Another challenge being faced by many global accountancy and legal firms is not only being able to offer consistently high quality services from country to country, but also to develop an organizational structure that encourages and rewards the right behaviors – for partners to genuinely collaborate across offices and service lines.
The politics can become tricky. Where is the profit being driven from? Whose P&L does it belong to? How collaborative are these international networks and do they truly trust their international members to provide their clients with the same standard of service?
Many law firms have an origination credit system, financially rewarding partners for referring work within the network, be that to other practice areas or other jurisdictions. However, where a Swiss Verein structure exists, because profits cannot be shared between partnerships, we have witnessed many challenges when it comes to incentivizing partners for referring work to overseas offices.
Other professional services firms have joined up their firm globally under one partnership, which itself can come with its own challenges, not least the liability, legal and regulatory challenges of going down this route – as well as the whole host of other cultural, operational and financial challenges of merging firms from different countries with different legal systems.
There is no simple solution but one thing is certain – with the many alternative business structures being used today, firms are finding more innovative ways to collaborate internally and service their clients on the global stage.