That cultural detail was cited by a Nigerian lawyer during an International Bar Association (IBA) pow-wow on Monday, to show how cultural flat-footedness can cost lawyers a good many deals in a globalised world.

Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong had cautioned as much in his speech at that very same meeting.

Former Mexican ambassador to Singapore Eduardo Ramos-Gomez then pointed out that cultural sensitivity was made up of nothing more mystical than the universal values of respect for, and understanding of, others.

But preaching respect and understanding to lawyers seems ironic when you consider how unapologetically adversarial the profession is, to say nothing of the old chestnut that, when lawyers say 'with all due respect', they mean anything but.

The best field of law with which to demonstrate the importance of understanding cultural differences is, perhaps, the wild, wild west of Internet intellectual property law, where online service providers (OSPs) like YouTube clash with copyright owners.

This area of practice is currently a cowboy land of all-grey terrain, because the world's laws to protect copyright online came about when OSPs were just cyber-storage sites.

But OSPs - or what the law calls 'hosts' - now also edit and publish Web content, which makes it hard for, say, YouTube to argue that it was ignorant of, and did not directly benefit financially from, any copyright-violating postings.

And dealing with today's legal disputes using yesterday's laws is turning current OSP-copyright owner clashes into free-for-alls.

The United States, birthplace of the most hosts, is more forgiving of them, providing copyright infringers with a number of escape hatches and leaving copyright owners to hunt them down.

Singapore's Copyright Act is just as unabashedly pro-business, requiring judges to wade through a raft of considerations before deciding if a host should sink or float, and penalising copyright owners who are trigger-happy with complaints.

Britain, noted British lawyer Mark Stephens, is not as liberal-minded as the US, being more rigorous in probing whether hosts have gone too far in using copyrighted works.

But the courts of Britain's neighbours, France and Belgium, are the fiercest champions of copyright owners because, as French lawyer Alexandra Neri put it, judges see them as 'people who work deep into the night, creating by candlelight'.

While an awareness of such cultural biases can help lawyers prepare their cases better, such cultural sensibility still seems rare.

At my table during the Women Lawyers' Interest Group lunch on Monday were delegates from Argentina, Finland, Germany, Northern Ireland, Peru and the US.

Referring to her Japanese client, the German lawyer said: 'He kept talking to me without once looking at me, until he decided he could accept a woman as his lawyer'.

With a laugh, the Peruvian lawyer then piped up: 'Mine insisted on his way even though I kept telling him it was not possible.'

Then, a lawyer from upstate New York asked me why Singapore was no longer part of Malaysia.

After I explained it had largely been a cultural clash between mostly-Chinese Singapore and mostly-Malay Malaysia, she gasped: 'You know, I never knew Mr Lee (Kuan Yew) was Chinese.'

I rest my case.

suk@sph.com.sg