ON THE LAW PATH

It’s always been a source of bewilderment to me how, over the years, ‘international’ has become so devalued as a description of the big law and accountancy firms. Few other adjectives have changed in meaning to the same extent.

When a corporation claims to be multinational, everyone knows we’re talking about a General Electric or a Unilever-scale enterprise with listings on several exchanges and product lines in every country. Equally, global banks convey the unquestionable message that they handle money in all major financial centres of the world.

So why, when we look at law and accountancy firms, are their clients more than likely to raise a sceptical eyebrow at vaunted global expertise?

Advertisers have for years had a statutory duty not to mislead with their language. Yet lawyers and accountants, both professions supposedly of manifest exactitude, persist in selling their ‘international’ capability when it can mean anything from one man and a dog in a broom cupboard to a full office staffed by partners, assistants and qualified locals.

The Big Six have performed better than the lawyers in this area of expansion but only Arthur Andersen is even close to being a fully fledged world firm.

The others still have a long way to go to bring their federations up to the same level of service where global partners do only the very important, high profit margin global work and national partners do the national work.

All this is relevant to the legal sector now because of the changes in legislation promised by Labour on multi-discliplinary practices, incorporation, outside capital for partnerships and joint and several liability. The new government also has a far more flexible view on European integration.

For business purposes, this means a united states of Europe within three years which will completely re-configure the global market.

This worries corporate and professional practice advisers such as Dr John Viney, chairman of international headhunter Heidrick & Struggles.

Viney is outspoken about how both lawyers and accountants run their businesses – decades behind corporations, bankers and other professional services, many of which look like partnerships on the outside but legally are not.

For a start, like Heidrick & Struggles, they should have incorporated instead of fudging the partnership principle into a corporate-style operation.

Partnership is difficult to manage and standardise internationally. Few succeed at world level.

Viney has his critics. Several managing partners of City law firms decry his background as an astrophysicist, classical pianist and headhunter.

But professional services are too heavily peopled with dyed-in-the-wool traditionals, ‘little Englanders’ desperately trying to impose, rather than integrate, a moribund culture on foreign expansion.

Sadly, it’s likely history will repeat itself and the first global players will be American. At least half a dozen contenders, top Wall Street firms, are only a couple of years away. Americans have spent 150 years creating a unified culture, by integration and not imposition, across diverse multi-lingual states initially hell bent on being as jumbled as Europe. Unify it they did with a single currency and a single language.

Today, polyglot technology makes the latter unnecessary. National identity can be preserved, leaving just the lure of a large market and one currency to inspire the ‘international’ strategists.

But before attempting such hegemony, English lawyers and accountants will have to start listening to other cultures and instigate a consensual process – for them, extremely difficult. KPMG senior partner Colin Sharman is one of few exceptions. He has not only travelled extensively but lived and worked for long years overseas. The new managing partner of Clifford Chance, Tony Williams, has a similar background. Both understand that a few trips to Paris or New York no longer qualify international strategists.

Gilles Thieffrey is head of Norton Rose’s capital markets practice in London. A lawyer qualified in New York, Paris and London, he believes there is just one prerequisite for laywers and accountants to be fully international today: accepting people with funny accents in the next seat along, sharing in the decisions – and following the foreigners if that is the consensus.

Otherwise, they might as well get used to an American-dominated 21st century with a radically different complexion than the one about to end.