Entrepreneurial Lawyering for Digital Trade

This article argues that ensuring the rise of e-commerce does not leave SMEs in least developed countries (LDCs) behind requires lawyers to expand their activities beyond macro-level trade agreements. While e-commerce can lower traditional trade barriers, selling online into high-value markets exposes SMEs to a compounded set of legal and regulatory hurdles including traditional trade issues such as technical barriers to trade and sanitary and phytosanitary requirements, and customs duties, alongside e-commerce-specific rules on data privacy, consumer protection, and cybersecurity. As online merchants typically enter several markets at once, these requirements multiply across each destination market, and SMEs from LDCs face particular difficulties where secure payment systems and domestic privacy or consumer-protection frameworks are absent.

To address these on-the-ground obstacles, the article proposes a an integrated approach of offering tailored legal advice to LDC SMEs, defined not by the field of law but by the type of problem it solves and the entity it serves.

Read the article here.