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

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).
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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
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