If the 72 partners made up this year at Clifford Chance decided against joining the firm and instead set up a law firm on their own, the new entity could rival established players such as Stephenson
Harwood, Lawrence Graham or Masons in terms of size.
Such a rapid rate of expansion – the next largest increase was Allen & Overy with 40 new partners – has inevitably raised the question of quality control.
Clifford Chance's rivals have been quick to pick up the issue: "How can they maintain quality with growth like that?" is one typical response from a managing partner at a rival firm.
The issue of quality will be at the heart of whether the vision of a global, one-stop shop is destined to succeed in the long run.
There is little doubt clients find the one-stop shop an attractive concept. The problem is that, at the moment, it is still a concept rather than a reality.
So the news, revealed in last week's issue of Legal Week, that Clifford Chance is looking to upgrade the 'quality control' programmes it inherited from its three constituent firms should come as no surprise.
Clifford Chance, Rogers & Wells and Puender Volhard Weber & Axster were already working on the question of quality well before the merger came into effect, preparing a 91-page professional standards of practice manual.
Clifford Chance has now set up two working parties – each staffed with partners from New York, London and Frankfurt – to develop firm-wide standards.
One working party will look at the firm's new training school called 'The Academy', which will open in the autumn. The other will look at the thornier issue of partner evaluation, which Clifford Chance's deputy chief operating officer Chris Perrin says will "look at everything partners do".
In a sign of how important and sensitive the question of partner evaluation is, Clifford Chance has enlisted the help of McKinseys, the leading management consultancy, to inform its thinking.
The old adage that 'you are only as strong as your weakest part' is understood by Clifford Chance, Perrin says. "If we let a client down in one country, it can affect our relationship across the firm."
If the weakest part is that weak, the consequences can be severe – in the most serious cases it can lead to the rupturing of the client-lawyer relationship.
This threat was spelled out at a law firm management conference last year in London, by Stephen Lambright, group general counsel at US brewer Anheuser-Busch.
Lambright revealed that his company had had a bad experience at the hands of the overseas office of one major law firm, which had provided exemplary service until that point.
Asked what had happened, he simply replied: "We do not do business with that firm any more."
So firms such as Clifford Chance are imposing practice-wide quality standards to head off even the faintest possibility that they could face an Anheuser-Busch scenario.
But what are the key components of a 'quality control' programme? And how can a firm implement such a programme without canteen rumblings of heavy-handed management?
According to management consultant David Temporal, the first problem management faces is establishing what 'quality' exactly means.
"There is no real universal standard of quality, no yardstick," he says. "Different clients have different expectations. And even an individual client can have different expectations, depending on what service he is buying."
Understanding and managing a client's expectations in each case will go a long way to helping a firm meet and even exceed those expectations. Failing to understand those expectations will mean that the client will go away disappointed with the quality of service he has received.
Temporal emphasises the importance of establishing a culture of quality, because management cannot control the behaviour of individual lawyers – perhaps someone who is unable to stifle his yawns at a client meeting or looks lethargic – however hard it tries.
No matter how technically brilliant the lawyer might be, the client may come away feeling that the individual in question is not fully focused on his work.
While senior management can set the overall tone, responsibility for quality must be devolved down to practice heads and team leaders who see practitioners at work.
"There must be education and awareness at the coalface as opposed to central management diktat," Temporal says.
With the sheer scale of the operations of firms such as Clifford Chance and Baker & McKenzie – the City firm's rival for the title of the world's largest law firm – this is of huge importance.
By devolving responsibility down the firm's hierarchy, the quality culture can be adapted to meet local requirements and cultural sensitivities across a global network.
As Christine Lagarde, chairman of Baker & McKenzie, points out: "You do not want to replicate, duplicate or produce clones of standard English lawyers."
The process, she says, is one of 70% harmonisation and 30% customisation.
The distinction, Lagarde says, between harmonising service delivery and standardising is a subtle, but important one.
So what in practical terms can firms do to ensure quality is
maintained or indeed improved to provide a competitive advantage?
In his book Managing the Professional Service Firm, management guru David Maister writes: "Improving the quality of work can be costly and hard to demonstrate. Improving the quality of service can be as cheap as instilling more responsive attitudes in professional staff, and it tends to be infinitely more visible to clients."
This is borne out by a survey of in-house counsel in the most recent issue of Legal Week Benchmarker.
This survey saw counsel rate very highly factors such as commitment of external lawyers to get a result; clear and concise communication; time management skills including keeping to deadlines; and clear commercial advice.
Gone are the days when a partner could comfort a client's enquiry into the quality of the lawyers working on a deal by saying that the firm's trainees only came from Oxford or Cambridge.
Recruitment of the best talent is still crucial, but further education, training, staff evaluation and auditing are equally important.
In a bid to ensure that the same quality standards are applied across the firm, Clifford Chance's management says it plans to use its Academy to instil quality standards in new lawyers.
"Law firms have historically under-funded training," Perrin says.
But the Academy will be a concept, rather than a physical entity, with much of the education information online through the firm's intranet.
For now, there are no plans to replicate Arthur Andersen's training centre near Chicago. "We are still only an organisation of around 7,000 staff, about half of whom are lawyers," says Clifford Chance's director of human resources John Barnard. "Scale is against us."
More controversial will be the partner evaluation scheme, which explains the involvement of
McKinseys when no outside consultants were used for the merger itself.
Perrin admits that prior to the merger, the three firms had different approaches, and says his own firm's partner evaluation was 'patchy'. "It was applied in an inconsistent way," he says.
Rogers & Wells' merit-based system meant that its partners were assessed primarily on the fees they brought in. This would clash with Clifford Chance's wider lockstep-driven approach. Puenders, on the other hand, had run various pilots and experiments, but had not established a formal system.
Although Perrin declines to provide details of the new system as partners have not yet seen what is being proposed, he says "we are trying to make the process more efficient".
Perrin's reluctance to reveal the fine detail is perhaps sensible given the experience of other institutions that have introduced quality control programmes.
When PricewaterhouseCoopers introduced a system where partners from different offices and even different disciplines reviewed their colleagues' files in the early 1980s, the exercise created a huge amount of resentment, which is still bubbling away today.
Baker & McKenzie's office audit system, put in place five years ago as part of a drive to shed its 'McFirm' image, appears to have fared somewhat better.
Teams made up of three partners – one speaking the local language and another from outside the region – and two professional staff members drawn from the finance and systems departments descend on an office to conduct a five-day review.
The audit team looks at compliance with firm-wide standards and even conducts ghost phone calls.
In the five years that the programme has been run, Lagarde says there has been increasing emphasis on systems and communication, especially via e-mail, and the use of know-how and information databases.
Lagarde admits that this process is expensive, but declines to reveal the total cost. "But it is money well-invested," she claims "and there is never any complaint about how much it costs".
Whatever specific process a firm finally goes for, management needs to ensure that its introduction is presented as a positive move and not another level of bureaucracy that will get in the way of a lawyer's day-to-day practice.
The individual should be able to see that the extra scrutiny is good for their own development as well as good for the firm as a whole.
It is a delicate balancing act and one Clifford Chance's management will do well to spend time mastering if its vision of a top-tier global firm is to be realised.If the 72 partners made up this year at Clifford Chance decided against joining the firm and instead set up a law firm on their own, the new entity could rival established players such as Stephenson
Harwood, Lawrence Graham or Masons in terms of size.
Such a rapid rate of expansion – the next largest increase was Allen & Overy with 40 new partners – has inevitably raised the question of quality control.
Clifford Chance's rivals have been quick to pick up the issue: "How can they maintain quality with growth like that?" is one typical response from a managing partner at a rival firm.
The issue of quality will be at the heart of whether the vision of a global, one-stop shop is destined to succeed in the long run.
There is little doubt clients find the one-stop shop an attractive concept. The problem is that, at the moment, it is still a concept rather than a reality.
So the news, revealed in last week's issue of Legal Week, that Clifford Chance is looking to upgrade the 'quality control' programmes it inherited from its three constituent firms should come as no surprise.
Clifford Chance, Rogers & Wells and Puender Volhard Weber & Axster were already working on the question of quality well before the merger came into effect, preparing a 91-page professional standards of practice manual.
Clifford Chance has now set up two working parties – each staffed with partners from New York, London and Frankfurt – to develop firm-wide standards.
One working party will look at the firm's new training school called 'The Academy', which will open in the autumn. The other will look at the thornier issue of partner evaluation, which Clifford Chance's deputy chief operating officer Chris Perrin says will "look at everything partners do".
In a sign of how important and sensitive the question of partner evaluation is, Clifford Chance has enlisted the help of McKinseys, the leading management consultancy, to inform its thinking.
The old adage that 'you are only as strong as your weakest part' is understood by Clifford Chance, Perrin says. "If we let a client down in one country, it can affect our relationship across the firm."
If the weakest part is that weak, the consequences can be severe – in the most serious cases it can lead to the rupturing of the client-lawyer relationship.
This threat was spelled out at a law firm management conference last year in London, by Stephen Lambright, group general counsel at US brewer Anheuser-Busch.
Lambright revealed that his company had had a bad experience at the hands of the overseas office of one major law firm, which had provided exemplary service until that point.
Asked what had happened, he simply replied: "We do not do business with that firm any more."
So firms such as Clifford Chance are imposing practice-wide quality standards to head off even the faintest possibility that they could face an Anheuser-Busch scenario.
But what are the key components of a 'quality control' programme? And how can a firm implement such a programme without canteen rumblings of heavy-handed management?
According to management consultant David Temporal, the first problem management faces is establishing what 'quality' exactly means.
"There is no real universal standard of quality, no yardstick," he says. "Different clients have different expectations. And even an individual client can have different expectations, depending on what service he is buying."
Understanding and managing a client's expectations in each case will go a long way to helping a firm meet and even exceed those expectations. Failing to understand those expectations will mean that the client will go away disappointed with the quality of service he has received.
Temporal emphasises the importance of establishing a culture of quality, because management cannot control the behaviour of individual lawyers – perhaps someone who is unable to stifle his yawns at a client meeting or looks lethargic – however hard it tries.
No matter how technically brilliant the lawyer might be, the client may come away feeling that the individual in question is not fully focused on his work.
While senior management can set the overall tone, responsibility for quality must be devolved down to practice heads and team leaders who see practitioners at work.
"There must be education and awareness at the coalface as opposed to central management diktat," Temporal says.
With the sheer scale of the operations of firms such as Clifford Chance and Baker & McKenzie – the City firm's rival for the title of the world's largest law firm – this is of huge importance.
By devolving responsibility down the firm's hierarchy, the quality culture can be adapted to meet local requirements and cultural sensitivities across a global network.
As Christine Lagarde, chairman of Baker & McKenzie, points out: "You do not want to replicate, duplicate or produce clones of standard English lawyers."
The process, she says, is one of 70% harmonisation and 30% customisation.
The distinction, Lagarde says, between harmonising service delivery and standardising is a subtle, but important one.
So what in practical terms can firms do to ensure quality is
maintained or indeed improved to provide a competitive advantage?
In his book Managing the Professional Service Firm, management guru David Maister writes: "Improving the quality of work can be costly and hard to demonstrate. Improving the quality of service can be as cheap as instilling more responsive attitudes in professional staff, and it tends to be infinitely more visible to clients."
This is borne out by a survey of in-house counsel in the most recent issue of Legal Week Benchmarker.
This survey saw counsel rate very highly factors such as commitment of external lawyers to get a result; clear and concise communication; time management skills including keeping to deadlines; and clear commercial advice.
Gone are the days when a partner could comfort a client's enquiry into the quality of the lawyers working on a deal by saying that the firm's trainees only came from Oxford or Cambridge.
Recruitment of the best talent is still crucial, but further education, training, staff evaluation and auditing are equally important.
In a bid to ensure that the same quality standards are applied across the firm, Clifford Chance's management says it plans to use its Academy to instil quality standards in new lawyers.
"Law firms have historically under-funded training," Perrin says.
But the Academy will be a concept, rather than a physical entity, with much of the education information online through the firm's intranet.
For now, there are no plans to replicate Arthur Andersen's training centre near Chicago. "We are still only an organisation of around 7,000 staff, about half of whom are lawyers," says Clifford Chance's director of human resources John Barnard. "Scale is against us."
More controversial will be the partner evaluation scheme, which explains the involvement of
McKinseys when no outside consultants were used for the merger itself.
Perrin admits that prior to the merger, the three firms had different approaches, and says his own firm's partner evaluation was 'patchy'. "It was applied in an inconsistent way," he says.
Rogers & Wells' merit-based system meant that its partners were assessed primarily on the fees they brought in. This would clash with Clifford Chance's wider lockstep-driven approach. Puenders, on the other hand, had run various pilots and experiments, but had not established a formal system.
Although Perrin declines to provide details of the new system as partners have not yet seen what is being proposed, he says "we are trying to make the process more efficient".
Perrin's reluctance to reveal the fine detail is perhaps sensible given the experience of other institutions that have introduced quality control programmes.
When PricewaterhouseCoopers introduced a system where partners from different offices and even different disciplines reviewed their colleagues' files in the early 1980s, the exercise created a huge amount of resentment, which is still bubbling away today.
Baker & McKenzie's office audit system, put in place five years ago as part of a drive to shed its 'McFirm' image, appears to have fared somewhat better.
Teams made up of three partners – one speaking the local language and another from outside the region – and two professional staff members drawn from the finance and systems departments descend on an office to conduct a five-day review.
The audit team looks at compliance with firm-wide standards and even conducts ghost phone calls.
In the five years that the programme has been run, Lagarde says there has been increasing emphasis on systems and communication, especially via e-mail, and the use of know-how and information databases.
Lagarde admits that this process is expensive, but declines to reveal the total cost. "But it is money well-invested," she claims "and there is never any complaint about how much it costs".
Whatever specific process a firm finally goes for, management needs to ensure that its introduction is presented as a positive move and not another level of bureaucracy that will get in the way of a lawyer's day-to-day practice.
The individual should be able to see that the extra scrutiny is good for their own development as well as good for the firm as a whole.
It is a delicate balancing act and one Clifford Chance's management will do well to spend time mastering if its vision of a top-tier global firm is to be realised.