If further proof were needed of the rather slow pace of change in the legal profession, events over recent weeks at both Clifford Chance (CC) and Gateley provide it.

More than three years after the Solicitors Regulation Authority started handing out the alternative business structure licences ushered in by the Legal Services Act, the UK is finally set to see a law firm flotation. Though there has been much talk in the past from the likes of Irwin Mitchell about a possible float, it is Gateley that looks set to gain the historic first-mover advantage (or potentially disadvantage), assuming institutional investors take up the firm's share offer.

Venturing into such untested waters is a bold statement given everything about the listing is effectively a first. From how you decide on the all-important valuation of a law firm – which, until now, has been paying out most of its profit to equity partners – to how you sell the merits of the float to investors as well as existing and future staff, Gateley is in new territory.

But regardless of whether Gateley's move turns out to be successful in the long term it seems unlikely that it is going to lead to a flurry of similar activity at the upper end of the UK legal market. For these firms, the arguments against such efforts to raise extra capital – the dilution of profit or the risk of losing partner control – largely remain as true today as when the Act was first implemented. As demonstrated by CC's latest lockstep overhaul, the issues preoccupying partners are pretty much the same as those that concerned them five, 10 and probably 15 years ago. How do you reconcile the idea of partnership and the collegiality that once went alongside it with remuneration for hundreds of partners spread across increasingly unwieldy and geographically expansive firms?

Lockstep in its purest form may be traditional, but implemented correctly it also needs to be fairly brutal. Applying it across large partnerships operating in numerous markets – from the most developed to the still emerging – is increasingly difficult.

CC's latest move may be unpopular with some (whether because they are directly affected or they just don't like it) but the firm needs to make changes. The overhaul is far less radical than Gateley's, but in its own way it shows CC's Matthew Layton is genuinely committed to trying to change things that have arguably held the firm back in the past. And this can only be a good thing if CC hopes to compete with more profitable global leaders.