit from having local attorneys.

The common types of poor lawyering include bribery, receiving private fees, forgery, theft of clients’ money and obtaining property by deception, all with themes of greed and laziness. But there are also failures of lawyers’ regulation not just of lawyers’ character, with little discipline of the largest law firms involved in corporate scandals. Choosing a ‘good’ law firm is therefore important for all law students’ futures, and it is important to ask firms about many issues, including their attitude to pro bono work and whether they have a written policy on handling ethical issues. More fundamentally, if the public interest in ‘good’ lawyering is to be supported across Greater China, then better legal ethics education is central to change and social stability. This chapter examines key procedural rules about investigating lawyer misconduct in each of the PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and provides the different definitions of what is misconduct, lists of penalties, details of complaints processes, reviews and appeals. Finally, we set out a table of key ethical rules affecting legal professional conduct in each of the Pthree jurisdictions, including those related to fees and costs.

Public interest lawyering in South Korea has emerged as a response to inadequate rights protections. During the democratic transition, Lawyers for a Democratic Society (Minbyeon) was the primary network of lawyers who advocated for civil and political rights, especially on behalf of workers, students, and dissidents. In the 1990s, lawyers increasingly worked with nongovernmental organizations to promote social and economic rights in the areas of labor, consumer advocacy, environmental rights, and gender equality. Most recently, a small number of public interest lawyers’ groups formed to focus on the rights of minorities, such as migrants, refugees, people with disabilities, and sexual minorities. Meanwhile, bar associations, law firms, and law schools have sought to promote pro bono activity as a professional ethic. This article examines the emergence of public interest law entities since the early 2000s to identify patterns in institutional development and sustainability, especially in modeling and diversification. These case studies uncover an increasingly institutionalized infrastructure for legal mobilization in Korea.

In the conclusion we suggest that the stakes are high - that the challenges facing universities, and especially facing disciplines that remain in isolation from each other grow greater everyday and that we are entering a period of political uncertainty about higher education. We show the way Liberal Management Education creates a solidarity and a winning alternative to the crisis we face in both higher education and increasingly in our societies as a whole.

qLegal is a leading commercial clinical legal education programme at Queen Mary University of London in which postgraduate law students provide supervised pro bono legal advice to technology start-ups and entrepreneurs. Within qLegal, clients often present with complex data protection issues, which relate to their business or the technology that they are developing. Law students who participate in qLegal have to learn and develop skills to respond to the needs of technology entrepreneurs. This requires students to demonstrate practical client management skills, as well as familiarity with an area of law (data protection) that is in a constant state of evolution as new technologies arise. This chapter explores the relationship between the law, law students’ skills development and technology entrepreneurs. In particular it focuses on the development of qLegal, its purpose and role as a clinical legal education programme. It explores the way in which qLegal offers an opportunity for knowledge transfer between entrepreneurs and aspiring lawyers. Further it examines how qLegal offers a means by which to test, expand and challenge students’ understanding of the application of law in unfamiliar fact scenarios, where limited, as well as newly emerging case law pushes students out of their comfort zone.

This chapter examines the various schemes of how individuals can obtain legal advice and representation in Hong Kong. The chapter discusses the split legal profession in Hong Kong between barristers and solicitors and then focuses on legal aid and its various schemes and the schemes operated by the Duty Lawyer Service. Besides providing a descriptive account, this chapter also looks at the reforms that have been proposed with respect to legal aid, the challenges that litigants in persons (unrepresented litigants) may face and the problems that they may pose to the court system.

This chapter clarifies how the practice of poverty law has changed since Congress created federally funded legal services in 1964. Lawyering on behalf of poor people has always been deeply entangled with the actions of individual states. However, 50 years since the War on Poverty, poverty lawyering has become even more state focused. The increasingly state-based nature of the work has wide-ranging implications for legal practice and the development of doctrine. The chapter pays particular attention to the limitations and opportunities lawyers face that are specific to poverty law. Lawyers practice in spite of restrictions placed on federally funded organizations, challenges of coordination across states, and the fragility of private funding and pro bono assistance. States also face limitations in their lawmaking, but these fiscal, bureaucratic, and legislative weaknesses create various openings in which poverty lawyers can lobby and litigate.