Cross-cultural communications

Culture” is a word that is subject to so many different meanings and interpretations that it has become virtually meaningless. For the purposes of this column, I am defining “culture” broadly to include the factors that affect the way in which people behave and relate to each other. Cross-cultural communications is therefore the way in which we communicate with, and relate to, people from different cultures. I am also including in the definition communication with people from different jurisdictions.

This column focuses on how lawyers communicate with, and relate to, people from different cultures and difference jurisdictions. Increasingly, lawyers operate in a cross-cultural, cross-border context where at least one element is defined by reference to another culture or another jurisdiction. As a result, we find that we often need to deal with clients, lawyers and other parties from cultures that are different from the culture in our home jurisdiction. For example, we may find ourselves acting in a transaction in which an American client is investing in mainland China, or a Singaporean client is investing in Hong Kong. Or it may be a purely domestic transaction, but one in which the client representative is from another country or jurisdiction.

It is important to acknowledge that this is an area in which everyone’s experience will differ to some degree. It is impossible to come up with a list of prescribed “dos and don’ts” for cross-cultural communications and nobody can claim to have an easy solution to all of the challenges involved. Instead, I hope to share some observations in order to encourage readers to think about the issues and how they might respond to the challenges.

Why this is important for lawyers to think about

As lawyers, we are not always good at communication, whether within our own culture or in a cross-cultural context. Even when we communicate with clients from our own culture, there are often cultural misunderstandings that arise as a result of our professional focus and our status as lawyers.

One of the reasons why we sometimes do not communicate effectively is that we are often more focused on the technical detail, and on identifying and solving technical legal issues, than dealing with relationships and people issues. Because of this focus on technical issues, we tend to be more results-oriented than process-oriented (for a discussion about the relevance of this generally in the context of negotiations, see China Business Law Journal volume 4 issue 5: Negotiate). We sometimes overlook the fact that achieving a result from a legal perspective, whether it be obtaining the necessary contractual protection for a client in a commercial agreement, or advising a client on how to comply with the law, is dependent on communications and relationships. In other words, we tend to be preoccupied with the result – “what needs to be done” and “where do we want to get to” – rather than the process – “how should it be done” and “how should we get there”.

This is reflected in the way in which we refer to the work that we do for clients as “matters”, which tends to depersonalise the process in much the same way as a doctor is inclined to focus more on the medical condition than on the person who is suffering from the medical condition.

Someone once described lawyers as “insecure overachievers”. We have very high expectations of ourselves in terms of knowing the answers to complex legal questions and communicating them to clients in a precise and authoritative manner. Sometimes, however, the meaning gets lost in the message. Communicating highly technical issues to clients can be difficult enough for lawyers without the additional challenges of operating in a cross-cultural, cross-border context.

The discussion below considers some of the challenges and identifies some of the techniques and strategies that lawyers can adopt in order to meet the challenges in a cross-cultural context.

A former partner of Linklaters Shanghai, Andrew Godwin teaches law at Melbourne Law School in Australia, where he is an associate director of its Asian Law Centre. Andrew’s new book is a compilation of China Business Law Journal’s popular Lexicon series, entitled China Lexicon: Defining and translating legal terms. The book is published by Vantage Asia and available at law.asia.