Miscellaneous

Multilocal Management

By Bill Gratsch

Bruce MacEwen, writing at Adam Smith, Esq., posted this week on the topic of global management of law firms, a timely subject in this era of globalization.  In his post, Global Management: Central or Local?, Mr. MacEwen noted:

Multilocal?

That's the new McKinsey coinage intended to lend new intellectual luster and heft to the perennial management-theoretical challenge of how to manage multinational firms. No matter how familiar the business issues, now is probably an especially timely moment to revisit them, given the strenuous economic environment. In good times, suboptimal management can be overlooked; but at times like this there is no room for slack in the rigging.

Other bullet points from his post include:

The fundamental challenge is to capture the greatest value from local practices while also benefiting from the value of an international platform and brand...

...If, for example, you're a capital markets-centric New York and London powerhouse, a centralized and more or less top-down approach may be ideal. To the extent you have other offices, they may be more branches of convenience than full service local outposts in their own right. Conversely, if your firm has a more widely diversified portfolio of local practices (say, energy in Moscow, IP in Milan, project finance in Dubai, startup financing in Eastern Europe, etc.) then headquarters needs to "get out of the way" of these country-specific profit centers...

...Consider some partial measures--short of centralized mandates--to facilitate more "natural" and instinctive collaboration...

...And especially in our industry, where local jurisdictional, substantive law, regulatory and licensing issues are so much more critical to what we do than (say) different packaging preferences might be to a consumer goods firm, it's important to try to strike the right balance between capitalizing on local law capability while maintaining the "one-firm firm" strength of a global platform able to seamlessly serve our equally global clients...

To read these points in context, and all of Mr. MacEwen's post, click this link: Global Management: Central or Local?

Full post as published by Blawgs Blog by Bill Gratsch on April 08, 2008 (boomark / email).