Culture club

Although credited with pulling together an impressive European network in the 1990s, one flamboyant former senior figure at a UK firm was prone to the odd gaffe. Perhaps the most telling example came when he summoned all the European colleagues to a big celebration in London. On the anniversary of VE Day. At the Imperial War Museum.

A former partner recalls the horror of seeing European colleagues looking decidedly uncomfortable. ‘The Germans, the Italians and the French members went through the gamut of negative emotions, from embarrassment to fury. They didn’t stick around long and the UK guys were soon left on their own.’

Accepting cultural differences among lawyers from a variety of jurisdictions, and adapting the firm’s policies and decision-making processes to encourage inclusivity, has not traditionally been high on international firms’ agendas. This has been demonstrated by countless stories of UK- and US-headquartered firms rampaging through Europe less than ten years ago. Firms opened offices by either a) an acquisition of an entire office; b) forming alliances and then manipulating the member firms to extract value from them or mould them in their image; c) poaching partners or even teams and moving them to new offices; or, very rarely, d) merging with European firms on an equal footing.

Unrest often followed. European partners felt marginalised or colonised. Every month came stories of UK and US firms falling out with their French, Dutch or German partners. The firms usually couched the reasons given for the parting of ways in cold-blooded economic tones, but often there was the undercurrent of a culture clash. When two partners left Bird & Bird’s Brussels office in 2002, the firm pointed out that there was a fundamental ‘lack of fit’ between the departing partners’ practices and the direction the firm wanted to take. The partners responded, arguing that Bird & Bird was ‘very London-centric’, and they’d had enough being at a firm ‘where Brussels felt like a forgotten city on a forgotten continent’.

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