I remember several years back working with another reporter on a piece about women in law, which focused on the relative lack of female partners. The article tried to assess the prospects for changes to the industry's working practices that would ease the conflict for female lawyers between parenthood and making partner.

After the piece came out, my colleague told me that he didn't think law firms needed to change at all, in the sense that it wouldn't damage them commercially to keep losing huge numbers of expensively-trained women lawyers. I knew he was right.

Because the legal industry is no different to any other business – people respond to incentives. They can be positive: financial rewards, security, status; they can be negative: demotion, redundancy, loss of opportunity. But people do respond. When things happen despite apparently logical arguments that they shouldn't – like, for example, an industry with a near 60% female intake not being able get its act together to retain female lawyers – incentives are the reason. The way incentives work keeps things happening that polite conversation says shouldn't.

In the case of women and the law, the forces are plain: there is a huge supply of labour flocking to the law but few are going to make it through the tournament of partnership at a major City law firm. That allows law firms to be 'wasteful'; to use a natural filtering process to ensure they gain only the most willing and able subjects to conform to their model. Since law firms are already struggling to accommodate those wanting partnership, men are more willing to fit in with the established 24/7 demands of partnership and every other firm is running the same recruitment model, there's no major incentive to change – positive or negative. So little changes.

You can apply this concept to pretty much any business practice that endures in law that managing partners are sheepish about discussing on the record. Billing culture, lack of social diversity, fee hikes – they happen because that's the way the incentives make them play out. Clients could effect dramatic changes in the profession tomorrow if they wanted – so far they haven't because of how the incentives for in-house legal teams work.

Deep down, outside counsel know that: any partner worth their salt can sense the difference between a client grumbling to let off steam and demanding that something changes. To improve the lot of women in law would probably take a drop in the number of people wanting to be commercial lawyers sufficient to make the dramatic current outflow of female associates from private practice an operational problem. But then those numbers are so high because people are responding to the incentives of high pay in law.

Does any of this matter? It's debatable. I suppose the real relevance is that anyone with a mind to effect change in the profession has to change the incentives. It's human nature.