**7. Conclusions**

Thus, as it is already a reality, it is inarguable that digital technologies will significantly change the practice of law. The question that remains is how the profession will respond to this. Under the blows of digitalization, professional monopolies are breaking down and non-legal competitors are increasingly performing new roles on the market. For this reason, this paper has argued that the large law firm must change their business model in three main directions in order to remain competitive. First, they need to move away from the classic hierarchical and patriarchal organizational structure of the partnership to become shareholder limited liability corporate companies with a flat and decentralized management structure. Second, they need to develop multidisciplinary practices and teams within the firm that would allow non-lawyers to perform key roles. Third, they need to make a smart use of LPO and LTPO to cut costs and make use of cutting edge technological developments.

This article provides just a first attempt at redefining the business model of large law firms and future research will necessarily delineate the organizational details of the new large law firm more thoroughly. Yet, a move in the direction indicated in this paper will provide large law firms with a thinner, more dynamic, and effective organizational structure that would allow them to respond to the current social developments that are jeopardizing their position as leading organizations in the private sector for legal services. This is to say that the increased digitalization of the legal field is bringing large law firms to the point of crucial intervention; a point in which the elites that set the premises must

<sup>133</sup> Interview with Head of Innovation of large law firm, 3 December 2019; interview with CEO of English large law firm, 1 May 2020; and interview with Senior Partner of large law firm, 16 August 2019.

<sup>134</sup> (Sennett 2006).

redefine the appropriate models of organizational structure and policy that have gone unquestioned for a long time before in order to remain afloat. The proposal for reforming large firms provided above in this paper is just a first stab at setting up new forms of inter-sectoral and organizational coordination that will encourage diversification, creativity rather than hastening homogenization. Further research in this area will necessarily have to grapple with developing a new sociology of the profession and of legal work that would take into account the impact of these broader societal changes, not only on large law firms, but also on lawyering in general. As to large law firms, their de-bureaucratization is the first big task that the current digitalization of the legal field is posing upon them. Although lawyers have developed into, or perhaps have always been, a conservative profession regarded as resistant to change, the current developments associated with the digitalization of the legal field are providing them with the unique possibility to abandon their iron (for many golden though) cage of organizational men in which the bureaucratization of large law firms has pushed them. This, however, will necessarily involve a rebalancing of the practice of the law in favor of a renewed ethos of professionalism able to be the basis for a freer, more autonomous, and creative legal practice and, perhaps, for the return of large law firm lawyers to embody the most respected form of delivery of legal services in both the private and public sphere.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the *Dreyers Fond.*

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
