Learning to be a lawyer in transnational law firms: communities of ...

Exemplifying the role of CoP in TNCs, Currah and Wrigley (2004) show that retail TNCs seek
to develop firm-wide CoP through a combination of virtual communications (email, video
conferencing etc.) and face-to-face interactions (facilitated by both individuals travelling to other
stores and travelling ‘best practice teams’). These CoP are used to generate new and transfer
existing best practices relating to store design, customer service routines, merchandising
procedures, just in time delivery techniques etc. In the case of English transnational law firms,
strategies for developing CoP are similar to those found in retail. Two main strategies are used.
First, the practice group in transnational law firms has been shown by previous research (see
Faulconbridge, 2007; Jones, 2005, 2007) to be important in forming CoP. Practice groups bring
together, both virtually through regular often weekly video and telephone conferences but also
face-to-face through annual practice group conferences, lawyers engaging in the same type of
work (e.g. mergers and acquisitions; litigation etc) but in different offices of a transnational
firm’s network. Secondly, and according to our research more importantly, there is a hereto
unstudied role in English transnational law firms for communities formed around training
programmes that firms often badge as ‘academies’ or ‘universities’ and which allow lawyers to
gain a ‘Diploma’. Training programmes are delivered: by trainers who travel from office-tooffice
to deliver courses; by ‘local’ staff who implement globally agreed programmes that they
have been trained to deliver, usually by personnel in the home-country of the firm; and most
importantly through global and regional (e.g. pan-European) events when lawyers from several
offices travel to one location for a period of time, ranging from one day to a week. The structure
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