But while partners wax lyrical about how the exciting strategy ‘aligns them with clients’, often cruelly mangling a PowerPoint presentation that could have productively been used for sales figures, there is one tiny problem — this strategy for differentiation is just a little bit hampered by the fact that, er, everyone does it.
While Simmons & Simmons and CMS Cameron McKenna can argue they were the innovators in organising their business by industry sector as well as practice area, virtually everyone has since followed suit. And, frankly, sector teams have been common in the
The problem has only been exacerbated by the fact that the magic circle has taken exactly the same approach — making it harder still for smaller firms to argue that their sector specialism is giving them an edge. Linklaters and Clifford Chance, for example, both boast understanding of industries well into double-digits with Linklaters this year jumping on the bandwagon by renaming its European projects practice as energy and infrastructure to highlight its focus.
A similar rebranding of Freshfields’ projects practice and a tightening-up of its industry sectors, which saw the number of industry groups covered reduced from 15 to 12, coincided neatly with the exodus of projects partners the firm has been enjoying ever since.
What don’t you specialise in?
In fact the sheer volume of industries firms claim to ‘specialise’ in is a problem in itself. Lovells is far from the worst offender, but its recent shake-up saw it target industries including — but not limited to — financial institutions, energy, consumer, real estate and life sciences. This is entirely reasonable, but given that the sectors cover virtually the entire corporate spectrum, it is unlikely to differentiate it too much from its rivals — bad news for a firm which has made a point of saying it is staking its future on taking on the magic circle for particular aspects of work.
As soon as law firms start launching pornography and black-market industry sector groups (and arguably they already have a fair bit of that covered in leisure and gambling teams) they will surely have covered the lot.
Even those firms that have narrowed their focus have run into problems. Take
And Dentons is by no means the only firm classifying real estate as both a practice and an industry sector — although perhaps its clients understand the subtle difference between the two groupings…
But the problem with being identified with certain sectors is — and
