Management and Marketing - Theses
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Item"Law, done differently”: Exploring the emergent legal organisational form of NewLaw in context( 2022)QUOTE: The legal world will change “more radically over the next two decades than over the last two centuries” (Susskind, 2013, p xiii). QUOTE: NewLaw for me is several things. It's a mindset first and foremost. It's a shift from looking at the value of lawyers being their time to the value of lawyers being everything else, which is their ability to review, their ability to provide professional advice, their negotiation skills. And it's outcome driven. Then you start looking at legal technology [and] how they can deliver things in a more flexible, client-centric way. And the flow-on from there is value-based pricing and project scoping, project management, with always the end user in mind. And obviously then the end result is they're customer service driven. For me, that is what NewLaw means. I talk a lot around a tribe and language (Interview K1-F). Recent decades have seen disruptive and transformative forces of increasing globalisation, more demanding clients and markets with regulatory changes, changing workforce expectations and technological advances that accelerated exponentially in the 2010s. In this dynamic context the legal industry, dominated for centuries by the professional partnership, has seen the entry of heterogeneous and innovative competitors. Since the mid-2000s the phenomenon labelled “NewLaw” has emerged with its participants claiming it to be a distinctive legal organisational form delivering legal services in new and different ways with a range of business models, that is, “law, done differently”. Early industry definitions opposed NewLaw to taken-for-granted traditional legal organisational forms and then the profit-oriented “BigLaw” while later definitions saw it gaining more complexity (Furlong, 2014). Growing rapidly in numbers and market share, NewLaw has attracted much attention in the industry literature for its symbolic significance as a new legal organisational form that is “disruptive innovation” and having a “disproportionate impact” (Thomson Reuters (Aus), 2019). However, as yet, the industry offers no valuable explanation or conclusive definition as to what constitutes NewLaw as a legal organisational form nor how NewLaw relates to its context. Therefore this Thesis seeks to understand and conceptualise the novel legal organisational form of NewLaw in its context by exploring the different academic literatures relevant to investigating the professional organisational form. With a lack of research concerning the NewLaw phenomenon, it begins by reviewing the “classic” definition of professional organisational form yet finds this unsatisfactory with a selective use of the literature, a search for distinctive professional characteristics and “classic” assumptions. It turns to examining in more depth each of the three literatures that have long explored the professions and their professional organisational forms: the sociology of professions, archetype theory and institutional logics. It finds useful concepts and arguments in these literatures, and also significant gaps. These gaps include limited descriptions of characteristics, continued dominance of historical understandings of professionalism and centrality of expert knowledge, and lack of consideration of interaction with contextual influences. Based on this review, the Thesis formulates two research questions (RQs) that focus on conceptualising the contemporary phenomenon of NewLaw as a legal (professional) organisational form and how participants within and advising NewLaw understand its influences and relationship with its context. To answer these meaning-centred questions, a constructivist-interpretive philosophy with a qualitative methodology was chosen. This Thesis developed 42 Australian NewLaw case studies that drew on 37 interviews with NewLaw participants and industry experts, observations and site visits, as well as extensive secondary data including webpages, industry media and podcasts, social media, artefacts and visuals. Nine characteristics and six themes are identified in the findings. As the two RQs are tightly interconnected, the findings are analysed together in relation to each of the literatures to provide a greater understanding of the NewLaw organisational form. These show the NewLaw organisational form as a distinctive constellation with an overarching philosophy of purpose that, distinguished from BigLaw and TradLaw, values true professionalism, includes profitability and supports innovation, with multi-level characteristics. For NewLaw these characteristics are analysed to be an active design, client-centric approach with fit for purpose work, use and sharing of expert knowledge both legal and beyond, valuing of professional workers, pricing for value, mindset of innovation aided by technological tools as required, being privately owned and using six business models. Interlinking the academic and industry literatures with these findings, this Thesis makes a number of contributions to knowledge to critically enrich the understanding of NewLaw as an emergent legal (professional) organisational form in the contemporary context. Theoretical contributions at a macro level include renewing the concept (and re-labelling the institutional order) of professionalism with multiple dimensions, extending the content of and approaches to expert knowledge beyond a monopoly to include lawyers as interpreters and collaborators with empowered clients while exploring jurisdictional claims, and adding the influence of innovation - suggesting it as an eighth institutional order. Theoretical contributions at the meso level make a case for the NewLaw interpretive scheme as a purpose-based combination of renewed professionalism with balanced profitability, extended expert knowledge and intentional innovation. This is called the 2PI, building on the historically dominant schemes of P2 (professional partnership) and MPB (managed professional business). Combining these contributions means NewLaw is an actively designed and distinctive organisational form with the 2PI purposive interpretive scheme guiding and being guided by its multiple, multi-level characteristics. Empirical contributions show a difference between meaning-based symbols and values compared to their material manifestations, and also suggest that “levels” of logics have blurred boundaries. A practical contribution guides managers as to designing and operating a NewLaw organisational form. The Thesis suggests these contributions are transferable to other emergent and existing legal and perhaps other professional organisational forms, while the framework of an interpretive scheme and characteristics may assist in moving closer to a definitive definition of the legal organisational form. Finally, it re-examines the label “New” as understood by participants and the claim for the purposeful and innovative NewLaw organisational form as a positive disruption for the legal profession.