How collaboration takes place among corporate law firms in London?

 If you ask a majority of corporate law firms in London what their biggest assets are, you are most likely to receive a rather simple reply: “our lawyers.” Go a little deeper and you are likely to reveal that what these leaders actually mean is their colleagues’ specialized expertise—their aptitude to do world-class legal work in tax, IP, M&A, employment, and the list goes on. On the one side, this is an easy answer. It understands the unique role lawyers play as technical experts—professionals who are able to diagnose specific legal problems and offer legal solutions (see “Professionalism in the 21st Century”). Certainly, this trend toward greater specialization has intensified as the pace of knowledge change has persistently rated up.

On the other hand, clients are striving to globalize and challenge more-sophisticated technological, regulatory, economic, and environmental demands. As an outcome, their concerns have become, to derive a term from business, VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous). Most of their problems transcend traditional practice regions and disciplinary silos, and crisscross geographies and jurisdictions.

Collectively these two trends—augmented specialization and a rising complexity in client issues—develop a demand for lawyers who are not only technical experts in their own specific domain but also lawyers who can cooperate with others throughout the firm, and often around the world, to solve multi-layered problems. The puzzle is, however, that most firms have lawyers trained as subject-matter specialists. Because most top-tier law firms in London understand that their clients progressively imagine each of their lawyers to be the leading expert in a specific domain, firms have nurtured expertise specialization by creating narrowly defined practice areas and by rewarding professionals for developing reputations in exact niches. The collective expertise has thus become dispersed across people, places and practice groups. Therefore, tackling client problems that exceed practice areas and disciplinary silos extremely challenges traditional models of law firm structure and ways of doing business. To maintain, corporate law firms in London and lawyers have to collaborate across their borders in order to address clients’ most intricate issues.

The rising complexity of legal work—work that is increasingly cross-practice and multijurisdictional in essence—requires lawyers to collaborate across expertise and organizational limitations. Data shows that when lawyers do work across specialties, their firms get increased margins, clients are more loyal, and separate lawyers are able to charge more for the work that they do. By defocusing input events, such as billable hours, and focusing more on output variables, like the breadth of service per client (known in some firms as “proliferation”), firms can lower the barriers to collaboration and land higher-value work.

In the legal scenario, it is necessary to make clear that the type of collaboration discussed here is resolutely distinct from what the industry often calls as “cross-selling.” Cross-selling occurs when, for example, Partner A introduces Partner B to his or her own client so that Partner B might provide extra services. Though Partner A may provide a standard of general overview to ensure that his or her client is satisfied with Partner B’s work, he or she is improbable to delve deep.