A whole new world

If you had joined a partnership some 30 years ago, you might have expected to spend your entire professional career at the same firm. You would have worked hard and had a fair degree of autonomy to develop your practice area. You competed with your professional colleagues in other law firms. Management tended to play a supporting role, allowing you to focus on your legal skills.

There are several reasons why this is no longer true today, notably:

• the deregulation of the financial services marketplace, which created major financial institutions and then large professional legal and accountancy firms with broader offerings to clients;
• the relaxing of advertising rules, which changed how law firms saw and competed against each other;
• the arrival, mainly in London, of foreign law firms; and
• the emphasis on the profitability of individual practice areas.

The result? Partners in some firms found themselves working in more modern, competitive businesses, managed centrally in