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

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)
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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
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