Are We "Corporate" Yet?

Just how "corporate" is the management model at sophisticated firms?  While there may be superficial similarities of structure in an increasing number of firms, Legal Week posits that if lawyers simply mimic a corporate form of management without actually possessing the—horrors!—skills of businesspeople, it is an empty exercise.

Permit me to state the obvious, but top management in a corporation has traditionally come up through the ranks of finance, operations, marketing, and IT, learning the ropes as they go.  Top management in a law firm has traditionally come up through the practice of this that or the other arcane legal specialty.  Fortunately, human beings are adaptable and their plasticity can (within limits) be enlisted in support of filling the various roles in management with the best-suited candidates.  Any law firm worth discussing will, for example, have within its senior ranks a tough negotiator, an acute and effective listener and consigliere, someone with at least half a knack for IT, another who survived Accounting 101, etc.  The question, then, is simply that of mapping the right individuals to the right tasks.

Of course nothing is so simple:

For a modern law firm to flourish, it must have highly motivated and well-equipped senior non-lawyer managers. Recognition of the importance of these non-lawyer roles is crucial if their contribution is to be as effective as it would be in a corporate structure. However, this is still a tall order in an environment where success is often measured by fee earning and billing ability alone.

There's the rub in a nutshell.  Law firms often remain caste systems where those with the billable hours and books of business are deemed the only ones worthy of the executive suite (well, the executive committee, anyway).

So ask yourself:  How many hours has Jeff Immelt billed for GE or Carly Fiorina for HP?  Which clients are they personally responsible for bringing in?  In law-firm land, they'd never be where they are.

Then ask yourself this:  In a world of global competition, which of these two models, the corporate-land one or the law-firm land one, is dysfunctional?