Manifestation Level and Development Stage of the Corporatization (Corporate System) of Law Firm | Basic Interpretation of the Corporatization (Corporate System) of Law Firm (III)

Source: DOCVIT Law Firm  Time: 2016-06-22 14:37:33  Author: LIU Guangchao

In the lawyer industry, a lot of people talk about corporatization and carry out it. There is various and even dazzled forms of the corporatization of law firm. but, to sum up, there are three forms below. 

1. Individual-centered corporatization team 

In practice, it is not difficult to find that the following working situation may occur after some lawyers accumulate the business and build the team to a certain extent: the lawyer expands the market, builds the team, assigns the work, controls the quality and decides the distribution alone. Meanwhile, they also advocate the lawyer to be engaged in marketing and many lawyers register their own websites, blogs and WeChat official accounts and write books and participate in various activities as far as possible; they also stress the team training and some of them also build the systematic training system in their own teams; they also advocate the teamwork, divide the team into several groups for division of responsibilities and jointly complete the assigned cases; they also value the service quality and often strictly control the case handling quality just as the master leads apprentices; they also implement the payroll system and mostly have the objection to the commission system. Some of them use the simple performance assessment to implement the floating wage system. The lawyer teams around lawyers have seemed like the law firm under corporatization. According to preliminary understanding, there are many such teams, and such situation appears easily especially in the partnership law firms using the dutch treatment, the individual law firms with the outstanding individual strength and state-owned firms where lawyers vary widely in ability. Many famous and great lawyers come from such teams. These teams can be called as the rudiment of the corporatization of law firm, namely, the first stage of the corporatization, because this mode has the shape of the corporatization after all, especially in the service team and distribution integration. But, we also must see that there is still a long way from true corporatization. Basically, it is just a team not a firm. Hence, this is not the corporatization of law firm, and just is the team under corporatization regardless of thorough corporatization characteristics. 

2. Corporatization management based on the law firm 

At present, many large and well-developed law firms have introduced corporatization management to different extent, and the pattern of manifestation includes but is not limited to: simulating the corporate management structure optimization & governance structure of the Board of Shareholders, the Board of Directors and the Board of Supervisors, establishing the special brand, customer and marketing departments, implementing the separated case introduction and handling, carrying out the teamwork, forming the team promotion system, points-based distribution system or annual salary system, making the internal business procedures, carrying out the overall brand promotion, laying emphasis on providing the superior services of the law firm, breaking through the personal business model and implementing the teamwork operation, introducing the full-time managers or setting up the management partners. Many firms achieve good development trend, growing scale, emerging brand, optimized team and increased competitive power in this mode of operation. This situation is deemed to be the concentration manifestation of the corporatization of law firms, namely, the second stage of the corporatization. However, it cannot be called the complete corporatization because of the lack of substantial change in the organizational form and property right mechanism and insufficient product standardization and distribution integration. 

3. Corporate system form symbolized by property right 

The law firm with complete corporate system still cannot be established subject to current legal provisions. But, individual firms have actually started to carry out the internal restructuring and operation in strict accordance with the corporate system requirements and basically achieved the demutualization of property rights, product standardization, service branding, marketization and distribution integration, except the limitation of legal liability. DOCVIT Law Firm shall be deemed as such one. Since the foundation of our law firm, we have selected and insisted on the corporatization mode, and achieved initial  success that: the property right mechanism has been basically disentangled; the product system has been initially formed; the service brand has been established; the advantage of marketization starts to emerge; and the distribution integration has been completed gradually. If the Law on Lawyers can be modified to confirm the legitimacy of law firms under corporate system, these businesses that have essentially been operated according to the requirement of corporatization will be “justifiable”. We deem these real practice called as the corporatization of law firms as the third stage of corporatization. 

It should be mentioned that these three patterns of manifestation represent three stages and three depths. They also reflect the natural law in the development of the corporatization of firm laws. Of course, they are only three ideal models. In practice, there are a lot of overlaps, transitions and mixtures. In this Article, we adopt the concept of law firm under absolute corporatization, namely the corporate system, except otherwise stated.

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