To be fair, partners in the former camp are relatively thin on the ground if this week’s Big Question survey is anything to go by, an extended version of which is available online at legalweek.com/community.
You also get the sense that the traditionalists are well aware that they are raging against a system they feel, with some justification, is loaded heavily in favour of those firms at the top of the pile.
“Having worked for a number of international law firms and now a smaller national law firm,” observes one respondent, “I often have to refer to the names of my previous law firms to assure clients at the outset of a deal that I have the ‘perceived expertise’ to advise.”
So what’s new? The legal market is becoming more transparent. Even before the introduction of limited liability partnerships and the requirement for the publication of accounts, the movement of partners between firms was reducing managing partners’ wriggle-room when it came to creative financial reporting. At the other end of the spectrum, assistant solicitors have been empowered by the web. The
This greater transparency has shortened the inevitable time-lag between a shift in a firm’s quality and a corresponding change in the way its brand is perceived in the marketplace. This is bad news for firms that run into trouble. In the past, leading ‘brands’ could enjoy (if enjoy is the right word) a steady but slow decline. These days, firms that hit turbulence have less time to sort things out, hence the high premium being placed on the quality of a firm’s management.
Has this transparency led to a corresponding increase in a firm’s ability to move up the greasy pole? Hardly. As one survey respondent observes pithily: “We seem to have reached the stage where it is no longer possible for a firm to bullshit its way up the ladder.”
Meanwhile, ambitious partners have long since twigged that the easiest way to move up a notch or two is often to up sticks and join another firm, rather than hang around in the hope a collective push will pay off.
