Ji Li (University of California, Irvine School of Law) has posted Artificial Intelligence as an Equalizer? Linguistic Barriers and Inequality in Transnational Legal Practice on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
English dominates in transnational legal practice, structuring access to lucrative global markets, elite professional networks, and high-value cross-border opportunities. Practitioners whose native languages are linguistically distant from English (e.g., native Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean speakers) incur significant cognitive and professional costs in operating within this Anglophone environment, even when their substantive legal expertise matches that of native speakers. This Essay examines whether recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) mitigate these asymmetries. Drawing on original survey data from Chinese lawyers practicing in the United States, it finds that respondents frequently deploy AI tools and widely view them as enhancing efficiency in language-intensive tasks such as drafting, translation, and legal research. These gains, however, are limited. While AI reduces the productivity costs associated with English-language legal work, it does not displace the symbolic and relational dimensions of professional advantage. Cultural literacy, market knowledge, and professional networks remain central to success, and aspects of linguistic habitus that signal status and reproduce hierarchy persist. AI thus appears more likely to reconfigure—rather than eliminate—the distribution of professional capital that structures hierarchy within the transnational legal profession.
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Lawrence Solum