I must confess that when Friederike, the Legal Week reporter who covers Linklaters, told me a few weeks back that she was working on a story about the firm launching another partnership restructuring, my pundit powers had utterly failed me – I hadn't seen that one coming at all.

This means the magic circle law firm is going through its second major restructuring in three years, after the ambiguously-named New World programme saw more than 30 partners managed out in 2009.

Even with economic clouds darkening and the eurozone saga draining what levels of confidence could be found, another restructuring seemed incredible. Linklaters has now been through three major shake-ups in a decade and has attempted an unprecedented level of upheaval in the management of a major international law firm. The traditional view of the law firm model is that the partnership and associate base can't withstand that level of turbulence without things going seriously wrong. We're about to find out if that assumption is right.

Past that, I'll reserve judgment for the moment, but Linklaters' move once again demonstrates what has been increasingly evident throughout 2011 and will be surely a dominating theme in 2012: the legal market is moving into a state of dramatic flux in which the old certitudes are breaking down.

As one managing partner put it to me: "I can't remember such an unpredictable time. Hengeler, Cravath and Slaughters won't change but everyone else could do something radical right now."

And 2011 certainly provided plenty of evidence for the unexpected. There was the spectre of firms as conservative as Ashurst and Herbert Smith contemplating (and in one case securing) a high-stakes foreign union and China's top commercial law firm hooking up with its equivalent in Australia. Elsewhere, firms as diverse as Allen & Overy, DLA Piper, Hogan Lovells and Norton Rose discarded the old rule books to aggressively pursue globalisation along differing models.

Meanwhile, pressure to unbundle the legal services package continues thanks to tough trading conditions, with the response coming via legal process outsourcing, contract lawyers or wholly-owned divisions in low cost jurisdictions.

And that's even before considering the impact of the Legal Services Act, which remains open to debate in terms of institutional legal services, but over the medium term can hardly be a stabilising force.

In addition, there has been sustained pummeling of law firms after three years of unforgiving markets and the dislocating growth of emerging economies. The combined impact feels as if some long-held centre of gravity is finally shifting in the global legal market.

One result of these changes has been the emergence of a more diverse ecosystem than many once predicted – there isn't one model dominating the international legal market, there are many – while the old tiers and boundaries are slowly breaking down, creating opportunity for some and a lot of challenges for many.

Oh, yes, and there's the small matter of the eurozone… The immediate question is whether the first half of 2012 is going to look a lot like the mass waves of redundancies and partner exits law firms saw in 2009. Based on current conditions, my hunch would be no, at least not to the same degree. That feeling was reinforced by talking to two of my best-connected and consistently bearish contacts this week (though it barely needs saying that a global economy this vulnerable to shocks could easily get a lot worse very quickly).

Many lawyers will expect consolidation in 2012 and they'll be half right – but it's never quite that simple. Firms will be as likely to get smaller or break off practices as seal the big deal. But there is a greater willingness to gamble. It's easy to imagine the kind of things happening in the legal industry that would have been unthinkable just a few years back. What those jolting events will be is hard to predict, but nothing much is pointing in the direction of the status quo for 2012. It's going to be a bumpy ride.