Challenges Faced by Lawyers Representing Chinese Immigrants in Canada: Understanding Lawyer–Client Relationships Through Legal Consciousness

Abstract

This article examines how the legal consciousness of Chinese immigrants shapes lawyer–client relationships and affects lawyers who routinely represent members of the Chinese community in Canada. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations, it discusses how Chinese immigrants’ emphasis on the approval of their morality from above, tendency to prioritize distributive justice over procedural justice, and their different understandings of the lawyer's roles in the legal system pose challenges for lawyers working closely with them. I argue that Chinese immigrants’ dissatisfaction with their lawyers does not necessarily have much to do with the individual lawyer's competency and style; instead, it primarily results from the gap between what Chinese immigrants expect and what lawyers can do in the Canadian legal system. Bringing the collective characteristics of the legal consciousness of members of ethnic groups into the picture, this article aims to serve as a stepping stone for future discussions about relationships between lawyers and their clients within ethnic communities.

Introduction

In the spring of 2024, I met Nancy Chan, a Chinese Canadian lawyer who had been practising law in Canada since the 1990s. Nancy primarily served Chinese immigrants. Over the years, she had seen Chinese clients being pushed to her by other lawyers. She felt a sense of responsibility to help them, as ‘many people in the community are struggling and need help’. Her strong commitment to serving her own community, however, was not always appreciated. According to Nancy, ‘Your clients don’t know anything about the law. They always blame you. And they want it to be cheap and simple… They cannot tell whether you are good because they cannot even speak English’.

Nancy's experience reveals the complex feelings Chinese immigrants have for Chinese lawyers whose practice is primarily rooted within the Chinese community: On the one hand, Chinese immigrants rely heavily on Chinese lawyers for legal help because of language barriers, as well as their desire for cultural understandings and emotional support. Without Chinese lawyers, many of them may otherwise have great difficulties getting legal help. On the other hand, Chinese immigrants do not necessarily value the expertise and services provided by Chinese lawyers. There is a prevalent belief among Chinese immigrants that ‘one should avoid Chinese lawyers at all costs’, which reflects their concerns about the competency and even ethical standards of Chinese lawyers.

How do we understand lawyer–client relationships and client dissatisfaction in the Chinese community? What are some unique challenges for lawyers who primarily serve Chinese clients in Canada? Existing research on lawyer–client relationships has discussed the impacts of the clients’ legal status, cultural capital, race, gender, and class on their trust and interaction with lawyers (Bessière et al. 2024; Clair, 2021; Gleeson, 2021; Li, 2016). Sarat and Felstiner's (1986, 1995) influential work on conversations in divorce lawyers’ offices emphasizes the interactive two-sided conception of lawyer–client interactions and inspires scholars to examine the coproduction of legal meanings between lawyers and their clients. These studies offer insights into the impacts of social characteristics of clients and lawyers on both sides of the desk and the influence of the power dynamics on the co-production (Bessière et al., 2024; Mather et al., 2001:4). Legal ethics scholarship also highlights the vulnerability of solo and small firm practitioners who frequently deal with one-off matters in so-called ‘personal plight’ zones that are often emotionally charged, as their clients tend to have limited legal knowledge and unrealistic expectations (Levin, 2004; Levin et al., 2013; Mather and McEwen, 2012; Mather and Levin, 2024; Sklar et al. 2019, 2020).

As of this writing, however, research on the unique challenges faced by lawyers who routinely represent members of ethnic communities remains scarce (Levin, 2004), and we know little about lawyer–client relationships within these communities. The existing literature's analysis of the social characteristics of individual clients and lawyers, the size of the law firm, and the nature of the cases, has revealed some common challenges Chinese lawyers shared with many other solo and small firm practitioners. But there is a noticeable gap in the literature regarding the impact of the shared perceptions within the ethnic community on the ways in which individual members of the group interact with lawyers, especially when it comes to perceptions of how to relate to the law and how the lawyers should function within the legal system. Nor do we know much about the influences of these shared perceptions on the careers of the lawyers. Existing research, to a large extent, ignores the influences of the cultural perceptions shared among community members. In this article, I use the Chinese community as an example to emphasize that the collective level of perceptions is particularly important for the analysis of lawyer–client relationships in ethnic communities where cultural and community norms have conflicts with the rules and procedures of the formal legal system.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with Chinese immigrants and lawyers, as well as observation in lawyers’ offices and courtrooms, I bring the legal consciousness of Chinese immigrants into the picture to facilitate a better understanding of challenges faced by lawyers whose practice is deeply rooted within the Chinese community in Canada. Legal consciousness refers to the ways in which people experience, understand and act in relation to the law (Chua and Engel, 2019; Engel and Munger, 2003; Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Halliday, 2019; Halliday and Morgan, 2013; Harding and Keeling, 2024; Harding, 2006; Headworth, 2020; Hertogh, 2018, 2023; Liu, 2023; Merry, 1990; Nielsen, 2000, 2024; Wang, 2019; Young, 2014). Inspired by the discussions of the ‘cultural baggage’ that immigrants bring with them to their host countries and the ‘collective legal consciousness’ of people in a given society (Hertogh and Kurkchiyan, 2016; Kubal, 2013; Kurkchiyan, 2011), I focus on the shared perceptions among Chinese immigrants regarding the role of the lawyers in the legal system and the ways in which one should relate to the law to examine the impacts of these perceptions on lawyer–client relationships.

The discussion of this collective-level legal consciousness helps capture the difficulties faced by lawyers who routinely represent clients in an ethnic community with a deep-rooted system of beliefs about law and justice that differs from those in the host country's legal system. While there are no doubt ‘bad apple’ lawyers whose behaviour negatively affects the reputation of the whole community of Chinese lawyers, I argue that Chinese immigrants’ dissatisfaction with Chinese lawyers does not necessarily have much to do with the individual lawyer's competency and styles; instead, it primarily results from the gap between what Chinese immigrants expect and what lawyers can do in the Canadian legal system.

As gatekeepers to complex legal knowledge, Chinese lawyers like Nancy are simultaneously navigating two systems that sometimes have conflicting values, that is, the legal system of the host country and the value system of the Chinese community. To satisfy Chinese clients, these lawyers must succeed in both systems, which is extremely difficult if not impossible. Chinese lawyers must serve as ‘translators’ to explain legal concepts and procedures to their Chinese clients who heavily rely on cultural beliefs to distinguish right from wrong and constantly refer to morality to evaluate the legitimacy of the law and legal procedures (Erie, 2012; He and Feng, 2021; Liu, 2024, 2018; Michelson, 2008; Thireau and Hua, 2005). During this process of translation, Chinese lawyers must impose the Canadian legal system's values on their Chinese clients to ensure a positive legal outcome, which inevitably leads to the marginalization of their Chinese clients’ sense of justice, morality, and their expectations of how the legal system should work.

For many Chinese immigrants, it is a process of unlearning and re-learning during which they must put their value system aside or at least suppress it to be able to understand how things work in the host country's legal system. Their confusions and frustrations often lead to distrust in their lawyers, dissatisfaction, and complaints about their lawyers on social media platforms and even to legal regulators. While current studies tend to suggest that people with lower cultural capital and marginalized identities in general are relatively more passive and deferential and at the same time less entitled and assertive when interacting with mainstream institutions (Gleeson, 2021; Tungohan, 2018; Young and Billings, 2020), this article complicates this existing assumption by demonstrating how Chinese immigrants’ resistance to their lawyers’ imposition of values of the formal legal system creates some challenges for legal professionals who routinely represent members of the Chinese community.

It is my hope that this article will not only help judges and lawyers make sense of how Chinese immigrants understand and relate to the legal system but also serve as a stepping stone for future discussions about challenges of practicing law in ethnic communities. By providing a detailed analysis of the gap between the expectations of Chinese immigrants and the reality of what lawyers can do within the Canadian legal system, this article calls for more attention to the influences of shared perceptions of the law within a given immigrant or ethnic group on lawyer–client relationships.

Lawyer–Client Relationships and the Vulnerability of Solo and Small Law Firm Practitioners

In an ideal world, lawyers and clients work together to solve a legal problem and achieve a common goal. To do so, clients rely on the expertise of their lawyers to navigate the legal world, and lawyers use their knowledge and experience to come up with legal strategies and guide their clients. In practice, lawyer–client interactions are always messier. In their classic study of lawyer–client relationships in divorce cases, Sarat and Felstiner (1995: 7–8) argue that although lawyers appear to play the dominant role, clients are rarely simply acquiescent and instead they take active part in getting their ideas and interpretations heard and accepted by their lawyers.

As law and legal process are typically dense and not accessible to people without formal legal training, it is common for lawyers and clients to have different agendas, expectations, sense of justice, and different views of what count as major issues, all of which make lawyer–client meetings competitive (Sarat and Felstiner 1986: 104, 112, 125; 1995: 4). This is especially the case for cross-cultural contexts. For example, Sida Liu's (2006: 765) study on elite corporate lawyers in China suggests that huge cultural divergence between China and Western countries makes it a formidable task for corporate lawyers to explain Chinese law to their foreign clients.

At the same time, distrust in lawyers and the legal system offers some explanation for lawyer–client relationships within marginalized communities. Matthew Clair's (2021) study of attorney-client relationships in criminal cases finds that socioeconomically and racially disadvantaged criminal defendants generally have lower trust in their defence attorneys, resulting in withdrawal from their lawyers, which Clair refers to as ‘withdrawal as resistance’; instead of deferring to their lawyers, disadvantaged criminal defendants are active in cultivating their own legal knowledge and skills to resist legal control, but their resistance is often penalized with negative implications for formal outcomes. Similarly, Shannon Gleeson (2021) finds that compared to their documented counterparts, undocumented clients tend to have lower expectations of their lawyers and frame their claims in more pragmatic terms.

The vulnerability of solo and small law firm practitioners is another relevant factor when it comes to Chinese immigrants’ dissatisfaction with Chinese lawyers who routinely represent the Chinese community, which has been examined by current legal ethics studies on client–lawyer disputes (Levin, 2004, 2012a, 2012b; Mather and Levin, 2024; Mather and McEwen, 2012; Sklar et al. 2019, 2020). To be specific, solo and small firm practitioners are often viewed as less ethical than other lawyers (Levin, 2004: 311). Tara Sklar et al.'s (2019: 337) study notes, ‘Compared with lawyers in large legal practices, lawyers in small practices had more than three times the odds of experiencing a complaint and 13 times the odds of a misconduct finding…’ Not surprisingly, most Chinese lawyers whose practice focuses on the Chinese community fall under this category, making them vulnerable to formal and informal complaints. Among all the factors that contribute to their vulnerability, the following three are the most relevant to Chinese lawyers who primarily serve Chinese immigrants.

First, their areas of practice such as family law, wills, real estates, and personal injury often expose them to clients’ inexperience with the law and unrealistic expectations for one-off matters, making them especially vulnerable to client–lawyer disputes (Sklar et al. 2019: 337). These practice areas are emotionally charged, and clients are often vulnerable (Levin et al., 2013). Leslie Levin (2004: 314) suggests that ‘individual clients with personal plight problems may be more likely than corporate clients to file discipline complaints against their lawyers’. Many of their clients, most of whom are one-shotters (Galanter, 1974), often struggle to understand the legal system and whether the lawyer has done a good job, and they sometimes complain about the lawyer out of their misunderstanding of the lawyer's obligations, distress over losing a case, or personal rivalry (Mather and Levin, 2024: 170; Sklar et al. 2019: 339). Divorce lawyers, for example, face a high rate of grievance complaints because of the challenges of dealing with divorce clients who generally have little experience with the legal system and unrealistic expectations of what the legal system can deliver (Mather and McEwen, 2012; Mather et al., 2001). At the same time, routinely working with lower status clients may also lead to a higher likelihood of complaints.

Second, solo and small firm practitioners often have more difficulties in office management and less administrative support to help them avoid the most common disciplinary complaints (Mather and Levin, 2024: 166). In addition to management of their schedules and files, some lawyers may not have sufficient support staff to help them stay on top of their phone calls and other client matters (Mather and Levin, 2024: 170; Levin, 2004: 343). As the main reasons for lawyer discipline are neglect of client matters and failure to communicate with clients (Levin, 2004: 374), it is reasonable to assume that the lack of resources to ensure effective communication with clients may give rise to client complaints. Sklar et al. (2019: 335) refer to studies on patient–doctor relationships to suggest that lawyers who adopt a more collaborative style of communication that engages clients in the decision making and provides more emotional support may face lower risk of complaints.

Third, lawyers who routinely represent members of ethnic communities face unique challenges. As Levin (2004: 326–327) briefly mentions in her study on legal ethics and solo and small law firm practitioners, legal representation of ethnic communities comes with ‘special ethical problems and different conceptions of “diligence” and “competence” based on the ethnic culture and community norms that differ from those recognized by the formal rules’. One example given by Levin (2004: 375) is that as these lawyers are often embedded in their ethnic communities, they are under the pressure to ‘take on matters that raise obvious conflicts by clients with whom the lawyers may have family or social ties’. In addition, they may be under the pressure to provide a range of legal services that are outside their areas of expertise (Levin, 2004). However, there is little empirical evidence to support Levin's emphasis on the unique challenges for lawyers serving ethnic communities in the existing literature, except for a brief discussion of the financial disadvantage for lawyers working with Chinese and Filipino clients in Esther Tangsoc's (2022) master thesis on Asian Canadian lawyers. My study takes up Levin's (2004) invitation to investigate the unique challenges for ethnic practice, with a focus on the stories of the Chinese community and the experience of Chinese lawyers who primarily serve Chinese immigrants.

Bringing the Legal Consciousness of Immigrants into the Picture

The concept of legal consciousness assists scholars in their efforts to appreciate the complexities of the experiences of migrants and reveal the role of law and policies in shaping their everyday lives. Studies have demonstrated that understandings of what the law should be and how to engage with the law are in the ‘cultural baggage’ that immigrants bring with them to their host countries, including the pre-migration cultural conceptions and social practices that continue to influence the ways in which immigrants behave in the host country (for a list of relevant studies, see Kubal, 2013: 59–60). Agnieszka Kubal (2013) calls for more attention to the concept of ‘collective legal consciousness’, which Marc Hertogh and Marina Kurkchiyan (2016) use to explain how people in different countries develop their own distinctive pattern of legal consciousness because of the powerful influence of political consciousness on the ways in which they understand and relate to the law (see also, Kurkchiyan, 2011). Hertogh and Kurkchiyan (2016: 417) argue that ‘legal and political consciousness are firmly linked together and that a deeper understanding of the “legal” dimension of everyday thinking requires more careful and detailed study of its interplay with the “political” dimension’.

In addition to cultural and social norms within their communities and political factors, there are various factors contributing to the different understandings of the law among immigrants, such as immigration status and previous experiences with the law (Asad, 2023; Abrego, 2019, 2011; Gleeson, 2021; Tungohan, 2018; Tenorio, 2024). Several studies on immigrants, although some do not directly invoke the concept of legal consciousness, have pointed to the impacts of cultural differences and previous lived experiences on how they understand and relate to the law in the host country. For example, Preet Kaur Virdi's (2013: 109) study of immigrant Sikh women in Canada suggests that even though official law claims to be more authoritative than religious laws and customs, this does not translate into everyday practices within Sikh communities in Canada. Studies on immigrants’ trust in institutions demonstrate that past experiences in the country of origin among immigrants who are ‘too old to forget’ the historical and contextual features of the country-of-origin institutions have a significant impact on their trust in the host-country institutions (Superti and Gidron, 2022). All these studies point to the importance of taking into consideration the cultural differences, the influence of political consciousness, and past experiences with the legal system in their home countries in the discussion of lawyer–client interactions in the host country.

Data and Methods

The data for this study is based on in-depth interviews with Chinese immigrants and lawyers who primarily serve the Chinese community, as well as hours of observation in the courtrooms and lawyer–client meetings in Canada between September 2023 and April 2025. Most of the interviews and observation were done in Western Canada, with a primary focus on Alberta and British Columbia. This study primarily draws on my research project on the legal consciousness of Chinese immigrants, which invited immigrants to share their experience with lawyers and the legal system, as well as the challenges they had encountered in resolving disputes in Canada. My research assistants and I located and interviewed Chinese immigrants who had experienced disputes in Canada, including family disputes, conflicts with neighbours, unpleasant business partnership, employment exploitation, rental scams, traffic accidents, just to name a few. I conducted 99 interviews in Mandarin or a mix of Mandarin and English, and my research assistants conducted a total of 57 interviews either in Cantonese or Mandarin. The interviews covered immigrants from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. While the vast majority of our interviewees were Chinese immigrants, there were also Chinese lawyers and law students routinely representing Chinese immigrants, staff members of the courts centre and the legal service program in community organizations, and legal interpreters, all of whom (N = 11) were recruited to speak about their experience working with Chinese immigrants. In addition to in-depth interviews, I conducted observations in the local courts and lawyer–client meetings to see how Chinese immigrants interacted with legal professionals.

Another project I have been conducting in the past two years on the experience of East Asian lawyers and law students has also offered important insights and inspirations, as it exposes me to the difficulties and concerns these lawyers have for legal practice in ethnic communities. For the recruitment of East Asian lawyers and law students, I posted the information of this study on LinkedIn, sent out invitations to participate in the study to lawyers using the contact information on their websites, and used snowball sampling to reach more lawyers. A total of 30 East Asian lawyers across different career stages and 13 law students (the majority of whom were articling students) from British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario participated in this project. Among them, 25 lawyers and 10 students self-identified as Chinese, among whom 14 routinely worked with Chinese clients (three in large law firms, two in mid-size litigation firms, and nine in solo or small firms) and four Chinese law students explicitly expressed concerns about challenges for representing Chinese clients. Although not all the Chinese lawyers and students focused their practice on the Chinese community, the reasons behind why they chose to serve their own community or not were important components in the interviews. It was through the conversations with senior lawyers who were concerned about the future of the Chinatown practice and the difficulties they had encountered in serving the community, as well as discussions with the younger generation of Chinese lawyers about their reluctance to focus their careers on the Chinese community, that I came to the realization of the urgency of investigating the lawyer–client relationships within the Chinese community and its implications for access to justice for Chinese immigrants.

Despite its coverage of both the narratives of Chinese immigrants and Chinese lawyers, the research team did not attempt to interview lawyers and clients who were working together at the time of the interviews. Chinese lawyers were asked to speak about the general pattern and challenges in their daily work, rather than commenting on specific cases. Nor did we ask Chinese lawyers to connect us with their clients out of ethical concerns. For the lawyer–client meetings we observed, we were brought to the meetings by Chinese immigrants, rather than through the lawyers. At the same time, most Chinese immigrants interviewed did not have extensive experience working with lawyers for various reasons, including the lack of legal aid resources available in their languages, limited financial resources, and the overwhelming nature of legal proceedings. As a result, the narratives presented in this article do not focus on ongoing interactions between lawyers and Chinese clients.

The length of interviews ranges from one to three hours, with most of them between 90 and 150 min. The conversations were recorded and transcribed in the language spoken, unless the interviewees did not give consent for recording. Detailed fieldnotes were produced by me and the research assistant who observed the interviews when they were not recorded. Data analysis began immediately after each interview, and I read the fieldnotes, transcripts and analytic memos from time to time during the data collection process. I combined all the interview transcripts and field notes taken during the interviews, in the courtrooms, and at the lawyer–client meetings and uploaded them to NVivo for coding. I looked for repeated ideas related to lawyer–client relationships and Chinese immigrants’ perceptions of the role of lawyers and the legal system, during which process I grouped them and organized them into more general themes. My institution's Research Ethics Board approved the legal consciousness project in 2022 and the legal profession project in 2023. The names of all my research participants are pseudonyms.

From Misunderstanding to Dissatisfaction

What are some factors that contribute to Chinese immigrants’ dissatisfaction with their lawyers in Canada? How do Chinese immigrants’ understandings of the roles of the court and lawyers prevent effective communications with legal professionals in Canada and give rise to misinterpretation of lawyers’ intentions? Only through a detailed analysis of the shared perceptions of the law and the role of lawyers within the Chinese community can we better understand Chinese immigrants’ dissatisfaction with their lawyers and the consequential challenges faced by lawyers who routinely represent Chinese clients. In this part, I discuss three common themes that were frequently brought up by Chinese immigrants and lawyers who routinely work with Chinese clients, that is, Chinese immigrants’ emphasis on the approval of their morality from above, their tendency to prioritize distributive justice over procedural justice, and the different understanding of the lawyer's roles.

The Emphasis on the Approval of their Morality from Above

Chinese immigrants who are considering going to court or in the process of legal proceedings tend to emphasize the importance of having the judge decide on their matters and tell the parties who is at fault. While it is common for immigrants and even their native-born counterparts to consider the legal process as ‘an arena for a full adversarial contest’ and bring folk beliefs of justice into their interactions with legal professionals (Gleeson, 2021; Merry, 1990; Sarat and Felstiner, 1986: 109), Chinese immigrants’ desire for a court decision from above is closely related to the importance for a neutral third party with power and authority to endorse the perceptions of justice of the party that believes that they have not done anything immoral. To many Chinese people, judges are champions of ordinary people in trouble and ‘parent officials’ (父母官) who will take efforts to uphold justice on behalf of the weak and poor (Michelson, 2008).

What makes things more complicated is the unique relationship between law and morality in Chinese cultures and legal proceedings. Chinese immigrants I interviewed often invoked the concept of qingli (情理) to describe their sense of morality to distinguish right from wrong in particular situations. Qingli is a concept that can be loosely translated into what the majority of people in society consider to be just and fair (Chou, 2000; Liu, 2018; Wang, 2019). Chinese people generally value qingli more than law. Many people consider law to be a complement to qingli, and it is common for them to turn to qingli first and only invoke the law when qingli has been exhausted (Sin and Chu, 1998: 152). In fact, in traditional Chinese legal culture, law should abide by and be grounded in qingli and be adjusted to meet the requirements of qingli (Lin, 2014), and judicial officers often emphasized the need to make their rulings harmonious with qingli and convincing to litigants (Xu, 2018).

To Chinese immigrants, a court decision means more than a judgement regarding whose claims make more legal sense – it serves as an approval of one's morality from a respected person with authority. Oftentimes, both the party who initiates the legal process and the respondent desire a court decision to approve their morality, even if going through the legal proceeding costs much more than reaching a settlement. Victor Chen, a manager of a cleaning company, was brought to court by his business partner in 2023. Victor insisted that he would like to fight until the end for a court decision. His lawyer kept reminding him of the high legal fees of going through the cross-examination, which could cost him another $40,000. Whenever the lawyer suggested reaching a settlement with the other party, Victor would suddenly become very disappointed. He repeatedly told the lawyer that ‘reaching a settlement with the other party equates losing the case’. During one of the lawyer–client meetings I observed, Victor explained that he was concerned about his reputation within the Chinese community if he could not obtain approval of his morality from the court. Victor complained to me when his lawyer left for a break, ‘Being brought to the court by a member of the Chinese community has a significant impact on my mental health. It had never happened before. My whole family has always been respected by people around us… I just cannot get over it – how dare that Chinese man and his wife treat me like this. I have been thinking about suing them too just to let them know how it feels’. Towards the end of the lawyer–client meeting, Victor agreed to go home and prepare his consent order to be sent to his lawyer as soon as possible.

A week later, I met Victor and his lawyer in the courtroom, and it turned out that Victor went so far as to deliberately put terms on his draft of the consent order that he knew the other party would never accept in order to stay in the court procedure, which in his view would be able to force the judge to make a court decision. He waited until the last minute to send the draft to his lawyer before the hearing, with the intention of leaving no time for the lawyer to change anything to make it acceptable. The trick did not work. The judge was not interested in making the decision for them. Instead, the judge told the two parties to come up with a consent order before going back to wait in his office. Both parties felt they deserved a court decision. The lawyer representing the other side told the court clerk that his client demanded more active involvement of the judge, and Victor was once again disappointed and thought the judge did not care anything about the significant impact the case had had on him over the past two years.

In fact, I had heard Victor's lawyer emphasizing several times in their meetings that the court was underfunded and understaffed, and judges would likely ask the two parties to collaborate and come up with a solution. His lawyer also repeatedly stressed that he had a formal obligation as a lawyer to encourage settlement according to the professional code. He also reminded Victor of the fact that the judge might find this type of case annoying, which meant the likelihood for the court to decide for Victor was low. Indeed, many cases involving Chinese immigrants are family disputes and conflict between business partners, which fall under what Sally Engle Merry (1990: 1) describes as ‘garbage cases’ that the courts dislike handling.

It is, however, not an easy task to convince Chinese immigrants to opt for settlement when they expect the judge to uphold their morality. Janet Wang, a lawyer in a small firm primarily serving Chinese immigrants, described it as an important part of her job to educate her Chinese clients and make sure that they were aware of the cost of depending on the formal legal system to resolve disputes. She suggested, ‘We have to explain to Chinese immigrants again and again that judges in the Canadian legal system are not their parent officials. We encourage them to settle by reminding them of the lengthy process and the high legal fees, which I think are signals that going to court should be the last resort’.

Unfortunately, negotiation and mediation do not come with an approval of their morality from a respected person with authority, which in part makes these alternative dispute resolution mechanisms less attractive to Chinese immigrants. According to Emily Yau, a licensed mediator who had six years of experience working as a legal program coordinator and interpreter to assist Chinese immigrants in navigating legal issues, ‘When Chinese immigrants are involved in conflict, many will prefer to go directly to the court. Mediation is not as attractive, as it is not binding…Even when the court assigns a mediator to help them, some Chinese clients find it confusing and expect the mediator to give them a decision. In fact, some of them complained that going through mediation was simply a waste of their time because they could not have a binding decision from above’.

This emphasis on obtaining approval from a respected person with power and authority has imposed extra burdens on lawyers who serve Chinese immigrants when legal regulators expect counsels to ‘advise and encourage a client to compromise or settle a dispute whenever it is possible to do so on a reasonable basis and must discourage the client from commencing or continuing useless legal proceedings’ (Federation of Law Societies of Canada, 2024). To make things worse, when encouraged to opt for alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, Chinese immigrants who are determined to obtain approval of their morality from a judge sometimes see it as an excuse made by the lawyers to avoid legal proceedings and interpret it as an indication that those lawyers are soft and incompetent to fight in courts. For example, when Janet encouraged a Chinese client to settle with her husband, the client responded, ‘I know Chinese lawyers cannot do a good job in the courtroom. After all, you speak English with an accent. No wonder the chance to win is low’. The conflict between Chinese clients’ emphasis on active involvement of the judge and the lawyer's obligation to encourage settlement inevitably gives rise to client dissatisfaction and misunderstandings.

Prioritizing Distributive Justice Over Procedural Justice

While influential law and society studies in the U.S. demonstrate that people prioritize procedural justice (fairness of the process) over distributive justice (fairness of outcome) because of their emphasis on procedural legitimacy (Sunshine and Tyler, 2003; Tyler, 2006), studies on Chinese citizens’ perceptions of the formal legal system have found that distributive justice is much more important than procedural justice to ordinary people (Feng and Cao, 2014; Liu, 2023; Michelson and Read, 2011). In traditional Chinese thinking, substantive justice was the ultimate objective for civil trials, and therefore, ‘in order to seek substantive justice, some flexibility in procedure was acceptable’ (Li, 2014: 141). As Michelson and Read (2011: 197) point out, ‘People in China assess distributive justice (satisfaction with the outcome) and procedural justice (satisfaction with the fairness of the process) virtually identically’. Substantive justice trumps procedural fairness both in traditional Chinese culture and in socialist legality in today's China (Michelson and Read, 2011: 197).

The primary reason behind the conflation of substantive and procedural justice, according to He and Feng's (2021) research on litigants’ attitudes toward civil justice in southern China, is that the litigants are unfamiliar with the law and court proceedings, and as a result, they cannot distinguish between procedural justice and outcomes and feel they have little control over the process. Compared to their counterparts in China, Chinese immigrants in Canada have even less knowledge of the legal system they are navigating, and thus, it is reasonable for them to prioritize substantive justice over procedural fairness. In fact, the difficulties for Chinese immigrants to make sense of the law and the legal proceedings push them to rely heavily on qingli to organize everyday life and relate to the law.

In a three-hour interview, Mary Hsu, an immigrant from Taiwan who appeared in front of the judge without legal representation for several times to fight against her brother-in-law for the house she had been living together with her late partner Richard for more than a decade, reflected on her own experience going through the legal system – ‘There were so many legal terms that I could not possibly understand. How could they assume that someone like me could understand “power of attorney” and “personal directive” that sort of things? I knew nothing about those legal documents whatsoever. The only thing I knew was that I wanted to help Richard and that he always wanted to protect me and leave the house to me’. ¹ In the end, Richard's brother got permission from the court to sell the house and force Mary to leave the house on a cold November day. Mary complained, ‘Law is too complicated for people like me to understand because of cultural and language barriers… I have no idea about the legal procedure, and no one could help me because I had no money. You know, lawyers only cared about money. So, I always use qingli to make sure what I do live up to conscience…It is unfair for me to be kicked out from my own place. It is by no means consistent with qingli’.

For Chinese immigrants who have more financial resources than Mary to afford a lawyer, their reliance on qingli and the resulting reluctance to place significant value on procedural justice often lead to misinterpretation of their lawyer's intentions, behaviour and professional skills. Lisa Han, a small firm practitioner whose clientele were primarily Chinese immigrants, often had to take a lot of time to educate her Chinese clients about the importance of evidence and what the lawyers could do. Some clients could not understand why Lisa kept asking for evidence or the conflict-of-interest check, and some of them translated it into Lisa's lack of trust in them. Lisa explained, ‘Oftentimes, they tell me their stories, and I believe them wholeheartedly. I know they are not lying to me. The problem is that they cannot provide evidence to support their stories, but at the same time, they expect me to promise a win in the court because they believe that their claims are completely supported by qingli’. Indeed, it is common for Chinese immigrants to accuse their lawyers of not telling the judge the whole story and their moral reasoning or qingli behind their claims, and some people see it as a signal that their lawyers are not following their instructions and not fighting for their best interest.

At the same time, their prioritization of distributive justice over procedural justice also leads Chinese immigrants to translate their lawyer's emphasis on evidence and reluctance to take on their cases into the lawyer's incompetence. For example, Jianwei, a businessman who immigrated to Canada from mainland China in the late 2000s, kept questioning the competence and professional skills of Chinese lawyers after hearing from a family friend that no one ‘dared to take on the case’ where the friend was kicked out of her own house after her common-law partner turned to the court and the police for help. According to Jianwei,

My friend was kicked out from the house she bought by a white dude who moved into her place about a year ago after they started dating… How ridiculous was this whole thing? She did not speak English well and had no choice but to turn to Chinese lawyers for help. She asked quite a few Chinese lawyers. Guess what, not a single Chinese lawyer dared to take up her case. They said they were not specialized in this type of litigation. I think they didn’t know how to deal with it, or perhaps it would likely take them too much time and efforts to solve the problem.

Jianwei's biases and discrimination against Chinese lawyers were based on his belief that being kicked out from one's own house was morally unacceptable, and those who dared not take on such a case must have poor legal skills to fight for their clients. He was among many other Chinese immigrants who believed that Chinese lawyers were only capable of taking on simple cases such as real estate and low-conflict divorce.

Chinese Clients’ Different Expectations of the Lawyer's Roles

In general, research shows that Chinese people are less likely than their American counterparts in Tom Tyler's (2006) renowned study to believe that they should comply with directives from legal authorities when they have personal feelings against the directives and think the judges or police officials are wrong. Rather, it is their recognition of the social values embedded in the law that motivates legal compliance, which also means that the law's lack of moral legitimacy ² will likely breed noncompliance (Liu, 2024). For the same reason, Chinese people are more tolerant of the evasion, manipulation, and resistance to the law (Erie, 2012; He, 2005; Liu, 2024, 2025; Su, 2018).

Mike Lee, a former in-house counsel of a global textile company in Taiwan with several factories in mainland China, shared during the interview, ‘My boss once asked me to help him deal with some legal issues in mainland China. He wanted to keep the factory operating 24/7 to make sure that our orders could be delivered on time. I told him that it was against the law to force people to work overtime that way, but he was determined to do it. What he wanted from me was an evaluation of the cost of violating the law. It is like, if running a red light could bring in millions of dollars, then he would risk it as long as he would not die’. Mike suggested that some Chinese businessmen did not rely on lawyers’ expertise to plan business activities; rather, they hired lawyers to justify or reduce the risk of their noncompliance with the law.

The strategies to work around the law are crucial for business owners to stay competitive and alive in a dog-eat-dog world. As He (2005: 527) points out, instrumental considerations add weight to Chinese entrepreneurs’ decision on whether or not to comply with the law. When most business owners engage in evading or manipulating the law, it pushes all players in the same industry to turn to legal evasion and manipulation. The law's lack of moral legitimacy and the uneven enforcement of the law further enhance their instrumental considerations (He 2005; Su 2018).

Expecting the lawyers to help with evading the law or at least working around it is a typical example of the continuing impact of past experiences in their home country on immigrants’ understandings of and relationship with the law and lawyers (Kubal, 2013; Superti and Gidron, 2022; Virdi, 2013). Similar to what Levin (2012a, 2012b) describes in her analysis of immigration lawyers and their lying clients, for clients coming from corrupt legal systems, they may have a different concept of the lawyer's place in the legal process, and some may even view lying as acceptable or even desirable because it is all about playing the system.

At the same time, some Chinese clients are used to the ways in which lawyers and clients interact in China and are reluctant to let their lawyers dominate the process. Weiming Guan, a small restaurant owner who had been involved in a lawsuit since 2023, told me that he was not happy with his lawyer because of the lawyer's dominant role. Weiming said,

The lawyer expects me to follow his instructions because he is the lawyer, but shouldn’t it be the case that he should listen to me because it is me who hires him? I have no intention to rely on the lawyer to distinguish between right and wrong. It is the judge's job…. Lawyers are not judges and should not be neutral in the process. The purpose of hiring a lawyer is to serve my needs and achieve my goals in the legal proceeding. It is inappropriate for the lawyer to always try to make the decision on behalf of the clients.

Weiming disliked the feeling of not being in control of the situation and kept questioning whether his lawyer was competent and professional.

Educating clients about how different ways things work in two countries and persuading them to follow the Canadian rules, therefore, become an important part of the daily work of lawyers who primarily represent Chinese clients. According to Matt Su, a criminal lawyer who routinely worked with clients from mainland China,

It is the lawyer's job to push back…. Lawyers obviously have to advocate for your clients, but you also have to control your clients and not let them lead you to do unfruitful or unethical things. You have to explain that maybe it all works back where you came from, but it is not how it works in Canada, and let's work together to make your case work within the Canadian context…If they don’t like my strategy and want to pursue an alternative strategy, I am happy to do that as long as it is ethical. And I ask them to sign off on that. It is trickier when they ask you to do something unethical or make an argument that is legally embarrassing, and that's when I would consider dropping or firing clients…. You have to manage clients, otherwise they will get you into trouble.

Matt did not think educating Chinese clients about the criminal system was that much different from explaining complex legal concepts and procedures to their native-born counterparts, as most Canadians knew very little about criminal law. To Matt, the most challenging part lies in some Chinese clients’ expectations for the lawyers to help them play the legal system. Matt learned from his clients from mainland China the belief that ‘there are some ways in which the lawyers can talk to the judges and then things all get kind of cleaned up’. Indeed, it is not unusual for Chinese lawyers serving Chinese immigrants to occasionally encounter clients who tell them to ‘take advantage of a loophole’, ‘be flexible and think about alternative solutions through the backdoor’, or find some guanxi ³ to get it fixed. While solo and small firm practitioners who serve individual clients with little knowledge about the law may need to deal with this situation more often, corporate lawyers in global law firms sometimes find themselves in the same situation as well.

Discussion and Conclusion

Using the Chinese community as an example, this article calls for more attention to the extra burdens for lawyers whose practice is deeply rooted in ethnic communities or those who primarily serve immigrants with different understanding of and relationship with the law. Bringing legal consciousness into the picture, this study not only reveals the impact of clients’ perceptions of the law on lawyer–client relationships but also offers some contexts for legal regulators and judges to better understand the choices and behaviours of these lawyers and their clients. It is my hope that this study has at least captured some factors that contribute to the vulnerability of lawyers primarily serving ethnic communities in terms of being accused of unethical conducts both by community members and by legal regulators.

It may seem on the surface that dealing with Chinese immigrants who have little knowledge of the Canadian legal system is not unlike serving the one-shotters who have only occasional recourse to the courts (Galanter, 1974) and emotional clients whose cases fall in the ‘personal plight’ zones (Levin et al., 2013) when it comes to the clients’ lack of knowledge of the law. Indeed, most of the lawyers whose practice focuses on the Chinese community also fall under the category of solo or small firm practitioners. Nevertheless, one of the most challenging parts of their work with Chinese clients is to complete the impossible task of effectively communicating and translating the Canadian law into plain language for their clients to fully understand the situation. This article investigates the difficulties in lawyer–client communication by revealing the gap between client expectations and the reality in the legal system. In the eyes of Chinese immigrants, a good lawyer should be able to simultaneously fulfil the expectations of the clients and skillfully navigate the Canadian legal system according to these expectations. Lawyers often find themselves caught in between and must impose the values embedded in the complex legal knowledge of the Canadian legal system on their clients. They have the extra burden to convince their Chinese clients that judges are not their parent officials, explain to them the importance of evidence and procedural justice, and manage some unreasonable expectations from their clients.

No matter how much time and effort these lawyers are willing to take to educate their Chinese clients in an ideal world, they are already constrained by the resources they have and the fees their clients are willing to pay and can afford. It inevitably leads to the dilemma that effective communications between the two would be extremely difficult to achieve, which also leaves some space for Chinese clients to interpret the intentions of their lawyers on their own and within their families and communities. Unfortunately, shared perceptions within their social networks about how the law and the lawyers should work can oftentimes reinforce their misunderstandings and contribute to client dissatisfaction.

This article, however, by no means suggests that Chinese clients are to blame for the unique challenges faced by lawyers whose practice focuses on the Chinese community. Rather, through detailed analysis of the reasoning behind their desires and requests, it aims to deflate the myth that Chinese immigrants are unreasonable and tend to make claims without evidence or even lie in front of the judges. It has less to do with their personalities and moral standards than their memories of how things work back home – some of those strategies are simply necessary for survival in a society where the law does not necessarily enjoy moral legitimacy and is not always the primary concern during the process of dispute resolution (He, 2017). In fact, it is the importance of the context of the formation of shared perceptions that makes legal consciousness a useful framework to facilitate a better understanding of lawyer–client relationship in ethnic communities. Despite its focus on the Chinese community, this article's emphasis on legal consciousness aims to offer some implications for future studies on lawyer–client interactions in other ethnic communities, especially for communities with a deep-rooted system of beliefs about law and justice that differs from those in the host country's legal system.