The financialization of large law firms: situated discourses and practices of reorganization

It is perhaps not surprising that large and global corporate law firms have prospered in the latter parts of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. A broad range of literature has revealed that corporate law firms have grown in size and geographical reach thanks to their central role in lubricating financial markets and activities from currency trading and the work of hedge funds, to mergers and acquisitions and the financial restructuring of transnational corporations (Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2008; Flood, 2007; Quack, 2007). Massive increases in profits, such as the 157 percent absolute increase in profit per equity partner experienced by the ten largest English corporate law firms between 1993 and 2008 (Legal Business, 2008) are, therefore, unlikely to come as a shock to people familiar with the workings of the international financial system and the economies of world cities such as London and New York. But, we contend, the story of the growing profitability of large corporate law firms and the increasing remuneration of leading partners in these firms is not as simple as it might first appear. Specifically, in this paper we suggest that the extraordinary increases in the profitability of large and global corporate law firms recorded, in particular, over the past decade are not only a result of firms generating more and more demand for their work and charging ever higher fees for their services. Whilst this is part of the story, in this paper we argue that spikes in profitability are also the