Walker Clark
Worldview Archives
Law Firms Without Borders: Challenging Trends in Cross-Border Legal Services
Although law firms today face a seemingly vast array of strategic, operational, and management challenges arising from the globalization of the legal services industry, there are at least five emerging trends that characterize law firms that are successfully building profitable cross-border and multinational practices, even when based in only one office or country.
This paper, presented at the 2022 Annual Conference of the American Bar Association International Law Section, on 29 April 2022, describes these five trends, based on observations and research by the author and other Walker Clark consultants in law firms over the past twenty years.
The Law Firm of the Future: “Anytime, Anywhere” Service
One defining characteristic of the successful law firm of the future is already visible in many of the most successful law firms today.
The successful law firm of the future will be able to deliver a high degree of responsiveness and service quality anytime and anywhere the client needs legal services.
Is your law firm ambicultural?
A managing partner of a client law firm of Walker Clark recently told me, "The problem with our firm is that we have too many opportunities and too many good ideas. At the end of the day we are like dogs chasing our own tails."
This is a frequent phenomenon in successful law firms.
Internal Globalization
An article in today's on-line edition of The Lawyer reports that Anglo-Australian firm Herbert Smith Freehills has started a pilot project by which its dispute resolution work in Australia, especially in the area of document review, is supported by its team in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The project is expected to finish in April 2014, at which time the firm will evaluate the results.
This "internal globalization" of support functions is an option that many multi-office law firms overlook or dismiss as too hard.
