In today's competitive, disruptive and often confusing legal landscape, it is difficult to see through branding and marketing to facts. This could be amusing except that the primary purpose of our profession is to consistently deliver excellence and value to clients, in whatever practices and locations a firm chooses to cover. Clients, lawyers and staff, and even entire law firms, are struggling to decipher the true nature of the (so-called) "law firm" structures being presented to them.

How do you share and collaborate? Is there any defined culture, or any common standards of excellence and ethics? How will conflicts of interest be cleared or are they ignored between and among constituent parts? Why will a client benefit by a firm's name being on an office when that office may be disconnected from the firm it knows and which may not deliver services at a similar level, and which may ultimately not be the best choice for their overall need?

The easiest to digest and trust is a truly unified and well-integrated law firm. These ultimately share a common culture and value system, maintain a common level of excellence and ethical standards, are integrated and collaborative, and, importantly, share financial benefits and liabilities and a unified conflict and compensation system. However, many of the largest so-called "firms" in the world are not firms. They are vereins, combinations of multiple firms doing business under a common or perhaps a similar name and, subject to applicable bar rules in each jurisdiction, provide for sharing of certain costs and perhaps revenues or profits. Some hope to become unified one day but others have given up that ambition, and others do all they can to have as many bells and whistles as possible to kind of look like unified firms with no expectation to actually become one. Then there are "legal networks," not too different from vereins, where each member firm retains its own name and full independence, usually just referring matters within the network. Finally, we have the wide range of "alternative service providers," usually funded by nonlawyer investors like the Big Four and providing various services.