*6.2. A Multidisciplinary Law Firm*

Today the vast majority of people working in large law firms are lawyers, assisted by a growing number of support personnel. This personnel, however, has often a limited role in shaping the strategy and the practice of the partners and often sit in different locations to symbolically show their subordinate role in the firm. This well-defined division of roles reveals the bias that lawyers often share about allowing non-lawyers within law firms. This difficult relationship is confirmed by the problems often arising between, on the one hand, the partners of the firm and, on the other hand, the executive

<sup>113</sup> Or without having to rely on a complex and often informal division of responsibility between managing partners and other partners, which often leads to internal conflicts.

<sup>114</sup> In a more or less informal way, many large law firms differentiate between categories and roles of partners. See, for instance, the well-known differentiation between the grinders, the minders, and the finders. See, among others, (Nelson 1988).

<sup>115</sup> This generalist way of evaluating lawyers has been said to derive from the so-called partnership ethos. According to this, in their practice, partners must strike a balance between their individual interest and the interest of the firm in which they work and are socialized into acquiring all the requisite technical and moral skills needed to be part of the partnership though long years of apprenticeship, (Empson 2007). This approach was also the building block of the hierarchical way of structuring large firms, where young associates were trained by the more senior partners.

directors, professional administrators, heads of innovation and the like, with the latter often tied to former's approval when it comes to annual budget, decisions of opening new offices, and large investments in technology.<sup>116</sup> More generally, in many countries (i.e., the United States and Denmark) it is still prohibited for lawyers to share legal fees or the ownership of law firms with non-lawyers. Such a prohibition reflects profound concerns about the control non-lawyers may have over the legal profession and the detrimental effect this control could have on lawyers' professional responsibility obligations.<sup>117</sup> Yet, there are also many benefits that cannot be ignored. In particular, non-lawyer partnership may increase firm profitability by allowing outsiders to contribute to the capitalization of the firm which, at least in theory, would allow the firm to generate more income. At the same time, it may increase efficiency as it allows firms to provide business and legal services from one provider.

This is not the place to enter into a deep analysis of the legal and non-legal aspects of the relationship between lawyers and non-lawyers in the practice of the law and, for those contexts in which it is not allowed, it will be necessary to await legislative developments in that direction. However, the new law firm I envision will be characterized by a multidisciplinary environment, in which lawyers coexist and work together with other professional figures, such as accountants, financial advisors, engineers, designers, architects, data analysts, psychologists, teachers, and so on. The importance of this is confirmed by the statement of the managing partner of one Danish large law firm, when asked to describe how business is run in the firm:

A: Today, your practice and specialization must be part of something bigger. Today, when we work, we work in teams that can be up to 50 people at the time in order to actually accommodate the clients' needs. And they (the clients) are OK with that, in fact, they want that. [ . . . ] This is because for certain projects we need to draw in special competences within different fields of law and put them together and we also actually employ project leaders and other non-lawyers, because when we are 50 or more people working together on large projects, we need, for instance to make reports on how the project is progressing, how is the money spent in that time, and so on. We really need to work in multidisciplinary teams.<sup>118</sup>

While each firm will structure the relationship according to preferences and legal requirements, two solutions seems to be the more plausible, depending on whether the lawyers in point prefer a more entrepreneurial and/or managerial role (those that in the classic jargon of the profession are the finders and/or minders) or a more operational role on the ground (the grinders). Entrepreneurial and management oriented lawyers could choose to assume the role of "project managers" of goal-oriented executive teams, thus setting the basic organizational framework and structure the activities of the other actors in the teams. More practice oriented lawyers, instead, could decide to focus on one or more specific legal areas and become the firm's leading specialist of the product that is being offered, namely, legal services.<sup>119</sup> In relation to this, it is worth underlining that the CEO and the member of the board of this multidisciplinary firm will not have to be necessarily lawyers, but it may be constituted by individuals with different backgrounds, ranging from business economics, marketing, technology, and the like (obviously, where this is allowed).

This move from a lawyer-centric to a multidisciplinary environment constitutes a crucial aspect of the necessary re-organization of large law firms in the light of the digitalization of the legal field. Today, and even more so in the future, the legal solutions that large law firms are asked to provide will be based on the present state of the art of the technology available and will also require a number of

<sup>116</sup> This difficult relationship is the by-product of the historical developments of the profession. In many instances, in fact, not only was it prohibited for non-lawyers to practice law, but it was also (and in certain jurisdictions still is) prohibited non-lawyers from combining with lawyers to offer legal services for profit. (Andrews 1989).

<sup>117</sup> (Carson 1994).

<sup>118</sup> Interview with Managing Partner of Danish Large Law Firm, 20 September 2019.

<sup>119</sup> This new roles somewhat resemble the ones adopted by engineers in engineering companies or of scientist in large pharmaceutical companies such as Novo Nordisk, Bayer or Novartis, just name a few.

competences that go far beyond pure legal knowledge. From here, the need of building tech-savvy multidisciplinary teams able to both assist clients in understanding the technology and the complexity of the issues at stake and support them in their increasingly tech-oriented needs. Some of the most progressive law firms have already made movements in this direction. Exemplary is the English law firm Rradar, which counts among its ranks a high number of non-lawyers ranging from engineers, project managers, business analysis, and so on.<sup>120</sup> In Denmark, at the forefront of this development, we find a number of large law firms, which have started to include non-lawyers in key roles within the firm (although with still limited operational power), such as Plesner, Bech-Bruun, Kammeradvokaten/Poul Schnith, and Kromann Reumert.
