Elite Law Firms Research Articles

Pushing the bar – elite law firms and the rise of international commercial courts in the world economy

In the last thirty years, international commercial courts (ICCs) have emerged around the world. ICCs offer adjudication in international commercial disputes. They are not creatures of international law – as their name may suggest – but specialized domestic courts embedded in national legal orders. The rise of ICCs is remarkable in that scholars expected commercial arbitration to gradually displace litigation in the twenty first century. What drives the creation of ICCs? Legal research suggests that ICCs are a manifestation of a new era of assertive unilateralism in global governance. Scholars point to states’ geopolitical motives, backlashes against private authority in the form of arbitration, and economic statecraft. Drawing on the New Interdependence Approach, this study argues that most ICCs are the result of policy entrepreneurship of elite law firms in the pursuit of growing the global market for commercial litigation. Depending on the legal-political context, they forge coalitions with domestic judiciaries or political leaders to advance ICC projects. The study highlights deep-rooted changes in the global dispute resolution landscape, the important role of commercial law in International Political Economy (IPE), and points to the mostly overlooked significance of law firms and judiciaries as architects of global economic governance.

Elite lawyers in Türkiye: Educational capital, status hierarchies, and feminization

Abstract Sociological studies on elite lawyers working in large law firms have recently extended to non-Western countries. Based on a quantitative dataset comprising 1,303 lawyers from 106 Turkish law firms, this article aims to be the first empirical investigation of the social profile of lawyers in the rising large law firms in Türkiye. The analysis focuses on how characteristics of Turkish elite lawyers, in terms of educational capital, gender, and status are distributed. The objective of the analysis is to discover to what extent the expansion of legal education and rise of the private universities are reflected in the structure of elite law firms. To discover the relationships between university type, gender, and position at job, chi-square, and logistic regression analyses are conducted. Main findings are that the Turkish elite lawyers constitute a stratum where the most advantageous educational capital is concentrated compared to the profession in general, the lawyers working in the employee position are relatively young and have mostly private university degrees, and the increased feminization of the profession is closely intertwined with the status hierarchies.

Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Panes of Equity Partnership

This Article, prepared for a “micro-symposium” on Professor Kerri Stone’s monograph Panes of the Glass Ceiling (2022), explores the partnership pay gap in large law firms and the role of high-profile litigation in facilitating pay equity. There is a rich literature and extensive data on the gender attainment gap in elite law firms, particularly with regard to women’s attrition from practice and poor representation within the partnership ranks. Less attention has been paid to the way in which the exceptional women who achieve equity partner status continue to lag behind their male peers. This Article explores “Women v. BigLaw,” a cluster of equal pay cases brought by women partners in the late 2010s against elite firms. Using Stone’s work as a lens, it reveals how the same unspoken beliefs that underlie the law firm glass ceiling operate above it, placing women partners at the bottom of a new compensation hierarchy centered on origination credit. Due to historical allocations, a culture of deference toward male rainmakers, and implicitly biased attorney development and evaluation practices, origination operates as a form of “legacy credit” that locks in preexisting entitlements favoring male partners. Despite this, gender equity in law practice has been framed principally as a professional value, not a legal imperative. Women v. BigLaw and the unprecedented use of the court system by women lawyers reveals, however, that partnership pay practices pose a liability risk to firms. This new reality may incentivize structural change in ways that attention to gender equity as a managerial and professional goal could not.

Professional flows: Lateral moves of law firm partners in Hong Kong, 1994–2018

Abstract This article uses the case of law firms in Hong Kong to develop a processual approach for understanding lateral mobility in professional service firms. Based on the analysis of 1,461 lateral moves of law firm partners reported in 300 monthly issues of the official journal of the Law Society of Hong Kong during 1994–2018, as well as archival data and interviews conducted in Hong Kong, the article offers both a bird’s-eye view of the lateral mobility of partners across law firms of different jurisdictional origins and an in-depth investigation of how elite law firms in this market, namely the Magic Circle and Wall Street firms, are influenced by the dynamics of professional flows. Theoretically, the article reconceptualizes professional service firms as organizations connected by and transform through the flows of professionals between them, a dynamic process characterized by three key concepts: waves, cycles, and turning points. In addition to its theoretical contribution, the study has broader implications for understanding Hong Kong’s economic transformation since the 1990s, particularly after Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997 and the global financial crisis in 2008.

Handling Resistance to Change When Societal and Workplace Logics Conflict

Changes in societal logics often leave firms’ policies and practices out of step. Yet when firms introduce a change that brings in a new societal logic, employees may resist, even though they personally value the change, because the incoming logic conflicts with existing organizational logics. How can change agents handle logic-based resistance to an organizational initiative that introduces a new logic? We studied elite law firms that introduced a new role into their traditional up-or-out career path in response to associates’ anonymously expressed desire for better work–life balance, which associates resisted because expressing family concerns was illegitimate within the firms. Change agents responded to three forms of resisters’ logic-based concerns—irreconcilability, ambiguity, and contradiction—with three tailored responses—redirecting, reinforcing, and reassuring—using contextually legitimate logic elements. Over time logic elements of each concern–response pair harmonized to enable individuals to enact their logics seamlessly and organizations to update the existing logic settlement to assimilate the societal change. We demonstrate that the way available logics are accessed and activated between pluralistic change agents and resisters can enable logic settlements to be updated in response to societal change. We draw insights about how logics do or do not constrain agency.

Class Work and the Reproduction of Class Inequality: A Qualitative Study of Legal Secretaries in Elite Law Firms

2007년 금융위기 이후 불평등이 주요 사회 문제로서 대두되면서 사회과학 전반에서 계급 불평등은 중요한 연구주제가 되고 있다. 그러나 조직 이론에서는 계급 불평등의 이슈가 아직까지 학자들의 큰 주목을 끌고 있지는 못하다. 사실 조직 내에는 계급 불평등이 (재)생산되는 기제가 존재한다. 직무내용이 규정되고 직급이 위계적으로 조직되며 임금이 차등적으로 배분되는 과정은 조직 효율성을 높이기도 하지만 동시에 사회계급을 생산하는 기제이기도 하다. 이렇게 조직 구조와 인적자원관리 시스템이 사회계급을 생산하는 주요한 기제이지만 조직 내에서 사람들이 상호작용하는 과정에서 사회계급이 재생산되기도 한다. 그러나 아직 개인들 간 상호작용의 수준에서 사회계급이 재생산되는 과정을 경험적으로 분석한 적은 거의 없다. 조직에는 서로 다른 계급에 속한 개인들이 대면하고 상호작용 하는데 이 가운데 개인은 계급과 관련하여 자신의 개인적 정체성을 형성하도록 추동된다. 본 연구는 이를 계급 정체성 형성 작업(class work)으로 명명하며 이것이 어떻게 조직 내 계급관계의 재생산에 영향을 미치는지 분석한다. 계급 정체성 형성 작업이란 개인이 다른 계급의 구성원과 자신을 비교하면서 계급서열 내에서 자신의 위치를 규정하는 것을 말한다. 본 연구는 대형로펌에서 근무하는 법률비서가 변호사를 대면하면서 느끼는 정체성 위기를 어떻게 극복하고 있는지, 그리고 이로써 자신의 계급 위치를 어떻게 인지하는지를 분석한다. 본 연구는 법률비서 13명에 대해 심층면접을 진행하였고 근거이론을 통해서 계급 정체성 형성 작업의 네 가지 종류를 확인하였다. 정상화 전략, 변호사 아비투스(habitus)의 내면화 및 수직적․수평적 경계작업이 그것이다. 비서들은 변호사의 권위를 능력주의 담론에 기대어 인정하는 한편, 다른 비서 직종과 법률 비서를 구분하기도 하고, 변호사의 아비투스를 자신의 것으로 내면화하기도 했다. 이는 변호사와의 대면에서 파생된 자아 정체감의 위기를 비서가 극복하게 하지만 결국 조직의 계급질서에 동의하게 하는 효과도 가져온다. 결론적으로 비서의 계급 정체성 형성 작업을 통해서 로펌의 계급 불평등은 재생산된다 할 수 있다.Since the 2007 global financial crisis, inequality has emerged as an important social issue. It has thus become a crucial topic for research in social science. Organizations serve as the place for class inequality to be produced. Social classes are produced in the process of organizing jobs, constructing the organizational hierarchy, and distributing differential wages. However, there has been little theoretical explanation given for why class inequality is maintained and reproduced within organizations. People in different classes interact with each other within an organization. Depending on how they form their identities in relation to their social class, class relationships are either maintained or challenged. This study employed the concept of class work to examine how the formation of class identity affects the reproduction of class relationships in an organization. Class work refers to a form of identity work that defines an individual’s position in the class hierarchy by comparing him or her with members of other social classes. This study conducted in-depth interviews with 13 legal secretaries from elite law firms and identified four types of class work using the grounded theory. Class work includes normalization, vertical and horizontal boundary work, and the internalization of a lawyer’s habitus. These strategies not only help secretaries to overcome threats to their identity but also help them conform to the class order. Thus, it can be said that class inequality within elite law firms is reproduced through class work performed by secretaries.

Elite law firms in the IPO market

Abstract IPOs with underwriters that retain an elite law firm exhibit a lower average first-day return. This empirical pattern remains after controlling for an extensive set of proxies associated with existing explanations of IPO initial returns. We rationalize this finding with a pre-IPO pricing model, in which underwriters convey their lack of conflicts of interest to the issuer by engaging an elite law firm. Consistent with this selection channel and our model’s predictions, we find a lower incidence of elite law firm involvement and a larger difference in average first-day return associated with elite law firms during the dot-com period. We document similar findings with respect to the dispersion of IPO first-day returns and a pattern in the issuers’ re-hiring decision of investment banks consistent with our theory.

Matter Mills and London-Lite offices: exploring forms of the onshoring of legal services in an age of globalisation

ABSTRACTThis paper explores professional identity formation and the increasing differentiation and fragmentation of the corporate end of the legal profession through a consideration of onshoring, the opening (for the first time) of satellite offices in the UK (but outside of London) by elite law firms. We situate interviews with 25 lawyers, associates and partners, working in onshored UK law firm offices in work on legal services globalisation and the sociology of ‘dirty work’ (tasks and occupations likely to be perceived as disgusting or degrading). In the context of onshoring, globalisation has led to sidelining in that onshoring allows entry to elite, global firms both for those (the graduates of ‘good-enough’ law schools) perhaps unable to ‘make it’ in London and for those law firm partners and associates who have tasted City life and rejected it. That entry is, however, imperfect. It is the ‘dirty [legal] work’ that is done outside of London: seen as both lesser and also necessary to the law firm’s profitability. We see onshoring as a relatively simple organisational change to the shape of the profession, and also as part of a radical reorientation of a division of labour and what it means to be a professional.

On The Role of Elite Law Firms in IPOs

IPOs with underwriters that retain an elite law firm exhibit a lower average first-day return. This empirical pattern remains after controlling for an extensive set of proxies associated with existing explanations of IPO initial returns. We rationalize this finding with a pre-IPO pricing model, in which underwriters convey their lack of conflicts of interest to the issuer by engaging an elite law firm. Consistent with this selection channel and our model's predictions, we find a lower incidence of elite law firm involvement and a larger difference in average first-day return associated with elite law firms during the dot-com period. We document similar findings with respect to the dispersion of IPO first-day returns and a pattern in the issuers' re-hiring decision of investment banks consistent with our theory.

Just Like Global Firms: Unintended Gender Parity and Speculative Isomorphism in India's Elite Professions

Against most male-dominated accounts of professional work, elite law firms in India pose a puzzling exception: women make up about half of these firms, even at senior levels of partnership. Using in-depth interviews with over 130 professionals in India's elite litigation, transactional law, and consulting firms, this research suggests that elite law firms—as new local organizations—aggressively differentiate themselves from their more traditional peers to establish organizational legitimacy. At the same time, as institutions trying to mimic global firms without actual scripts for doing so, these firms engage in a form of “speculative isomorphism” through which they signal meritocracy and modernity to their global audience. Because equal gender representation is one such mechanism, the result is environments where certain kinds of women are uniquely advantaged.

In Dependence: The Paradox of Professional Independence and Taking Seriously the Vulnerabilities of Lawyers in Large Corporate Law Firms

In this paper, and drawing on the work of Martha Fineman and others, we deploy a vulnerability lens as an heuristic device to push against the concept of professional lawyer independence as enshrined in statute and promoted by legal services regulators. Using interviews with 53 senior partners and others from 20 elite law firms, we show how the meaning and practice of independence are profoundly mediated by the contexts, relationships and interactions of corporate lawyers’ everyday working lives. Vulnerable to competition from other firms, the demands of clients, the shift over time from ‘trusted advisor’ to ‘service provider’, regulatory requirements, pressures to make profit and so on, these corporate lawyers appeared prone to developing and normalising potentially risky and irresponsible practices. We therefore argue that a debate about corporate legal regulation is better based upon a richly theorised concept of inter-dependence which takes seriously the causes and effects of practitioner vulnerabilities in particular circumstances.

Up or Aside? Micro-Foundations of Institutional Change in the Career Structure of UK Elite Law Firms

We investigate institutional change as the co-occurrence of deinstitutionalization and institutionalization, while accounting for its determinants at multiple levels of analysis to further our understanding of how individual characteristics aggregated at the organizational level and organizational characteristics together account for the erosion and emergence of practices within the field. We empirically explore this question in a multi-level dataset of UK law firms and their employees, looking in particular at how the practice of equity partnership faded away and how non-equity partnership emerged as a new practice. Our results contribute to the literature on institutional change and the micro-foundation of institutions.

Nevertheless They Persisted: Gendered Frameworks and Socialization Advantages in Indian Professional Service Firms.

This article uses the Indian case to offer nuance to narratives about the gendered experience of professional work. I find that while gendered constructs certainly infiltrate all workspaces, there remain occupational and organizational differences in the ways in which women experience their environments. Particularly, while Indian women lawyers overall are more disadvantaged than their international counterparts, the experience of women lawyers in very elite law firms is more favorable than both their local and global peers. A confluence of factors might be responsible for this unusual experience of professional work, but this article highlights the importance of one set of supply side dynamics: the variations in socializing experiences and expectations before entry into these firms. In doing so, it adds to the literature that suggests the importance of not just enrollment parity, but also early training and institutional socialization for gender egalitarian professional outcomes.

Nevertheless They Persisted: Gendered Frameworks and Socialization Advantages in Indian Professional Service Firms

This article uses the Indian case to offer further nuance to these narratives about the impact of global cultures on the gendered experience of professional work. I find that while gender certainly infiltrates all workspaces through the framework of a background identity, there remain occupational and organizational differences in the ways in which women experience their environments. Particularly, while Indian women lawyers overall are more disadvantaged in many ways than their international counterparts, women lawyers in very elite law firms do much better than both their local and global peers. A confluence of factors might be responsible for this unusual experience of professional work, but this Article highlights the importance of one set of supply side dynamics: the variations in socializing experiences and expectations before professionals enter elite firms. In doing so, it adds to the literature that suggests the importance of early training and educational socialization for gender egalitarian outcomes in the workforce (e.g. Cech 2015; Seron et al. 2016). It also lends credence to the “pipeline” fix for gender equality by highlighting the substantive influence of increased representation on the ways men and women both think about their careers. Further, it reveals the particular global stickiness of gender frameworks (Ridgeway 2011): all sites are gendered, but the specification of these gendered identities are impacted by their respective embedded cultural contexts.

“Fitting in” and “opting out”: exploring how law students self-select law firm employers

ABSTRACTIn this paper we draw on interviews with 15 law students at the University of Birmingham in the UK to explore the extent to which law students critically self-evaluate themselves against their perceptions of the preferences of elite law firms. While our conclusions are necessarily tentative, we show how some law students “opt out” of applying to certain law firms where they perceive there is no fit between themselves and that law firm. Equally, our data also shows that some students recognise that, despite not having a supplementary fit with a firm (i.e. they can see that they do not “match” that firm’s current crop of lawyers or what they think is the firm’s culture), they realise that they can instead be a complementary fit for the firm, and hence realise that their potential to add something “new” to the law firm (by way of increasing diversity) can secure them a vacation scheme placement or a training contract. Finally, a proportion of students play “the numbers game” and despite determining a law firm “misfit”, still proceed to apply to as many law firms as possible as they thought that more applications meant a higher chance of success.

‘She gets the job done’: Entrenched gender meanings and new returns to essentialism in India’s elite professional firms

Using the case of elite Indian professionals, this article offers a contrast to the robust literature suggesting collinearity between gender essentialism and inequality in organizational settings. Analyzing 139 interviews with professionals in India’s elite litigation, transactional law, and consulting firms, it reveals that while gendered meanings and hierarchies certainly infiltrate all workspaces, not all trajectories for Indian women in high-status work are prematurely disadvantaged. Particularly, it suggests an unlikely positive valorization in the case of women working in new and elite law firms doing global transactional work. While other female professionals were dismissed or overlooked for not performing maleness in an organizational setting, it was the reverse for transactional lawyers who were regarded positively for similar traits. Instead of being passed over for opportunities or dismissed by their clients, many of these women were seen as best suited for handling the important, global work they were entrusted with and often requested on transactions. The limited case of these professionals reveals how in some new contexts, gendered assumptions about work can further rather than inhibit egalitarian outcomes. However, even as the theoretical extensions in highlighting this mechanism helps add nuance to our understandings of essentialism, it does so while confirming that even in moments of departure, equality is accessed within strictly patriarchal scripts in elite organizations.

Market Information and the Elite Law Firm

As a subcategory of contract negotiations, corporate transactions present information problems that have not been fully analyzed. In particular, the literature does not address the possibility that parties may simply be unaware of value-increasing transaction terms or their outside option. Such unawareness can arise even for transactions that attract many competing parties, if the bargaining process is such that (1) the price terms are negotiated and fixed prior to the non-price terms, contrary to the standard assumption; and (2) some of the non-price terms remain private for some period of time. A simple bargaining model shows that, when such unawareness is reasonably probable, each transaction party will maximize its expected payoff by acquiring current market information about non-price transaction terms. Because they have unique access to it, law firms with a significant share of transactional advisory work play an important role in aggregating and selling such market information. The implication is that, absent shocks to transactional practice, the volume advantage of high-market-share law firms should be self-perpetuating. This result is consistent with the observation that the legal advisory market for major corporate transactions is highly concentrated, and that the top firms earn substantial and persistent rents.

Law Firm Selection and the Value of Transactional Lawyering

Following the contraction in demand for law firms’ services during the Great Recession, “Big Law” was widely diagnosed as suffering from several maladies that would spell its ultimate demise, including excessive fees, excessive size, increased competition from in-house counsel, the commoditization of legal work, and the decline in demand for “relationship firms.” While each of these market pressures is only too real for certain segments of the law-firm population, their threat to the most elite U.S. law firms has been largely misunderstood. Even as many firms reduce their fees and contract in size, we should expect certain firms to continue to charge more and grow bigger. The current prescriptions for fixing Big Law fail to recognize that the top-tier firms within the group serve a unique market function. Focusing on a particular type of legal work – major corporate transactions – this Article proposes a novel theory of the value created by elite law firms: their private information about “market” deal terms, acquired through repeated exposure to the same types of transactions, provides clients with a significant bargaining advantage in deal negotiations. By aggregating expertise in the ever-changing and ever-increasing set of deal terms for certain transactions, law firms help their clients price such terms more accurately and thereby maximize their surplus from the deal. This pricing function – traditionally thought to be limited to investment banks – is one that cannot be replicated or subsumed by in-house counsel, other service providers, or commoditized contracts.

Dual Performance Feedback and Elite Law Firm Mergers

This paper examines how institutional logics interrelate with the organizational learning process to generate strategic changes. Although organizational actors are surrounded by contradictory demands stemming from multiple logics, organizational actors interact with those demands through aspiration levels. When organizations fail to satisfy conflicting demands compared to aspiration levels, decision makers experience intense political dissonance among members, which interrupt their decision making processes on strategic changes. In contrast, when organizations produce satisfactory performance on either of conflicting demands, decision makers are less likely to be exposed to this dissonance; thus they are more likely to search for solutions by taking greater risks. Using a longitudinal dataset of 217 largest law firms in the United States from 2005 to 2012, this paper shows relative commitment to the public legal service moderates the relationship between economic performance feedback and corporate acquisi...

Pro Bono and Corporate Legal Sector in India

By undertaking a qualitative empirical research on the pro bono practices of the top tier corporate law firms in India, this paper seeks to fill up an important informational vacuum about pro bono culture among the elite law firms of India. The primary issues that this research inquires into are: the kind of pro bono work undertaken by law firms in India; their understanding of the term pro bono; interaction of indigenous elements with global trends with respect to the understanding and practice of pro bono; factors influencing, whether positively or negatively, pro bono culture among Indian corporate law firms; and briefly, linkage between the notions of pro bono, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and public interest.The corporate legal sector in India is growing at a spectacular pace in terms of size, reach, areas of expertise and the revenue generated. Within the last couple of decades, it has emerged as one of the most important constituents of legal profession in India and is also increasingly making its presence felt globally. Due to the recent origins of this development and the paucity of studies relating to it, there is a great deal of curiosity about the functioning of various aspects of corporate legal sector in India. One of such important aspects is the extent and kind of engagement of Indian law firms with pro bono activities. Owing to a wide range of rationales, pro bono work, especially in the U.S. and U.K. has become an important part of the overall corporate law firm culture. It has become, in Scott Cummings’ terms, "institutionalized." The top tier corporate law firms in India, which now share business spheres with a number of international law firms, collaborating or competing with them over business opportunities and human resources, couldn’t be expected to remain immune to the practices and ideologies predominant among their foreign counterparts. Since the institutionalization of pro bono practice is most visible among the law firms in the U.S., this paper makes frequent references to the trends and practices adopted by American law firms. This paper recognizes the importance of the forces of globalization on the culture of the corporate sector generally and on the pro bono practices of the corporate law firms in India particularly. With respect to the latter phenomenon, the effect of globalization of knowledge and practices is particularly manifest in a gradual move towards institutionalization of pro bono as observed among most of the top tier law firms in India, as well as in the recent emergence of matchmaking organizations (both domestic as well as foreign) that seek to connect the legal practitioners with those in need of legal advice, such as social entrepreneurs, public interest non-profit organizations etc. The paper puts forth that the external notion of formal pro bono is not received in vacuum among the law firms of India. Owing to the contextual specificity of Indian public interest law and litigation, predominantly transaction-based nature of work of most top tier law firms in the country, and traditionally embedded beliefs, practices, and cultural values relating to the notion of "doing good," the currently evolving understanding and practice of pro bono is acquiring a distinctive shape in the country.It needs to be clarified in the beginning itself that the use of the term "pro bono" is a fairly recent development in India. The current use and understanding of the term is considerably amorphous and overlaps with other socially driven initiatives like CSR. Beliefs such as "giving back" and "doing good" emerge as the common elements that fundamentally underlie these concepts and impart very broad definitional parameters to them. Unlike the case of the U.S. or the E.U., initiatives like pro bono and CSR are not understood as having clearly distinct meanings and spheres of operation in India. The chapter is divided as follows: Section 2 describes the research methodology used for this study. Section 3 maps out different elements constituting public interest law (PIL) in India, factors influencing its development, and the relationship between pro bono and PIL in the country. Section 4 reports the results of a qualitative study conducted on the engagement of Indian law firms with pro bono activities, primarily falling under the following three broad categories: litigation based, transaction based and non-transaction based. Legal advice on transactional matters is seen to be the most predominant form of pro bono undertaken by Indian law firms, and thus is dealt with in detail. This section also identifies various factors encouraging/discouraging Indian firms from undertaking pro bono work. Section 5 concludes the paper.