The use of discourse expertise to control the provision of legal services and establish discursive hegemony in commercial law practice: a case study from Europe

Abstract This study examines the commercial law context in which two different law firms representing the same company client engaged in hegemonic discourses to establish control over the provision of legal services for an international Merger and Acquisition (M&A) transaction, which was negotiated across different European jurisdictions in English. The ability to construct and maintain discursive hegemony can help strengthen a dominant position for lawyers in a competitive market for professional services. For this type of professional activity, discursive hegemony relates to power that is achieved through discourse expertise, and the way it was used to prioritize legal advice about a contentious issue and persuade the other discourse participants to accept it. Discourse expertise involves the ability to access and leverage disciplinary knowledge and deploy a range of discursive-communicative strategies to deal with contested orders of interactional discourse. In conjunction with discourse and genre analysis of authentic negotiation documents and emails sourced from one of the participating law firms in Istanbul, the research process involved on-site interviews at the law firm to obtain grounded explanations of the discursive strategies and practices used by lawyers actually involved in the M&A negotiation process. This ethnographic research also revealed how hegemonic features of discourse expertise are operationalized under the law firm’s mentoring system to the point where they become embedded in its disciplinary culture and professional reputation.