Learning to be a lawyer in transnational law firms: communities of ...

Learning to be a lawyer in transnational law firms: communities of
practice, institutions and identity regulation
James R Faulconbridge*, Andrew Cook
Geography, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK.
Email: j.faulconbridge@lancaster.ac.uk; a.cook3@lancaster.ac.uk
Daniel Muzio
Leeds University Business School, Leeds University, UK.
Email: dm@lubs.leeds.ac.uk
*Corresponding Author
1

Learning to be a lawyer in transnational law firms: communities of practice,
institutions and identity regulation
Abstract
This paper examines the way English transnational law firms use communities of practice to
connect together, as ‘islands of expertise’, offices in different European countries. Through
analysis of original empirical material collected through interviews the paper shows how firms
use communities of practice to not only transfer home-country best practices to European offices
but also to manage the geographically heterogeneous affects of institutional contexts on the
attitudes and values of lawyers – what we refer to as lawyers’ geographically heterogeneous
identities. As such the contribution of the paper is twofold. First the paper highlights the
important ‘identity regulation’ role of communities of practice that coexists and contributes to
the wider organizational learning role focussed upon in existing studies. Second the paper shows
how transnational corporations use communities of practice as part of their ‘institutional
entrepreneurship’ strategies which seek to minimise the effect of nationally variable institutional
contexts on overseas activities.
2

Introduction
As part of empirical and theoretical interest in theorising economic globalisation there has been
widespread study of how transnational corporations (TNCs) operate as transnational social
communities (Jones, 2007; Morgan, 2001; Yeung, 2005). In particular it has been suggested that
one of the main competitive advantages of TNCs is their ability to generate communities that
couple together the ‘islands of expertise’ (Amin and Cohendet, 1999) so as to allow
organizational learning through inter-subsidiary collaborations (see in particular Bartlett and
Ghoshal [1998] on the transnational organisational form). One of the main conceptual frames for
such work has been the communities of practice (CoP) approach developed by Lave and Wenger
(1991) and Wenger (1998). Studies using the CoP approach include Amin and Cohendet (2004),
Currah and Wrigley (2004), Faulconbridge (2006), Ibert (2006) and Orlikowski (2002). In all of
these studies it has been shown that, with varying degrees of success, TNCs seek to gain
advantage over ‘local’ competitors in host country markets by using CoP to: generate new
knowledge relating to the design and delivery of products or services; and/or transfer and
implement forms of corporate ‘best practice’.
This paper examines the way English transnational law firms use CoP to connect together, as
‘islands of expertise’, offices in different European countries. Particular emphasis is placed on
the affects of heterogeneous institutional contexts on the organizational learning process
managed through CoP. In doing this the paper contributes to existing debates by adding to
understanding of the way the heterogeneous institutional ensembles associated with the varieties
3

of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, 2001) and national business systems (Whitley, 1998) influence
and are influenced by organizational learning processes. It does this by revealing how
transnational law firms use CoP to generate new and transfer existing knowledge and best
practices to overseas offices, as has been exemplified by existing studies (Currah and Wrigley,
2004; Jones, 2005, 2007), but also to manage the geographically heterogeneous affects of
institutional contexts on the identities of workers. Specifically it is shown how CoP allow
learning relating to the expected identities and behaviours of lawyers employed by a
transnational law firm, identities and behaviours defined by the institutionalised and placespecific
norms of the home-country of the firm. It is, therefore, suggested that approaches to
studying TNCs that draw on the CoP framework should pay more attention to the equally
important ‘identity regulation’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002) role of CoP that coexists and
contributes to the organizational learning role focussed upon in existing studies. It is also
suggested that the role of CoP in the institutional entrepreneurship strategies of TNCs should be
better recognised. These strategies seek to short-circuit the influence of institutional
heterogeneity on workers in different parts of the firm’s international network yet little is
currently known about the extent to which such uses of CoP allow TNCs to overcome hurdles to
international business associated with the varieties of capitalism and national business systems.
The rest of the paper develops these arguments over four further sections. The next section
consider the globalization of law firms and the way institutions have influenced and in some
cases hindered the development of integrated office networks. The following section then
considers the way CoP have been formed by transnational law firms to overcome the challenges
4

posed by institutions whilst the penultimate section argues that it is the identity regulation role of
CoP that has been most important in allowing the development of the defining feature of
transnational law firms: consistent firm-wide best practices and styles of services. The
conclusions section then considers the implications of theorising the identity regulation role of
CoP for approaches to understanding TNCs as relational communities.
Law firms in context: globalization, institutions and cultures of work
As noted by Beaverstock et al. (1999), law firms were one of the late globalizing business
services. With the exception of the US firm Baker and McKenzie which opened its first overseas
office in 1955, the top ten transnational law firms (Table 1), which significantly are all English
or US in origin, only began a sustained period of overseas expansion in the 1980s. One of the
main explanations for this late globalization is that transnational law firms are forced to operate
as intensely embedded organizations, being entangled in the geographically heterogeneous
cultural, economic, political and social contexts of their home and host countries (see Hess
[2004] on such embeddedness). In particular, the complexity of the regulatory environment that
firms encounter when seeking to operate outside of their home country has affected the
globalization of law firms. Lawyers, as representatives of a state authorised profession, and law
firms are bound by stringent and nationally specific codes of practice. In some cases this
regulation prevents overseas firms establishing offices because of rules that prevent a nonnational
of a country owning a law firm or obtaining a license to practice as a lawyer, as
5

continues to be the case in India. In other cases it required offices to be structured in very
different ways to the home country, English or US offices of globalizing firms. For example, the
nationally variable privileges awarded to lawyers mean in some countries transnational firms are
allowed to have departments that represent client’s in court (e.g. in Italy) but in other countries
are not (e.g. in England where an independent Barrister must be employed).
[insert table 1]
Perhaps one of the most significant hurdles faced, however, is associated with the raison d’être
of transnational law firms: the development of competitive advantage by providing a globally
aligned and consistent style of service to other TNC clients. As such, unlike retailers and other
intensely embedded service firms (see Coe and Wrigley, 2007; Wrigley et al., 2005),
transnational law firms do not seek to adapt their home-country best practices to the norms of
legal service provision in overseas host-countries. Rather they seek to export a common, usually
home-country defined model of legal practice to all offices in the firm’s network. However,
national institutional systems, the definition and effects of which we outline further below,
generate significant hurdles to the successful development, diffusion and implementation of the
best practices that are supposed to ensure the delivery of seamless, consistent worldwide services
to clients. These hurdles are not so much associated with the prohibition of certain types of
activity. Rather these hurdles relate to the way national institutional systems associated with the
legal profession generate lawyers with nationally variable values, attitudes and behaviours which
6

are displayed in nationally-variable styles of legal practice. It is to the cause and nature of these
variations that we now turn.
Transnational law firms and national institutional systems
A large body of work on the varieties of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, 2001) and national
business systems (Whitely, 1998) has shown that firms’ best practices and the attitudes, values
and behaviours of workers are embedded and produced by geographically heterogeneous
institutional contexts. Two examples using the case of manufacturing industry serve to illustrate
the connection between institutions – defined as formal, legally enforced regulations and
informal norms and customs - and best practices – defined as work processes, techniques and
outcomes that are influenced by the attitudes, values and economic behaviours of workers (on
these definitions see Hall and Soskice [2001] and Gertler [2004]).
First, the work of Whitley (1998) on national business systems (see Table 2) draws attention to
how manufacturing workers and firms develop nationally-specific best practices and behaviours
because of the ‘functional’ influence of the institutional landscape in which they operate. As
such, in the typology outlined in Table 2 institutions are assumed to compel and encourage
particular behaviours and best practices. A second example comes from the work of Gertler
(2004) who provides further theoretical clarification of the relationship between institutional
7

ensembles and economic behaviours and practices. For Gertler (2004, 7, original emphasis) any
analysis of such relationships must “maintain a clear distinction between institutions at the
societal level, attitudes and values (often shared by individuals within society, but ultimately
experiences at the level of the individual), and economic behaviour as expressed in the industrial
practices of firms and the individuals that comprise them”. As such, Gertler (2004) draws
attention to how institutions define workers’ attitudes and values which then cause and are
displayed in workers’ nationally variable best practices and behaviours. 1 Both Whitley (1998)
and Gertler (2004) also show that TNCs tend to develop best practices and behavioural norms
defined by home-country institutions. When operating in a different institutional environment
this means, norms and practices have to be exported and implemented in an alien institutional
context or the norms and practices of the host context adopted. Or a hybrid form that combines
features of the home and host country norms and practices has to be developed as a compromise.
[insert table 2]
In the context of this paper, the link made between institutions, attitudes and values, and
practices and behaviours is significant in that a similar story to that told by Whitley (1998) and
Gertler (2004) about manufacturers can be told about the relationship between national
institutional systems relating to the legal profession and the attitudes, values, behaviours and
practices of lawyers. For example, Morgan and Quack (2005) show that, as a result of the
nationally specific negotiations between the state and the legal profession that form the ‘national
system of the professions’ (see Burrage et al., 1990; Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2007), in
8

England institutions exist which lead to large law firms and lawyers being entrepreneurial and
displaying business orientated attitudes, values and behaviours when delivering legal services. In
contrast in Germany institutions lead to smaller law firms and lawyers that act as civil servants,
scientists of the law and independent (rather than business orientated) practitioners. The specific
causes of these differences and the consequences for approaches to legal practice and lawyers’
behaviours are further drawn out in Table 3 with the example of Italy included for
methodological reasons explained below. For transnational law firms the differences described
mean facing the challenge of not only implementing procedural best practices in terms of routine
ways of working – e.g. systems for managing standard contract templates and client billing
arrangements – but also ensuring all lawyers worldwide have the same attitudes and values and
display the same behaviours as lawyers in the home-country of the firm when working with
colleagues and clients. Or in the language of Alvesson and Willmott (2002), transnational law
firms face the challenge of ensuring all lawyers employed by the firm have the same identity,
with identity being defined by Alvesson and Willmott (2002) as an understanding of ‘who I am
and how I should act’ as a lawyer. The existence of such a common identity acts as the basis for
the seamless and consistent style of service firms seek to deliver worldwide.
[insert table 3]
The rest of the paper, therefore, examines how English transnational law firms use organisational
CoP to ensure that learning occurs which leads to seamless and consistent services worldwide
despite the differences in lawyers practices, attitudes, values and behaviours caused by
9

institutional heterogeneity and the national system of the professions. We focus on English firms,
highlighted in Italics in Table 1 because our research suggests these firms have developed the
most advanced organizational learning strategies that use CoP to ensure all lawyers in all
worldwide offices learn about the procedural best practices of the firm but also the attitudes,
values and behaviours the firm’s lawyers are expected to display. In particular we focus on the
role and effects of organizational learning via CoP involving Italian lawyers in Milan working
for English transnational firms. Our rationale for focussing on Italy is that, first, the effects of
Italian institutions on the activities of transnational law firms have not be studied to date.
Second, as the work of Culpepper (2007) and Trigilia and Burroni (2009) suggests, Italy
provides an example of what in Table 2 is described as a particularistic environment with the
home-country of English transnational law firms corresponding with the arm’s length model.
This means Italy provides an example of when institutional difference between home and host
countries is great and, therefore, organisational CoP are most affected by institutional
heterogeneity and play the biggest role in overcoming the affects of such heterogeneity on
workers attitudes and values.
Analysis is based on a series of 66 interviews. Interviews were completed with representatives of
all of the English transnational law firms listed in Table 1. Individuals were interviewed in
London and Milan and held positions including office managing partner, partner, head of
training, trainer, senior associate, associate and trainee. This represents all sections of the
hierarchy in law firms. Interviews were also completed with regulators of the legal profession
and education in England and Italy, law schools in the two countries and freelance providers of
10

training services to law firms. All interviews focussed on institutional influences on lawyers’
identities and practices, the role of CoP in transnational law firms, the way CoP are formed and
allowed organizational learning and, in particular for reasons outlined below, the role of formal
training programmes in constructing CoP and the affects on lawyers’ practices and behaviours of
such communities. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and coded to identify recurrent themes
relevant to the topic of analysis. All quotations provided below are anonymised to protect the
identity of the individual and the firm they represent.
Organizational learning and the operation of communities if practice in transnational law
firms
Three core features define a CoP according to the work of Wenger (1998). First, a community is
defined by the existence of mutual engagement in the shape of a group of individuals who do the
same type of work and interact, principally by talking about the work they complete. Second, a
CoP always has a joint enterprise in the form of a shared understanding of how to do the work
that all community members are involved in. Third, a CoP has a shared repertoire made up of
words, objects and routines related to the job or activity all are involved in. It is the existence of
these three constituent elements that defines the geography of CoP – i.e. a community’s members
can be co-located or geographically distributed as long as they all share a mutual engagement
and together learn about and develop joint enterprise and shared repertoire (see Amin and
Cohendet, 2004; Gertler, 2008).
11

Exemplifying the role of CoP in TNCs, Currah and Wrigley (2004) show that retail TNCs seek
to develop firm-wide CoP through a combination of virtual communications (email, video
conferencing etc.) and face-to-face interactions (facilitated by both individuals travelling to other
stores and travelling ‘best practice teams’). These CoP are used to generate new and transfer
existing best practices relating to store design, customer service routines, merchandising
procedures, just in time delivery techniques etc. In the case of English transnational law firms,
strategies for developing CoP are similar to those found in retail. Two main strategies are used.
First, the practice group in transnational law firms has been shown by previous research (see
Faulconbridge, 2007; Jones, 2005, 2007) to be important in forming CoP. Practice groups bring
together, both virtually through regular often weekly video and telephone conferences but also
face-to-face through annual practice group conferences, lawyers engaging in the same type of
work (e.g. mergers and acquisitions; litigation etc) but in different offices of a transnational
firm’s network. Secondly, and according to our research more importantly, there is a hereto
unstudied role in English transnational law firms for communities formed around training
programmes that firms often badge as ‘academies’ or ‘universities’ and which allow lawyers to
gain a ‘Diploma’. Training programmes are delivered: by trainers who travel from office-tooffice
to deliver courses; by ‘local’ staff who implement globally agreed programmes that they
have been trained to deliver, usually by personnel in the home-country of the firm; and most
importantly through global and regional (e.g. pan-European) events when lawyers from several
offices travel to one location for a period of time, ranging from one day to a week. The structure
12

and ethos of such programmes is captured nicely by the following comments from one global
head of training:
“we put together were a series called the [firm x Diploma]…the idea of the Diploma is
that if you are in corporate, wherever you are in the world, you will still take the
Diploma. So it transcends jurisdictions and the design of the courses I think is really
clever, because we’ve got a local technical core, a local technical core which is local
training for each of the jurisdictions and we’ve got a global core, so we’ve got a stream of
training which is global which works for any office wherever they are and then we’ve got
a global skills core”.
(9, Global head of training, English firm)
Figure 1 outlines the programme associated with the award of a Diploma in one English
transnational law firm. All lawyers worldwide employed by the firm are expected to complete
the Diploma – something that takes many years and is part of the career progression process in
the firm.
Most important in allowing such training programmes to cultivate firm-wide CoP are the global
or regional events which enable encounters several times a year between lawyers at the same
stage in their career but in different worldwide offices. In particular, as one trainer in a
13

transnational firm noted, in the first instance global and regional training events allow lawyers
to:
“meet their peers in other offices and hear that, ‘I may be struggling with this in London,
but actually it’s no different in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, um New York’. We don’t
apologies for that, there’ll be, there’s something very powerful in getting a bunch of peers
together for that time”.
(4, Training lawyer, English firm)
[insert figure 1]
Indeed, such events are viewed as being so important by firms that they are one of the few forms
of business travel that has not been scaled back as a result of the recession which began in 2008.
Training programmes ensure that the types of social interaction and conversation, or what is
referred to as ‘mutual engagement’ in the CoP literature, needed to form a transnational
community occur. In turn this mutual engagement as part of training programmes supports
learning about the joint enterprise and shared repertoire of the firm.
Because legal regimes are national in scope and lawyers in each office must be trained, have
knowledge of and be able to negotiate the peculiarities of the legal systems in the country they
work in, CoP are less useful for allowing learning in relation to technical legal knowledges. They
14

are, however, more useful for allowing learning in relation to the joint enterprise and shared
repertoire associated with service delivery best practices. These best practices are detailed in
Table 4. In addition CoP are important because they allow learning about the attitudes, values
and behaviours lawyers are expected to demonstrate when serving clients and which also form
the joint enterprise and shared repertoire of the firm. In English transnational law firms these
attitudes, values and behaviors, which are also detailed in Table 4, reflect an Anglo-American,
common law model of legal practice in which lawyers provide business services as ‘trusted
advisors’, and even as pseudo management consultants (Rosen, 2002), rather than providing
technical legal advice about the law. As such in the case of the English transnational law firms
studied these attitudes and values relate to the identity of a lawyer in England. Table 3 suggests
that such identities are very different to the identities promoted by institutional ensembles in
Italy. Hence in the firms we studied one of the main roles of CoP formed around training was to
attempt to change lawyers’ identities to match those of lawyers in the home-country. Together
the combination of the identities and the procedural best practices outlined in Table 4 are viewed
by transnational law firms as being so central to the provision of consistent worldwide services
that they form what might be called a ‘core skills map’. All lawyers are expected to demonstrate
knowledge of the best practices and perform the identities and behaviours detailed in such skills
maps.
[insert table 4]
15

Our research suggests, then, that CoP are important in transnational law firms not only because
of their role in generating new and transferring existing procedural knowledge and best practice
relating to service delivery but also because of their role in allowing learning about the attitudes
and values – i.e. the identities - the firm expects lawyers to display when interacting with
colleagues and clients. This is demonstrated by the dominance of non-legal, commercial and
behavioural skills in the training programme outlined in Figure 1. Indeed, the aims and
objectives laid out in the documentation supporting one firm’s training programme further attest
to the importance of training-based CoP for allowing identity-related learning, stating that
participation by lawyers should shape attitudes and values and:
• Allow the firm to develop a cohort of lawyers who have a consistent approach to legal
practice
• Ensure lawyers know their colleagues worldwide and share common understandings of
how to meet clients’ needs
• Develop globally minded, diverse and flexible people
(Source: Adapted from documents
collected during fieldwork)
In the rest of the paper we therefore focus our analysis on CoP formed by the types of training
programmes outlined above so as to better understand their role in shaping the identities of
lawyers. Such ‘identity regulation’ – defined following Alvesson and Willmott (2002, 625) as
intentional effects on identity construction and reconstruction - is important for law firms
16

ecause, as Table 3 reveals, lawyers attitudes, values and behaviours are shaped by institutional
contexts associated with the nationally specific system of the professions, something that means
ensuring all lawyers worldwide develop consistent firm-specific ways of delivering services and
interacting with colleagues and in particular clients can be difficult. Using CoP to change the
identities of lawyers in overseas offices or, to paraphrase Schoenberger (1997) their ‘social
conventions, behavioural norms, standards, customers, and rules of the game’, is therefore a key
strategy for ensuring seamless and consistent worldwide standards of client service, standards
defined in the values, attitudes and behaviours column of Table 4. These attitudes, values and
behaviours reflect those of lawyers in the home-country, English offices of the transnational law
firms studied. Insights from interviews with those managing, delivering and completing training
programmes used to form CoP in English transnational law firms’ home-country (London) and
Italian (Milan) offices are used in the analysis below to develop understanding of the role of CoP
both from the perspective of those designing strategies to change identities and those subjected to
those strategies. 2
Learning and identity regulation through communities of practice
Identity regulation has been shown to be a common strategy in knowledge intensive services
such as law. As Kärreman and Alvesson (2009, 1117) note, “management in knowledge
intensive firms tends to pay more attention to the regulation of ideas, beliefs, values and
identities of employees than most other organizations. The subjectivity of employees becomes
17

highly central. To produce individuals with the right mindset and motivation becomes a more
vital part of the total apparatus of control mechanisms and practices than is the case for other
organizations”. Table 5 outlines the different types of identity regulation strategies identified by
Alvesson and Willmott (2002) with, according to our research, those in italics being enacted
through CoP formed around training in transnational law firms. It is unsurprising that CoP are
used for such identity regulation work. As Wenger (1998) notes, “There is a profound connection
between identity and practice…Inevitably, our practices deal with the profound issue of how to
be a human being. In this sense, the formation of a community of practice is also the negotiation
of identities” (Wenger, 1998, 149). Being a member of a CoP involves learning both the skills
associated with a particular job – e.g. best practices associated with how to effectively operate a
machine, how to use the firm’s client billing systems – but also the attitudes and values of
community members, “what everyday life is like; how masters talk, walk, work, and generally
conduct their lives” (Lave and Wenger, 1991, 95).
[insert table 5]
In transnational law firms CoP formed by global training events and associated with Diploma
programmes play three different roles in identity regulation. First, they allow lawyers from
different worldwide offices to come together for a period of time and learn from the senior
partners of the firm, who are usually drawn from the home-country, about the types of attitudes
and values lawyers are expected to display. As one training partner commented, “[Person x] our
managing partner is committed to helping people, you know, if you like, be induced into the
18

programme as quickly as possible. So he’ll talk about the strategy, he’ll talk about the vision,
he’ll talk about what his hopes and fears are, but they also get a sense of what it’s like to work
here as well” (7). As such, the CoP formed by training act as a means of identity regulation
through discourse in the form of conversations between lawyers, speeches at training events etc.
which help ‘govern’ understandings of identity (see Alvesson and Wilmott [2002] for more of
such governance through discourse). This governance is focused on producing lawyers with
identities that mirror those of the English senior partners from the home-country of the firm.
However, secondly, as Wenger (1998, 53, original emphasis) notes, identity regulation through
CoP “may involve language, but it is not limited to it. It includes our social relations as factors in
the negotiation, but it does not necessarily involve a conversation”. Consequently lawyers also
learn ‘who I am and how I should act’ through participation in the community, observation of
other community members and through ‘personal identity work’ inspired by participation and
observation. By attending and participating in the CoP formed around global training events
lawyers get to observe the way colleagues from other offices, and in particular from the homecountry
offices, behave when delivering legal advice. Such personal identity work involves
reflection on the way existing understandings of ‘who I am and how I should act’ as a lawyer fit
with the models promoted and experienced as part of academy or university programmes. As a
result, it is unsurprising that the training used by transnational law firms, as one training partner
put it, encourages “people to mix together and do their own sort of more informal learning if you
like and sort of build on to that when they’re back in the office” (5, Global training partner,
English firm).
19

So important is such observation and experience that many global training events are run as
simulations. Transactions are mocked up with those attending the training event taking the role
of lawyers on the deal. Either senior lawyers, or in some cases training consultants or even
actors, play the role of the client. Such simulations allow lawyers to experience the ways of
working and the values and attitudes that other lawyers from different offices throughout the firm
display when dealing with everyday challenges and when interacting with clients. This allows
individuals based in offices throughout the world to learn about how their approach to being a
lawyer fits with or differs from that of other lawyers working for the firm and particularly those
from the home-country of the firm. As the global head of training quoted above reported:
“’The Real Deal’, which is a mock up of a deal, and they each have a coach who follows
them through this course, the course lasts between three and four days depending on what
the deal is, and they literally have to kind of run the deal as if they would, they’ll be
running meetings with clients, people playing clients, they’ll be briefing partners, so
that’s a very interactive course that’s a combination of technical and developmental”.
For one junior lawyer who had experienced such simulations, the benefits were described as
follows:
20

“ …we had the chance be four in a room with a partner, so that the partner could explain
to us ways of doing things…they gave us the opportunity to explain if something was
absolutely different in the civil law respect to the common law and learn about why there
are differences”
(Trainee, English firm’s Milan office)
Thirdly, as this quotation from a trainee lawyer suggests, in terms of identity regulation
observation and participation also pay an important role in identity regulation when coupled to
feedback provided by those running the course and, in particular, feedback from the senior
lawyers involved in a simulation. These senior lawyers may play the role of the client in the
simulation or may simply observe the lawyers ‘at work’. Feedback from senior lawyers then
takes many forms but most important is one-to-one feedback when the perspectives, values and
attitudes expressed by trainees are questioned, critiqued or commended. Such feedback is a
deliberate attempt to drive the identity regulation process by inspiring individuals to again
engage in their own personal identity work by reflecting on ‘who I am and how I act’ and ‘who I
need to be and how I need to act to fit into this community’. As one independent provider of
legal training to English and US firms commented:
“We [the training firm] have an Editorial Board [of lawyers]of forty two and the reason
it’s so big is that we want, at each event, around eight or nine or ten of them to actually
come to the event. So they sit on the tables with the delegates and they work the case
21

study exercises with the delegates. So in that role they are immediately acting effectively
as coaching and mentoring facilitators. But delegates love the fact that this is a real
lawyer sat with me for two days chatting about how we should manage this case
scenario…I see principally the role as being a sounding board. So somebody tells you
[the editorial layer] what they think and you don’t offer your own opinion, you just
challenge their assumptions and you keep challenging their assumptions until they
become more robust in their opinion, or not as the case may be”.
(14)
Feedback allows individuals to understand if their values, attitudes and behaviours make them a
legitimate participant in the community of lawyers that is the firm. As Lave and Wenger (1991)
describe, to effectively participate in a community requires legitimacy, something developed
over time as an individual learns and displays both the skills (i.e. best practices) but also the
identity – i.e. attitudes, values and resultant behaviours - that allows legitimate community
membership. In transnational law firms this means demonstrating the attitudes, values and
related behaviours outlined in Table 4 which form part of the home-country defined joint
enterprise and shared repertoire of the firm.
22

Promoting the right values
Despite the importance of discourse, observation, participation and feedback, it is important to
emphasise that the attempts at identity regulation outlined above face a number of barriers. As
Morgan (2001) highlights, in TNCs the tensions associated with individuals and groups who do
not ‘fit’ the firm-specific culture of practice lead to micro politics – i.e. disputes and
contestations – because of conflicting opinions about the validity and importance of identities
promoted by the firm. These conflicts can act as a form of resistance that prevents the production
of a convergent identity in worldwide community members (see also Ferner et al., 2006). In
transnational law firms such micro politics relate to the way the place-specific institutional
influences on identity outlined in Table 3 conflict with the home-country models promoted by
firms. To combat such conflicts, strategically constructed forms of power relations support the
discourse, observation, participation and feedback that are designed to allow identity regulation
through CoP formed around training. In particular, the identities and associated attitudes, values
and behaviours outlined in Table 4 are assessed through performance reviews and promotion
procedures. So as one trainer at an English firm commented:
“Related to training quite often is the promotion process. So obviously all of this
training, if the individual wants to and they have the ability, would ultimately be leading
them to promotion to senior associate and then may be one day partnership hopefully. So
a lot of the skills and the knowledge and abilities that you are developing through this
training, are reflected in the promotion criteria”.
23

(11, Training partner, English firm)
Indeed, a number of the firms studied used simulations as part of the assessment process when
individuals seek promotion to the position of senior associate or partner. This allows the ability
of the individual to be a legitimate participant to be tested and their attitudes and values relating
to ‘who they are as a lawyer and how they should act’ to be examined. As one interviewee
described:
“We have a development centre which is a global looking at all the lawyers at that level
[senior associate looking to become partner] across the world. We put them on a day and
a half, two-day, development centre, we put them through some simulations and they get
an objective assessment of their current level of business skills against a future
benchmark…So we can say in two years time, if you want to be this, you’ve got to do
these things to improve your skills…and then hopefully, about a year or so later, you are
chosen as a partner candidate and then you go into the partnership selection process”.
(1, Global head of human resources, English firm)
Such power relations encourage lawyers to attend training that is part of global Diploma
programmes and take on board the messages conveyed about the best practices and in particular
identities the firm expects all lawyers to master. Indeed, Table 6 provides examples of what
24

junior lawyers working in Italy said they had learned from training about the attitudes and values
relating to ‘who they should be and how they should act’ as a lawyer working for an English
transnational firm. As the quotations suggest, the training-based CoP help Italian lawyers
understand the home-country, English norms of the firms they work for and how, because of
different institutional norms, these might be different to the attitudes, values and behaviours of
many lawyers in the Italy. However, this understanding of the identities that underlie the joint
enterprise and shared repertoire of the firm does not always get translated into changed attitudes,
values and behaviours.
In line with work which highlights the way individuals can resist and subvert attempts to regulate
their identity (see Kornberger and Brown, 2007; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003), lawyers in
different European jurisdictions resist and reject some elements of the identities promoted
through CoP. For example, as Table 3 suggests, in many European jurisdictions including Italy
the role of a lawyer is to be an expert who studies the law, develops unrivaled technical
knowledge of legal precedents and advises clients about these technicalities. However, in
England the importance of such expertise and the value of such technically heavy advise is
emphasized much less and transnational firms do not necessarily value lawyers who insist on
constantly studying legal precedents and burdening clients with the complexities of the law. As a
result, training programmes attempt to play down the importance of technical competency as one
of the best practices, attitudes, values and behaviours of transnational firm lawyers (see Table 4).
The following comments summarise the reactions of several interviewees in Italy in relation to
25

this issue and the way lawyers reject attempts to promote attitudes, values and behaviours that do
not emphasizes technical competence:
“One of the major differences we have experienced over the years is that most English
lawyers, the trainees have very little knowledge of the law. This applies to all firms
because your system is different, it does not necessarily need to take three or four years
of law to become a lawyer contrary to what you do here… One company are thinking
about providing a six month version [of the compulsory law degree] so, it is potentially
after not having done a law degree, you be a lawyer after 18 months…English lawyers
they find themselves lawyers but sometimes, their concepts are a bit nebulous…Honestly
I believe our system [in Italy] has many failings, many shortfalls, but I feel more
confident uh, in dealing with one of my youngsters that you know a trainee or youngster
from the UK”.
(38, managing partner, Milan office, English firm)
[insert table 6]
Consequently, identity regulation through CoP leads to lawyers whose identities, behaviours and
practices resemble what Yeung (2001) describes as a ‘mosaic’ or ‘hybrid’. Identities, behaviours
and practices are produced by both the CoP transnational law firms develop and institutional
legacies that continue to produce nationally specific understandings of the identity, behavior and
26

practices of a lawyer. One lawyer summarized this by suggesting “Oh you know, Italians can
adapt themselves quite a bit! I don’t know how I did it, I just don’t know (58, junior associate,
Milan office, English firm). Italian lawyers working for English transnational law firms do not
have the identity of and do not behave and practice like lawyers in the home-country offices of
the firm. But they also do not behave and practice like corporate lawyers working at domestic
Italian firms in Milan either. Instead they have the identity of and behave and practice like what
might be described as an Italian transnational lawyer. The identity, behavior and practice of an
Italian transnational lawyer is a hybrid form that is part English and part Italian because of the
combined effects on lawyers of firm-based identity regulation and the inherited and persistent
influences of the institutional ensembles outlined in Table 3. As a result, the transnational lawyer
in Germany or Spain and her/his attitudes, values and behaviors are likely to be different to the
transnational lawyer in Italy. Identity regulation through CoP is, then, only partially successful if
the aim is to produce a cohort of ‘cloned’ community members.
Conclusions
This paper makes two contributions to existing debates that conceptualize TNCs as relational
communities. First, the paper shows that in transnational law firms CoP are used not only to
allow organizational learning related to procedural knowledge and best practices associated with
service delivery but also to allow learning relating to the identity of legitimate members of the
firm. Relatedly, second, the paper also draws on existing work that demonstrates the link
27

etween institutions and the production of firms’ best practices and workers identities to reveal
how transnational law firms use CoP to change the influence of institutions on workers’
identities and practices. In revealing this ‘identity regulation’ (c.f. Alvesson and Willmott, 2002)
role for CoP the paper demonstrates that the activities of TNCs are actually embedded (c.f. Hess,
2004) by a somewhat understudied social force: the geographically heterogeneous influences of
national institutions on workers’ identities (see also Morgan [2001] and Ferner et al. [2006] on
such ideas). Understanding the nature of such identity-related embeddedness is important, in
particular because it provides a lens to explore the way TNCs are affected by and in turn affect
the varieties of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, 2001) and national business systems (Whitley,
2001).
The focus on the role of CoP in transnational law firms reveals, then, the growing sophistication
of the strategies used by TNCs to short-circuit and overcome the embedding affects on
operations of geographically diverse institutional contexts. Work on the varieties of capitalism
and national business systems has increasingly begun to focus on the way TNCs seeks to change
the influence of institutions on their operations in different countries (see for example Crouch,
2005; Dejelic and Quack, 2003). In line with the ideas developed here about the relationship
between institutions, attitudes and values (identities) and behaviors, it has been recognized in this
work that institutions “are not universally embraced or straightforwardly ‘adapted to’, but rather
continue to be the object of ongoing conflict, as actors struggle over the form that these
institutions should take and the functions they should perform” (Thelen, 2004, 32). The struggle
described by Thelen is represented in this paper by the identity regulation strategies of
28

transnational law firms that seek to change the influence of institutions on lawyers’
understandings of ‘who I am and how I should act’. As such, transnational law firms have been
shown to be ‘institutional entrepreneurs’, attempting to change the influence of institutions on
the identities of lawyers working outside of the home-country through CoP. In the case of the
firms studied here this means engaging in a struggle to export models of the identity of a lawyer
from England to Italy, the English identity being exported emerging, to use the terminology
outlined in Table 2, from an arm’s length’ institutional context and being implemented in Italy
where a ‘particularistic’ institutional environment exists. The analysis reveals the effects of such
short-circuiting strategies with identity regulation invoking some change in the attitudes, values
and behaviours of Italian lawyers. But, despite the firms’ best efforts, this does not lead to
‘strong convergence’ (Gertler, 2001) and the replication of home-country models worldwide.
Rather, and contrary to the ideals of transnational law firms, such strategies lead to ‘mosaics’
(Yeung, 2001), ‘or ‘hybrids’ as geographically heterogeneous identities persist but with a greater
degree of commonality existing between lawyers in different countries.
The paper reveals, then, the subtleties of the way the strategies of TNCs and their operation as
transnational social communities help change the influence of national institutional systems on
workers’ identities and economic practices in different national contexts. The empirical analysis
also raises a number of new questions that deserve further research. In particular comparative
research that provides a better understanding the place-specific and variable effects of TNCs’
attempts to act as institutional entrepreneurs is an important future theoretical and empirical
endeavor. For example, understanding how TNCs’ institutional entrepreneurship strategies are
29

invoked differently and result in inconsistent changes in institutional effects from place-to-place
- at national and sub-national levels - seems important. Relatedly, analyzing the extent to which
TNCs act as ‘lead firms’ or as vectors of ‘challenger rules‘ (Djelic and Quack, 2003) that have
wider effects on the relationship between institutions, firms best practices and workers attitudes,
values and behaviours in host-countries seems important. As Djelic and Quack (2003) allude, the
institutional entrepreneurship strategies of TNCs – such as using CoP to regulate workers’
identities - may act as the first step towards the more widespread reproduction of Anglo-
American models of business and legal practice in, to use the terminology outlined in Table 2,
‘particularistic’ and ‘arm’s length’ environments if domestic firms copy the approach of
transnational firms in order to compete with them and offset the new competition they create (see
also Morgan and Quack [2005] on such processes). However, little is known about the extent to
which TNCs’ institutional entrepreneurship strategies actually invoke such wider change. The
findings presented here would suggest that such change will not involve the replication of Anglo-
American models but their reproduction. But again the geographically heterogeneous nature of
this reproduction process is currently understudied. Further research on the way TNCs as
relational communities engage in institutional entrepreneurship would therefore seem to be
urgently needed.
30

Notes
1
As such, work on the link between institutions, attitudes and values and behaviours and practices
dovetails with work on ‘cultures of work’. As Schoenberger (1997) describes, ‘cultures of work’ relate to
the “social conventions embracing behavioural norms, standards, customers, and the ‘rules of the game’”.
An extensive literature (e.g. Jones, 2003; Trompenaars and Prud’homme, 2004) has examined how TNCs
are affected by and managed diverse cultures of work. However, due to space constraints and to maintain
the analytical focus on the institutional causes in diverse attitudes, values and practices we do not explore
this literature in detail here.
2
It is important to acknowledge in that focussing on the identity regulation role of CoP we are unable to
provide analysis of the way best practices are adapted or hybridised through organizational learning, as
reported by Currah and Wrigley (2004), or of the way organizational learning in reverse occurs when
headquarters learns from overseas subsidiaries. Such processes do go on in transnational law firms.
However here, in order to contribute to debates about the role of communities in organizational learning
by identifying their identity regulation role and because of space constraints, we are unable to fully cover
such issues.
31

References
Alvesson, M. & Willmott, H. (2002) 'Identity regulation as organizational control: producing the
appropriate individual', Journal of management studies, 39, 619-44.
Amin, A. & Cohendet, P. (1999) 'Learning and adaptation in decentralised business networks.'
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 17, 87-104.
Amin, A. & Cohendet, P. (2004) Architectures of knowledge: Firms capabilities and communities,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Bartlett, C. & Ghoshal, S. (1998) Managing across borders: the transnational solution., London, Random
House.
Beaverstock, J. V. (2004) 'Managing across borders: knowledge management and expatriation in
professional legal service firms', Journal of economic geography, 4, 157-79.
Beaverstock, J. V., Smith, R. & Taylor, P. J. (1999) 'The long arm of the law: London’s law firms in a
globalising world economy. ' Environment and Planning A, 13, 1857-76.
Burrage, M., Jarausch, K. & Sigrist, H. (1990) 'An actor-based framework for the study of the
professions', In Burrage, M. & Torstendahl, R. (eds) Professions in theory and history. London,
Sage.
Coe, N. & Wrigley, N. (2007) 'Host economy impacts of transnational retail: the research agenda ',
Journal of Economic Geography, 7, 341-71.
Crouch, C. (2005) Capitalist diversity and change. Recombinant governance and institutional
entrepreneurs., Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Culpepper, P. D. (2007) 'Eppure, non si muove: Legal change, institutional stability and Italian corporate
governance', West European Politics, 30, 784-802.
Currah, A. & Wrigley, N. (2004) 'Networks of organizational learning and adaptation in retail TNC’s',
Global Networks, 4, 1-23.
32

Djelic, M. L. & Quack, S. (2003) 'Theoretical building blocks for a research agenda linking globalization
and institutions', In Djelic, M. L. & Quack, S. (eds) Globalization and institutions: Redefining the
rules of the economic game. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.
Durand, C. & Wrigley, N. (2009) 'Institutional and economic determinants of transnational retailer
expansion and performance: a comparative analysis of Wal-Mart and Carrefour', Environment
and Planning A, 41, 1534-55.
Faulconbridge, J. R. (2006) 'Stretching tacit knowledge beyond a local fix? Global spaces of learning in
advertising professional service firms', Journal of Economic Geography, 6, 517-40.
Faulconbridge, J. R. (2007) 'Relational spaces of knowledge production in transnational law firms',
Geoforum, 38, 925-40.
Faulconbridge, J. R. (2008) 'Negotiating cultures of work in transnational law firms', Journal of Economic
Geography, 8, 497-517.
Faulconbridge, J. R. & Muzio, D. (2007) 'Reinserting the professional into the study of professional
service firms: the case of law', Global Networks, 7, 249-70.
Ferner, A., Quintanilla, J. & Sanchez-Runde, C. (2006) 'Introduction: multinationals and the multilevel
politics of cross-national diffusion', In Ferner, A., Quintanilla, J. & Sanchez-Runde, C. (eds)
Multinationals, institutions and the construction of transnational practices. Convergence and
diversity in the global economy. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Gertler, M. (2004) Manufacturing culture., Oxford, Oxford University press.
Gertler, M. (2008) 'Buzz without being there? Communities of practice in context', In Amin, A. &
Roberts, J. (eds) Community, economic creativity and organization. Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
Gertler, M. S. (2001) 'Best practice: Geography, learning and the institutional limits to strong
convergence', Journal of Economic Geography, 1, 5-26.
33

Hall, P. A. & Soskice, D. (2001) Varieties of capitalism. The institutional foundations of comparative
advantage, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Hess, M. (2004) 'Spatial relationships? Towards a reconceptualization of embeddedness', Progress in
Human Geography, 28, 165-86.
Ibert, O. (2007) 'Towards a Geography of Knowledge Creation: The Ambivalences between ‘Knowledge
as an Object’ and ‘Knowing in Practice', Regional Studies, 41, 103-14.
Jones, A. (2003) Management consultancy and banking in an era of globalization, Basingstoke, Palgrave
Macmillan.
Jones, A. (2005) 'Truly global corporations? Theorizing organizational globalisation in advanced
business-services', Journal of economic geography, 5, 177-200.
Jones, A. (2007) 'More than ‘managing across borders’? the complex role of face-to-face interaction in
globalizing law firms ', Journal of Economic Geography, 7, 223-46.
Karreman, D. & Alvesson, M. (2009) 'Resisting resistance: Counter-resistance, consent and compliance in
a consultancy firm', Human Relations, 62, 1115.
Kornberger, M. & Brown, A. D. (2007) 'Ethics' as a discursive resource for identity work', Human
Relations, 60, 497.
Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning. Legitimate peripheral participation., Cambridge,
Cambridge University press.
Morgan, G. (2001) 'Transnational communities and business systems', Global Networks, 1, 113-30.
Morgan, G. & Quack, S. (2005) 'Institutional legacies and firm dynamics: the growth and
internationalization of UK and German law firms', Organization Studies, 26, 1765-85.
Orlikowski, W. (2002) 'Knowing in practice: enacting a collective capability in distributed organizing',
Organization Science, 13, 249-73.
Peck, J. & Theodore, N. (2007) 'Variegated capitalism', Progress in Human Geography, 31, 731-72.
34

Rosen, R. E. (2002) 'We're All Consultants Now: How Changes in Client Organizational Strategies
Influences Change in the Organization of Corporate Legal Services', Ariz. L. Rev., 44, 637.
Schoenberger, E. (1997) The cultural crisis of the firm, Oxford, Blackwell.
Silver, C. (2002) 'The Case of the Foreign Lawyer: Internationalizing the U.S. Legal Profession',
Fordham Journal of International Law, 25, 1039-84.
Sveningsson, S. & Alvesson, M. (2003) 'Managing managerial identities: Organizational fragmentation,
discourse and identity struggle', Human Relations, 56, 1163.
Thelen, K. A. (2004) How institutions evolve: The political economy of skills in Germany, Britain, the
United States, and Japan, Cambridge Univ Pr.
Trigilia, C. & Burroni, L. (2009) 'Italy: rise, decline and restructuring of a regionalized capitalism',
Economy and Society, 38, 630-53.
Trompenaars, F. & Prud'homme, P. (2004) Managing change across corporate cultures, Chichester,
Capstone Publishing.
Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning meaning and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Whitley, R. (1998) 'Internationalization and varieties of capitalism: the limited effects of cross-national
coordination of economic activities on the nature of business systems', Review of international
political economy, 5, 445-81.
Wrigley, N., Coe, N. & Currah, A. (2005) 'Globalizing retail: conceptualizing the distribution-based
transnational corporation (TNC)', Progress in Human Geography, 29, 437-57.
Yeung, H. W.-C. (2001) 'The dynamics of Asian business systems in a globalizing era', Review of
International Political Economy, 7, 399-433.
Yeung, H. W.-C. (2005) 'The firm as social networks: an organisational perspective', Growth and
Change, 36, 307-28.
35

Table 1. The top 10 transnational law firms, ranked by Revenue at the start of the reported
research
Source: Firms’ websites and The Lawyer (2009)
Firm
Country of
Origin
2008
Revenue
(£M)
Lawyers
Global
Offices
European
Offices
Skadden Arps Slate Meagher
& Flom USA 1,380 2,100 22 6
Baker & McKenzie USA 1,374 3,627 70 23
DLA Piper* USA/England 1,319 2,267 59 29
Linklaters England 1,298 2,367 30 17
Freshfields Bruckhaus
Deringer England 1,287 2,263 28 16
Clifford Chance England 1,262 2,904 28 13
Latham & Watkins USA 1,192 2,150 22 9
Allen & Overy England 1,091 2,122 25 14
Sidley Austin USA 928 1,892 16 4
Jones Day USA 818 2,516 29 7
*DLA Piper is split into dual firm down English and USA lines. Totals here are combined from
the two entities.
36

Table 2: The link between institutions, manufacturing firms’ best practices and workers’
economic behaviour.
Source: adapted from Whitley (2001, 39-42).
Particularistic
environments
Collaborative
environments
Arm’s length
environments
Institutional context
No institutions
encouraging
collaboration or trust
between workers or
firms and weakly
enforced formal and
informal institutions
Existence of many
formal and strictly
enforced institutions
that tie the fortunes of
workers and firms and
firms and subcontractors
and clients
together
Flexible institutions
that explicitly
promote trust and
collaboration with
legal systems
designed to coordinate
economic activities
rather than
excessively control
Common firm types
produced by
institutional context
Opportunistic – firms
seek short term profits
with little investment
in the future. Little
employee-employer
cooperation and no
firm-sub-contractor
trust
Cooperate hierarchy
– firms seek to
collaborate to build
long-term strength.
Workers actively
involved in firm
hierarchies and longterm
and collaborative
relationships with
sub-contractors
Isolated hierarchy –
firms operate
independently and
seek to minimise
impact of institutions
on operations. Little
formal employee
involvement in the
running of firms and
limited collaboration
with sub-contractors
Exemplary country China Germany USA
37

Table 3: National variations in the institutional ensembles that define best practices, attitudes and
values – i.e. the identity - of legal practitioners
Source: Authors’ research and Morgan and Quack (2005)
Regulation or norm
forming institutional
ensemble
UK Germany Italy
Length of formal
education associated
with qualifying as a
lawyer
Between 2 and 4
years
Between 6 and 8 years
7 to 8 years on average
Legal code and
informal ethos
attached to it and
promoted in education
Common law –
precedents and
interpretation of
statues to resolve
client problems
Civil law – application
of scientific principles
of the law should be
used to advise clients of
legality of actions
Civil law – application of
scientific principles of the
law should be used to
advise clients of legality
of actions
Norms of lawyers’
relationship with
clients, as promoted
by defined role of
lawyer in a country
Lawyers as client
service providers;
meeting clients
needs whilst
maintaining
standards defined
by regulators
Lawyers are civil
servants; primarily duty
is to the court not the
client and regulations
strictly enforced
Lawyers as independent
arbiters of law; clients
needs are paramount in a
system where
manipulating the civil
code for a client’s benefit
is seen as standard
practice due to lax
enforcement of
regulations
Norms in terms of
mode of corporate
legal practice
Firm- and large
team-based practice
dominates as in the
common law model
lawyer provide
‘consultancy’
services to big
business (also
known as megalaw)
Until recently
autonomous individuals
dominated as lawyers
were civil servants
providing scientific
advice on the law and its
requirements (firms with
more than 50 lawyers
did not exist until 1990
in Germany)
Small firms as lawyers
seen as scientific advisors
manipulating legal
technicalities to meet the
needs of business.
Powerful partners
dominate firms as all
firms must be named after
a practicing partner
Relevant national
business system model
Arm’s length Collaborative Particularistic
38

Table 4. Skills and associated best practices and identities – i.e. attitudes, values and
associated behaviours - promoted in one English transnational law firm.
Source: Firms’ documents collected during fieldwork
Skill Best practices Identities and the values
and attitudes to be
demonstrated in behaviours
Legal knowledge
Business Awareness
Communication
Office-level (i.e. non firm-wide best
practices) relating to national legal
systems
Use the [firm x] billing system to
deliver bills to clients on time and
accurately
Use templates to develop briefings for
the client extranet
Use the [firm x] communication
platform to regularly interact with
fellow practice group members
worldwide
Seeks innovative but effective
and efficient solutions not
overly burdened with legal
technicalities
Uses legal principles to
develop commercially
sensible advice
Act as the client’s trusted
advisor and help them make
business decisions through
recommendations
Actively network and
promote firms services
Collaborates with colleagues
in multiple offices and
motivates teams worked with
Acts as a team player not
autonomous impresario
39

Table 5. Strategies of identity regulation and their impacts on identity and cultures of
work. Strategies in italics are enacted through training based CoP in transnational law firms
Source: Based on Alvesson and Willmott (2002).
Discursive strategy
Language games and Impacts on identity and
cultures of work
Defining the person directly
Defining a person by defining
others
Providing a vocabulary of
motives
Explicating morals and values
Knowledge and skills
Group categorization and
affiliation
Hierarchical location
Establishing and clarifying the
rules of the game
Defining the context
The characteristics desired of the ‘ideal employee’ of
explicitly stated.
An individual or groups is compared to others who
represent ‘ideal’ cultures of work
A language is created to identify and help individuals
interpret the ‘ideal’ culture sought
Values are espoused, often via stories and by
comparison to those values deemed unacceptable, to
help workers orientate themselves towards ‘ideal’
cultures
Education and training as ways of instilling the
competencies needed to perform in line with ‘ideal’
cultures
Dividing up the world into ‘us’ and our identity and
‘them’ and their alterity
Praising individuals and groups that reflect the culture
and values of the firm
Laying out the ‘norms’ of how things are done in an
explicit fashion
Stating clearly the conditions that are sought in the firm
and expectations about how workers align themselves to
this context
40

Table 6: Quotations that outline the types of understanding developed by Italian lawyers as
a result of participation in training-based CoP of English transnational firm lawyers’
attitudes, values and behaviours.
Source: fieldwork
The role of the lawyer: as
technical expert or client’s
trusted advisor
“My experience is that lawyers of other jurisdictions are more
efficient in terms of productivity. There is a cultural thing
here whereby lawyers are not a service provider. But a kind of
gurus of mastering the laws, so they can take the time they
like” (53, Senior Associate, Milan office, English firm)
Cultures of autonomy versus
teamwork in the practice of law
“[firm x] has paid great attention to the concept of the
teamwork here, we are a global firm, we are a firm, the
hierarchy goes to the firm not the individual…Yes there is
really attention to you as a team player, why in Italy in the
Italian firms, we have the myth of the great sole practitioner,
the great lawyer, the One. Everyone I would say dreams of
being the Man, the real lawyer, the Great Lawyer…there are
the great egos in the firm and they don’t act as a team –
everyone looks at his own interests” (54, Junior associate,
Milan office, English firm)
The emphasis on business skills
rather than technical knowledge
“yes so last year I attended the first course here, here it was
the International skills foundation, yes it last one week in
London, and uh, there were how you say, there were 20, 20
people from all over the world…I also attended another soft
skills course two years ago, for three or four days in Essex
and that was held by some psychologists or something. It was
a really, was all based upon soft skills, so the way you behave
with your colleagues, so for example, how you should
delegate work to juniors, you know the approach you should
have for that, and obviously it is something that you know
when you are attending the course, you find it really
interesting and useful. But this is something for example that
even, coming back to the differences between Italian firms
and English firms, this is something that would not even be
imagined to do in Italy” (54, Junior associate, Milan office,
English firm)
41