Every law firm says it collaborates. It’s on the website and in the values deck. But does the client relationship actually get shared, or does it still sit with one person, and everybody knows which one? The industry even keeps two phrases in reserve for when it’s being honest: my client, my prey, and eat what you kill.
Karolina Šilingienė put that to Eva Berlaus, Managing Partner at Sorainen, and Dace L. Luters-Thümmel, an attorney-at-law admitted in both Germany and Latvia. Five things we took away.
- The incentives decide, not the values deck
Eva opened with a cross-border deal running on Latvian law, where the client relationship belonged to a partner from another jurisdiction who kept the lead and put their own Latvian colleagues in the passenger seat. The transaction took considerably longer than it needed to. Nobody involved was bad at their job. The incentives simply rewarded holding on and not sharing the relationship and mandate.
- Collaboration becomes real when it reaches the pay
Sorainen did not get there by believing in it. It started from an unglamorous question: what kind of collaboration, happening in what way, would actually contribute to the profit line? Everything followed from the answer, from how teams are formed to what the KPIs measure to how partners are remunerated. If collaboration cannot be attributed to the bottom line, it will remain a slogan.
- Trust is the result, not the starting point
Eva does not think trust alone does the trick in a large firm. What works is a system that requires collaboration and follows up on it. Trust arrives afterwards, because people can see the firm will protect them for behaving that way. Past a certain point the organisation starts rejecting anyone who does not.
- Knowledge is about to stop being the differentiator
Dace’s point, and the one that makes this commercially urgent. The difference between firms has always been knowledge, held by individuals and often deliberately kept close. That era is ending, because the knowledge is becoming available everywhere. What is left to compete on is how a firm cooperates and how it is led. Collaborative culture enters the stage!
- Transparency has to start with the associates
Crespect gets asked in almost every demo whether client and matter data can be hidden from associates. Technically, yes. But Eva’s answer runs the other way: law school produces experts, not collaborators, so the teaching has to happen inside the firm, and the earlier it starts the better the odds. A firm cannot ask people to behave like one firm while showing them the information of a dozen separate practices.
What we could not fit in here
The full episode also covers the German bar meeting where Dace worked out that one room held more lawyers than all of Latvia, why 57% of German law graduates are women and 16% of equity partners are, what both guests think AI will and will not take from the profession, and why Eva believes the Baltic generation now coming through finds collaboration far easier to accept than the one before it.
