The Great Trade War : People : U.S. Lawyer in Europe Attracts a World of Clients : Brussels-based American attorney defends an international array of companies charged with ‘dumping.’
Why did an American lawyer represent South Korea’s largest electronics company in trade disputes with the European Community?
The short answer: because that’s where the money was. Commerce is becoming more and more international as modern transportation and telecommunications blur national boundaries. Business success increasingly requires an ability to move smoothly between cultures as different as, for example, Brazil’s and Japan’s.
Just ask James K. Lockett, a Brussels-based American lawyer for the Minneapolis firm of Dorsey & Whitney. His clients, including South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, have come from no fewer than 17 countries on five continents.
“Relating to people from different countries requires a great deal of understanding,” Lockett says. “To do business with foreigners, you have to know their cultural context.”
Many thousands of Americans are doing what Lockett does: conducting business in a foreign country. According to the State Department, 2.3 million “private” Americans (not in the military or in U.S. embassies) lived abroad in 1992, up from 1.7 million a decade earlier.
Some of these were students; others were married to foreigners. A growing number were business executives and their families, typically working for U.S.-based multinational corporations and assigned overseas for three or four years.
Executives transplanted to other industrial countries generally live comfortably but not lavishly; their overseas salary bonuses do not always compensate for the higher cost of living in Europe and Japan. In the Third World, by contrast, many can afford fancy houses and servants.
Many American executives abroad try to re-create a little bit of the United States by living in heavily American neighborhoods and clinging to American customs and the English language. Others--generally the more successful--try to fit snugly into their new surroundings.
Lockett is unmistakably in this second category. He is a lawyer who represents almost exclusively business clients. He specializes in defending manufacturers charged by the European Community with “dumping” their products in Western Europe--that is, selling them for less than they charge at home.
Dumping, recognized internationally as an unfair trade practice, allows manufacturers to build new markets. According to the rules of international trade, a country in which a product has been dumped can attach tariffs that restore the product’s price to a fair level.
That sounds straightforward enough. But just exactly what constitutes dumping is a delicate and complicated question.
Lockett, who then worked for a Belgian law firm, was a pioneer in EC anti-dumping law in the mid-1980s. He represented Silver Reed, a Japanese electronics maker, when the EC undertook its first major anti-dumping action against half a dozen Japanese manufacturers of electronic typewriters.
Not only did the EC slap anti-dumping tariffs on Japanese-made typewriters, but--to prevent the Japanese from making an end run around the tariffs--it also put duties on typewriters made in Japanese-owned plants in Europe.
Silver Reed and the other Japanese typewriter makers appealed these second duties to the GATT, which held them to be illegal. The EC stopped enforcing them.
Why didn’t Silver Reed use a Japanese lawyer? Because, says Lockett, there were few Japanese lawyers in Brussels who were intimately familiar with EC law.
Why did an American lawyer instead of a European get the case? Because the United States had brought major anti-dumping cases years before the EC did, and American lawyers had more experience with the subject.
A flood of EC anti-dumping actions followed the electronic typewriter case, and Lockett found himself in the right place at the right time. After defending several more Japanese clients, he was retained by Samsung Electronics, South Korea’s biggest electronics manufacturer, when the EC charged it with dumping microwave ovens, videocassette recorders, compact disc players, color television sets, car radios and semiconductors.
That led to one of Lockett’s more embarrassing cultural gaffes. When a South Korean businessman handed him a business card, Lockett would innocently tuck it away in his shirt pocket.
“Only on my third or fourth trip to Korea did I discover that the business card is considered an extension of the person, and one should never stuff a person into his pocket,” he says. “I’d been insulting everybody I met.”
Now he carries a Korean-approved leather folder for business cards.
Lockett also picked up anti-dumping clients from Hong Kong, China, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Indonesia--and even the United States. He had to learn their commercial idiosyncrasies.
In Brazil, Lockett says, family ownership is the rule, and most companies reflect the dominant personality of the owner. Japan, at the other end of the spectrum, favors a collective approach to decision making.
Japanese businessmen feel more at home in the United States, where trade law consists of extremely detailed rules, with little left to interpretation. Brazilians, by contrast, are more in tune with the European Community’s less rules-oriented, more discretionary trade law.
“I need to understand how my clients think,” Lockett says. “I have to translate their thoughts and feelings to make them understood at the EC.”
Lockett’s international clientele gives him plenty of opportunities to collect frequent-flyer miles from the world’s airlines. During a particularly grueling five weeks this winter, he flew to:
* Turkey, where he is representing the Koc Group, Turkey’s largest manufacturer, which has been charged by the EC with dumping color televisions;
* Britain, where he met with executives in Koc’s European sales headquarters;
* Moscow, to meet with a Russian lawyer who works with Dorsey & Whitney’s U.S. offices;
* Paris, where Lockett spent a weekend with his wife and mother-in-law;
* South Africa, whose largest corporate group has a member that is charged with dumping ferrosilicon, a metal used in steel production, in the EC.
Lockett then went on vacation. But instead of relaxing, he flew to Colombia (30 hours, by way of London) for a board meeting of the International Christian Chamber of Commerce, a network of Christians in 45 countries who teach ethical business practices and help budding entrepreneurs start small businesses in poor countries.
“In my practice I take a lot out of the system,” Lockett says, “and I try with the Christian Chamber of Commerce to put something back in.”
Lockett got to Europe by design but to Brussels by accident. He studied international relations as an undergraduate at the University of Washington and international law at the Gonzaga University law school in Spokane, Wash. From there he went to the University of London, where he specialized in European and Chinese law while earning a master’s degree.
He then practiced law in Seattle for two years before taking what he calls a “crazy risk,” returning to the University of London to begin work on a Ph.D. Before long, he was recruited by a Brussels law firm that was looking for an English-speaking lawyer who knew China and had a background in European law.
It was then that he became involved in the anti-dumping cases involving typewriters and Samsung Electronics. Lockett spent four years with the Brussels firm and two more in the Brussels office of a London firm before Dorsey & Whitney recruited him in 1990 to open a Brussels office.
