Pro’s
- Presence everywhere that matters
- Have created their own barrier to entry
- Comprehensive practice area offerings
- Areas of very high intrinsic profitability
Con’s
- By and large, there are no economies of scale in law firms; there may even be a small contrary effect
- Marginal offices, with continuing churn of openings and closings around the periphery
- Specific practice areas and sectors can suffer cycles of flaccid demand
- Risk of a pachyderm-like lack of responsiveness
- Compensation across a very wide network with areas of high and low intrinsic profitability and high and low costs of living can be a big headache
Management priorities
- Try to remain nimble in maintaining an economically compelling geographic footprint and practice area mix
- Stay on top of enormous managerial complexity and overhead
- Maintain and reinforce the core concept of a “one-firm firm” across time zones, cultures, languages, and more.
What else can we say about global players?
Some of the earliest—Coudert Bros., e.g.—are no longer with us, and others have failed to live up to their potential; this is a back-door way of saying this business model, which everybody and their brother seemingly used to aspire to, is no panacea.
Second, the burden of managerial complexity needs to be called out for special attention. I know managing partners of some of these firms who live on airplanes. That’s glamorous for about a month, and then it quickly becomes a long-run endurance test of one’s physical constitution, dedication to the position and the firm, and simple self-discipline. Don’t underestimate how hard it is to run a firm on which the sun never sets.
Third, if you think the creative ability of competitive Type A’s, working together in a single office, to spontaneously generate tensions where none need exist, to obsess over purely imaginary slights, and to perceive favoritism mysteriously visible only to themself and themself alone, can be challenging, try expanding the canvas to a few continents. Is the “home office” throwing its weight around? Or are the outposts making irrational demands?
Are the practitioners in the most profitable practice areas appropriating more than their “fair share”? Are the practitioners in the least profitable practice areas trying to hold up the firm for ransom? Does the geographic footprint of the firm’s offices, always and inevitably a creature more of history and experience than reason and logic, make plausible sense? If not, how far out of kilter is it? Bad enough that it needs to be addressed or just tolerably bad, and tinkering would cause more sturm und drang than it would be worth?
Finally, these firms by their nature find their primary clientele among multinationals with similar global presence. In case you hadn’t noticed, you might want to know that that’s become a particularly volatile and perilous sector of the corporate landscape to occupy. Not even the most innovative firms, at the crossroads of technology and business, have an assured future. (If you doubt me, I have just a few words for you: Apple, Dell, Facebook, Microsoft, RIM).
Yet the ranks of the Global Players are well populated with firms of (by and large) tremendously impressive capability. Regular readers know that I am not a doom-sayer about BigLaw in general, and one reason among many that I’m not is simply this: The ability of these firms to marshal, on a dime, a vast, powerful, and targeted array of impeccable talent, backed up by deep resources, across virtually 24 time zones, is awesome to behold.
A complex, globalized economy will always need such services. So perhaps I should half take back what I said: Being a Global Player is no guarantee of success, or even indefinite viability, but if you can play in these leagues you may have some serious fun doing so.
