Editor's Note: This story is adapted from ALM's Mid-Market Report. For more business of law coverage exclusively geared toward midsize firms, sign up for a free trial subscription to ALM's weekly newsletter, The Mid-Market Report.

The phrase “perception is reality” is generally attributed to Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater, but that principle is just as applicable to running a law firm as it is to running a campaign—particularly when it comes to the tricky proposition of decentralizing management functions.

Whether the firm has moved to a truly “headquarter-less” structure or has simply installed a managing partner or chairman in a satellite office, the perception among lawyers and staff that their new leader's home base is the de facto HQ is a reality firm management must contend with.

And the only effective way to do that, law firm leaders and consultants said, is for the new firm head to put in plenty of face time with attorneys and staff around the firm and to remain acutely aware of how every decision will impact and be received by the firm as a whole.

While technology has eliminated many of the old geographic barriers to serving clients, physical location can still be a significant factor when it comes to the internal operations of running a law firm.

Eric Seeger, a principal at the management consultancy Altman Weil, said a managing partner who works outside of a firm's historical headquarters or largest office is no longer rare.

“I don't know that the clients care that much,” he added, but he emphasized that the firm administration could care a great deal.

Especially in the early days of a new managing partner's tenure, Seeger said, “It's important to be on site regularly” to establish relationships.

In 2016, after Ulmer & Berne partner Scott Kadish was elected to serve as the 150-lawyer Cleveland firm's first Cincinnati-based managing partner, he quickly made it a priority to travel regularly to the firm's other offices.

“The way I have made this work is I'll do Cleveland once or twice a month for a couple of days,” he said. “And I use that time to meet with people, to actually walk around the halls and to see what people are doing. Maybe once every three months, I'll go to [the firm's smaller offices in] Chicago and Columbus to check in on people. I do that—one, to make sure they know I'm looking—and to make sure they know I care.”

Given that the firm is still very much headquartered in Cleveland—its chief financial officer, chief marketing officer, chief information officer and all of its other administrative functions are housed there—forming personal connections with attorneys and staff around the firm and remaining accessible have been vitally important, Kadish said.

But, Kadish added, the fact that he was elected managing partner in the first place, beating out two other Cleveland-based candidates, is a testament to the firm's philosophy that leadership should be about ability, not location.

“I use this in recruiting: 'They voted for me even though I'm in a satellite office because they thought I was the best person for the job,'” he said. “It really has to do with the culture of our firm.”

Walking the Walk

For some firms, naming a managing partner who works outside what has traditionally been thought of as the main office can be a way of signaling a de-emphasis on any one location; a step along the path toward full decentralization.

But, as Bob Hicks, chairman of the executive committee and managing partner at 450-lawyer Taft Stettinius & Hollister, can attest, that path is a long and winding one that never really ends.

In 2017, Hicks, a partner in Taft's Indianapolis office, took over as the first firmwide chairman and managing partner based outside of Cincinnati in the firm's 131-year history.

By then, Taft already had in place a long-established model of decentralized management, in which C-suite positions, back-office functions and practice leaders are spread across a number of offices, each of which has considerable autonomy to operate in the way that makes the most sense in that particular market. All of that is overseen by a firmwide executive committee and a firmwide compensation committee, both of which are made up of attorneys from across Taft's various offices.

That structure was established during a period of great expansion the firm experienced under the leadership of Hicks' predecessor, Thomas Terp, in part to kill the notion that any one office was more important than the others, according to Hicks.

“Here's the problem with a headquarters model: the only people who like the headquarters model are the ones who work in the headquarters,” Hicks said.

And maintaining a truly decentralized model has been integral to the firm's growth, Hicks explained.

Since the mid-aughts, the firm has expanded throughout the Midwest via a series of mergers with smaller shops, including the tie-up with 100-plus-lawyer Indianapolis firm Sommer Barnard that originally brought Hicks to Taft.

Hicks said the firm has been able to find merger partners and quality lateral hires—and, most importantly, integrate them successfully—largely because of its laissez-faire approach to managing the day-to-day operations of its various locations.

But even with decentralization in place as a key tenet of Taft's identity by the time he took over, Hicks said he was and still is “obsessively compulsive” about combating the impression that Indianapolis is somehow the center of the firm's universe simply because that's where he calls home.

“The people who are disadvantaged by me being from Indianapolis, ironically, are the people in Indianapolis,” Hicks said with a laugh. For example, he said, when the time comes to pick a location for one of the firm's annual retreats, his choice is invariably anywhere but Indianapolis.

Hicks said the firm also takes great care to ensure that its executive committee comprises diverse representatives from each of its 10 offices and that its growth does not become too concentrated on any one geographic location.

“If you ever develop a model where you say you're decentralized, but then you have disproportional growth or the management committee is stacked with partners from one city, that just destroys it,” he said, adding, “To walk the walk takes a lot more work and a really thoughtful approach…It's not something you think about once a year. You think about it every day.”