The challenge of geography:
Finally and perhaps least surprisingly, the difficulties of managing firms across multiple geographies or even continents came up in virtually every meeting we had. The challenge is easy to state: How to maintain a culture of cohesion and collaboration across time and distance, just as the necessity for doing so becomes more critical than ever?
We wish there were easy solutions to this, but of course there aren’t.
One approach is to avoid the problem as much as possible by relying on a network of “best friends,” frequent visits to update and keep local knowledge fresh and, in general, an aversion to bricks and mortar. The New York white shoe elite firms seem to be following this model, by creating targeted service offerings staffed relatively lightly in markets critical to their core practice (London and Hong Kong, not to be oblique about it). This is the antithesis of trying to clone the home base and seems in our view to be all about defending the home base more than expanding offensively into new territory.
A second approach is simply to get the entire partnership together on at least an annual basis. In our experience, this practice is universally followed, and universally deemed necessary but not sufficient to the challenge.
A third technique is to make sure that different geographies (and of course practice areas) are represented in firm management. As for the efficacy of this, see #2 above.
Finally, the most solid, durable, and meaningful way to ensure collaboration across a far-flung firm is to actually get lawyers working together on client engagements. For this there is no substitute. And isn’t that what the whole idea was behind creating a multi-jurisdictional firm to begin with? Of course it was; but don’t get us started on the gap between strategic aspirations and actual execution and follow-through on the ground.
