Lawyers’ Professional Careers: Increasing Women's Inclusion in the Partnership of Law Firms

Despite a huge increase in the number of women lawyers employed in professional service firms (PSFs) over the last four decades, the proportion of women at partnership level has changed at a much slower rate. This article investigates men's and women's understandings of women's careers and promotion to equity partner. The findings show that one reason why few women advance to equity partner level is that both men and women understand this role as requiring them to privilege work considerations over family. We recommend that PSF researchers and practitioners reflect more on the management of diversity and alternative work arrangements and organization.     

Archetype Change in Professional Organizations: Survey Evidence from Large Law Firms

This paper examines the proposition that the traditional archetype of the professional partnership is said to have changed into a more 'business-like' entity, the managed professional business. It broadens the restricted case sample base on which much of the evidence has been adduced, by developing a survey questionnaire through which 197 large British law firms were sampled. Change, consistent with the notion of a more commercially oriented and consciously managed organization, is concentrated in the market-facing area of the firm but coexists with areas of continuity in the governance of the firm and its strategic management. The findings reveal a more managerial form of organization in which the core elements of the traditional form of professional organization have not been transformed. These results contest the assertion of either transformational or sedimented change found in other, case-based research and suggest that archetype change needs theoretically to be distinguished from the general phenomenon of greater managerialism within the professional service firm.     

Patterns of Profit-sharing in Professional Firms

In recent years the traditional method of distributing profits on the basis of seniority in professional firms has come under attack because of its poor incentive properties. Using data on large law firms, this paper examines the extent to which new forms of profit-sharing based on individual performance have been introduced and whether these are associated with the more systematic control of the core of professional staff and more ‘business-like’ methods of managing, as has been argued in the American literature. The results suggest profit-sharing innovations are limited in scope and only loosely associated with wider changes in partnership management. Explanations for the persistence of traditional methods of sharing are developed from the data and it is argued that existing accounts present an over-rational model of change in which too much emphasis has been placed on the importance of individual incentives to achieve performance. Profit-sharing policies are driven by concerns to sustain cooperation and professional values about the appropriate way to distribute rewards.     

Power and control in professional partnerships

Strategic management controls in professional partnership firms are different from controls in companies. A recently developed model of strategic management controls in the partnership firm was applied in a modified form to a sample of 60 firms in three traditional professions—law, accounting and architecture. Strategic management in the partnerships was broadly consistent with the model but we identified three adaptations in 10 of the sample of firms: corporate planner, corporate monitor and operations monitor. This article explains these adaptations and suggests that the form which strategic control takes in a partnership depends on the distribution of power in the firm.     

Promotion to Partner in Professional Service Firms

A shift away from up-or-out, theconventional promotion system in professional servicefirms, has been explained as part of a wider set ofchanges in internal labor market arrangements andmanagement methods. This is investigated empirically in a sample oflarge partnerships in one profession. Up-or-out was usedby less than one-third of the sample of firms but iscommon among the largest firms. Internal reforms to the professional firm do not fully explainits rarity; up-or-out appears to be adaptable to newforms of management and internal labor market policies.This raises a number of questions about the utility of theoretical explanations of how professionalservice firms work or are changing.