“The one-stop shop is not a proposition of great interest to in-house counsel globally, nor is it believable,” is the conclusion reached by E. Leigh Dance and Deborah McMurray, “10 Things We’ve Learned from In-House Counsel in the US and Europe.”
According to the authors, the majority of in-house counsel feel that the service and work product is often inconsistent among offices of international firms. Those in-house critics tell stories about working with lawyers from one firm in differing offices, where the lawyers had never met and had strikingly different approaches. I am sympathetic to this view as it is hard to achieve consistent quality of legal service, let alone across languages, cultures, and legal systems where, to top it off, your firm has acquired groups of lawyers.