ABSTRACT
The Legal Services Act 2007 (LSA) has the potential to disrupt jurisdictional settlements, in creating new tasks and in generating new forms of knowledge (Abbott 1988: 192). Moreover, it may enable actors to more readily challenge prevailing institutional logics and establish new organizational forms or patterns of behaviour. In analysing the responses of different actors to the LSA, I argue that elite corporate law firms are edging away from traditional notions of legal professionalism and engaging in institutional entrepreneurship. The new models of professionalism developed by these actors reinforce their positions of privilege (Greenwood and Suddaby 2006: 43), not only within the legal profession’s internal hierarchies, but also in terms of their market share and status within global professional services. Yet the position they occupy is a complicated one. It does not appear that a new social entity has emerged (Abbott 1995: 869), which comprises elite law firms (let alone these firms and other professional service firms) as a product of the differences between themselves and the rest of the solicitors’ profession.1 As this chapter argues, they retain too great an influence over the traditional collective profession and an enduring (if somewhat instrumental) connection to the professional core.
