Content area
Full Text
We had a summer outing once that included role playing games. One game had a medieval theme suitable to the - very nice and old - location and guess what ... partners were the kings, associates the knights, secretaries the bounty and all other staff the kings' jesters, jousters, soldiers and servants. The partners really enjoyed it though. This is by far the best description I can provide regarding the status of support people (Accountant at a major UK law firm).
Introduction
Law firms have a reputation to be tough places to work ([39] Schiltz, 1999; [18] Henderson and Zaring, 2005) and have over the last decade faced an unprecedented level of change by becoming subject to the "same commercial pressures and values as banking, running an airline or manufacturing green and yellow widgets" ([28] Muir et al. , 2004, p. 179). These changes are widely recognised, yet the majority of literature discussing the personal level impact of these changes has so far focussed on lawyers ([19] Hitt et al. , 2007; [27] Morris and Pinnington, 1998; [18] Henderson and Zaring, 2005). At the same time, little information is available on what constitutes - at least among the top 20 UK firms - one third ([3] Ackroyd and Muzio, 2007) of the people working for law firms, in support areas such as administration, human resources, risk management, compliance, IT, knowledge management, business development, learning and development, finance or other professional fields.
In the context of fee earners, opinion polls across the legal industry ([44] The Lawyer, 2007; [43] The American Lawyer, 2007; [47] Vault, 2007) provide regular snapshots of the current mood, while support staff predominantly features in the legal press in two ways; One is news about layoffs ([24] Legal Week, 2008) and the second is outsourcing of a wide range of services, from IT to document review, to Asia and elsewhere ([44] The Lawyer, 2007).
The absence of the discussion and therefore knowledge about the extent to which the pressures on the industry and the resulting changes radiate down to support staff is one focus of this paper. The business rationale for addressing this gap is high turnover among support staff, which represents a practical problem in terms of loss of talent and...