Cette thèse examine comment les catégories de marché -ensembles qui partagent des similarités cognitives et culturelles- impactent la performance et l'évaluation des entreprises.Le consensus répandu dans la littérature indique que les organisations qui évoluent dans plus d'une catégorie sont sanctionnées tant au plan économique que social.Remettant en cause ce consensus actuel sur "l'impératif catégorique", cette thèse avance l'idée que les acteurs d'un marché ont un rôle plus complexe que simplement réprimer toute violation des catégories établies. Aussi dans ce contexte, être engagée dans plusieurs catégories de marché pour une organisation à la fois améliore son évaluation sociale mais réduit sa performance en cas de perceptions divergentes de ses affiliations catégorielles. Les données empiriques de cette thèse portent sur les cabinets d'avocats d'affaires dans trois grandes métropoles (New-York, Paris et Londres) au cours d'une décennie (2000-2010). Les cabinets d'avocats multi-services - ceux qui exercent dans plusieurs domaines du droit- obtiennent une meilleure évaluation de la part des clients tant au niveau global du cabinet que pour chacune de leurs spécialités juridiques. Toutefois, les désaccords entre clients en terme d'évaluation portant sur chacune des spécialités juridiques offertes détériorent la performance financière des cabinets. Cette thèse approfondit notre compréhension du rôle que jouent les catégories sur les marchés et les stratégies d'extensions catégorielles que les entreprises mettent en oeuvre. Ce travail contribue également aux études sur le champ juridique et a des implications pour la conduite stratégique des cabinets d'avocats d'affaires / This dissertation explores how market categories - clusters that share cognitive and cultural similarities - impact firms' performance and evaluation. Pervasive consensus in literature indicates organizations that do not fall into a single category suffer economic and social disadvantages.Unsettling this current consensus about the categorical imperative, this dissertation advocates that external audiences have a more complex role than simply patrolling the boundaries and sanctioning any infringement of established categories. They scrutinize categories in various ways depending on their needs. They infer some characteristics of firms from one category membership to another. They diverge about the category memberships and evaluation of firms. This dissertation provides evidence that in such cases, spanning categories both leads to positive social evaluations for organizations, but decreases performance in case of inconsistency across categories. Empirically I study the corporate legal services market in three major financial locations (New-York City, Paris and London) over a decade (2000-2010). My findings are twofold:(i) multi-category law firms- those that are engaged in several practice areas of law - receive better social evaluation from clients both at the firm level and at the practice area level; (ii) disagreement among clients' evaluation about law firms' practice areas undermines their financial performance. This dissertation deepens our understanding of the role that categorical structures play in markets and the category-stretching strategies firms implement to better navigate the "category map". This work contributes also to research in legal studies and has implications for law firms' business development

This study investigates the effect of founders socialization experiences and contextual interpretations on the deviation of recently-established law firms from the dominant organizational form in the B.C. legal profession. Through this research I address three issues fundamental to the neo-institutional perspective on organizational analysis: 1) whether consensually-understood frameworks exist in highly-institutionalized environments, 2) the extent to which new entrants to such industries reproduce or depart from these prescribed arrangements, and 3) why some conform while others deviate. In the first phase of my investigation, I ascertained the nature of the legal profession s dominant template for organizing by analyzing qualitative data collected from multiple data sources including both observers of and practitioners within this industry. I subsequently validated this template by collecting quantitative data through a survey administered to a panel of lawyers. The results support the existence of a commonly- perceived template for organizing in the B.C. legal profession. In the second phase of my research, I investigated sixty recently-established law firms in B.C. Through a background questionnaire and personal interview conducted with the founder of each firm, I collected data on multiple dimensions of form, the founder s experience, and his or her rationale for designing the firm in a certain way. I also administered a survey to a separate panel of lawyers, to obtain their perceptions of the extent to which alternative arrangements differed from those of the dominant template. This data was used to calculate deviation measures for the recentlyestablished firms. The results revealed that, despite the prevalence with which founders voiced disenchantment with the dominant template, 85% of their firms exhibited very little deviation from the normative form. Thus, it appears that most new entrants to a highlyinstitutionalized setting act primarily as agents of institutional perpetuation rather than entrepreneurship. The 15% that exhibited greater deviation tended to be headed by founders with less experience in the industry s most prominent organizations and by those who most strongly questioned the moral legitimacy of prevailing organizational arrangements. Experience in marginal organizations or other industries, as well as doubts about the dominant template s pragmatic legitimacy, were insufficient triggers of new entrant deviation. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

Esse trabalho aborda a Administração Legal como uma ferramenta capaz de orientar e conduzir as organizações prestadoras de serviços jurídicos rumo à inovação e à competitividade, em conjunto com a aplicação da metodologia Business Process Management (BPM) como opção alternativa na busca pela vantagem competitiva sustentável. Alinhando essas duas abordagens, a Administração Legal e o BPM, o objetivo deste trabalho é identificar os principais processos de negócio que compõem a estrutura de um escritório de advocacia. Uma pesquisa de natureza qualitativo-exploratória e quantitativo-descritiva foi realizada, sendo as estratégias metodológicas desenvolvidas em três fases. A primeira fase de coleta de dados envolve a identificação dos critérios e fundamentos terminológicos do contexto analisado, por meio da aplicação de três entrevistas individuais semi-estruturadas. Após a identificação do mapa das dimensões terminológicas, parte-se para a segunda fase da coleta de dados, a aplicação de um questionário estruturado, o qual foi aplicado nos escritórios certificados com a norma ISO 9001 no Brasil. Por meio da estatística descritiva foram identificados os principais processos de negócio que compõem a estrutura dos escritórios de advocacia, bem como seus processos de apoio. Os processos foram agrupados em quatro categorias para os processos principais e em seis categorias para os processos de apoio. / This work uses the Legal Administration, as a tool to guide and lead the legal services organizations toward to innovation and competitiveness, along with Business Process Management (BPM) methodology as an option for sustainable competitive advantage. Based on the application of both approaches together, i.e. Legal Administration and BPM, the aim of this research is to identify main business processes that make up the structure of a law firm. A qualitative-exploratory and quantitative-descriptive nature research was realized based on three main phases. The first phase involves identifying criteria and terminological basis within the context analyzed based on the application of three individual semi-structured interviews. After the identification of the terminology dimensions map, the second phase was the application of a structured questionnaire, which was applied on nine Law Firms, certified on ISO 9001, in Brazil. Based on descriptive statistics the main business processes that define the organizational structure of law firms, as well as their supporting processes were identified. The main business process were grouped in four categories and the support business processes were grouped in six categories.

This dissertation examines how firm-specific behavior concerning factors of production is shaped by institutional constraints in development countries. The initial two chapters analyze how firms in Brazil compensate workers for their labor: the first centers on the role of the collective bargaining framework, and the second quantifies the impact of firms on the racial wage gap. The final chapter focuses on firms' use of credit for working capital in response to disruptive periods of violence during Mexico's Drug War. Firms compensate workers not only with wages, but also with other job characteristics that the labor literature broadly refers to as amenities. However, it is hard to study amenity compensation because we rarely observe variation in amenities across establishments in some systematic way. One exception is the comprehensive set of amenities codified in the text of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) that unions negotiate with employers. In chapter 1, I leverage a reform that automatically extended all existing CBAs in Brazil to analyze the impact of this new collective bargaining framework on firm compensation, as measured by wages and amenities, as well as subsequent selection effects in the workforce. To quantify the value workers place on amenities secured by unions, I measure how textual elements in CBAs influence an establishment's ability to poach workers from other employers, conditional on wages, using data on the universe of CBAs merged with an administrative linked employer-employee dataset. I find that automatic extensions increase compensation by 1.6-3.8% when unions are strong---an effect that is driven by additional amenities whose value more than offsets foregone wage gains. These changes in compensation lead to an increase in hiring concentrated among low-skill workers, implying an elasticity of labor supply to the affected firms of around 2. Further evidence suggest that unions reduce compensation inequality within establishments. While union-driven changes to firm compensation can lead to an influx of low skill workers, how firms select and pay workers can have important consequences for wage disparities between groups. In Chapter 2 (work co-authored with François Gerard, Edson Severnini, and David Card), we measure the effects of firms' employment and wage setting policies on racial pay differences in Brazil. We find that nonwhites are less likely to work at firms that pay more to all race groups. This sorting pattern explains about 20% of the white-nonwhite wage gap for both genders. Moreover, the pay premiums offered by different employers are also compressed for nonwhites relative to whites. This within-firm differential wage setting contributes another 5% of the overall gap. We then explore to what extent the under-representation of nonwhites at higher-paying firms is due to the selective skill mix at these workplaces. Using a counterfactual based on the observed skill distribution at each firm and the nonwhite shares in different skill groups in the local labor market, we conclude that assortative matching accounts for about two- thirds of the underrepresentation gap for both men and women. The remainder reflects an unexplained preference for white workers at higher-paying firms. Interestingly, the wage losses associated with unexplained sorting and differential wage setting are largest for nonwhites with the highest levels of general skills. This suggests that the allocative costs of race-based preferences may be relatively large in Brazil. The first two chapters reveal that firms exercise some discretion over compensation and hiring within the context of institutions such as collective bargaining and nondiscrimination laws. But firms are also constrained by other institutions in how they carry out their day-to-day activities. In particular, the capacity of the State to exercise control over the legitimate use of force promotes the fundamental trust required between agents to make welfare-enhancing transactions. In Chapter 3, I analyze how drug-related violence affects credit use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs). Leveraging administrative data on working capital credit lines issued to MSEs in Mexico, I exploit geographic variation in homicide rates as well as exogenous kingpin captures to identify the causal effects of violence on credit use. I find that firms significantly increase the amounts drawn from their credit lines after experiencing violence shocks. More credit use could be motivated by rising short-term liquidity needs (distress story) or increasing risk of holding cash (substitution story). Rising default probabilities indicate signs of distress, although heterogeneity analyses reveal cash-for-credit substitution among non-revolving borrowers. I also find evidence that rising liquidity needs among distressed MSEs are likely driven by decreased economic activity rather than theft or extortion. As such, this paper highlights the important role that financial products play in terms of helping firms absorb violence shocks as well as providing safe alternatives to cash holdings under insecure environments.

Most law firms have done little to address the opportunities and threats related to potentially disruptive technology (DT), such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies that law firm leaders in the United States used to address the potentially detrimental influences of DT, such as AI and ML, on their organizations. The systems approach to management was employed as the conceptual framework. Data were collected from 6 participants at 2 international law firms with offices in California using semistructured interviews and organizational artifacts. Data were analyzed using Miles, Huberman, and Saldana's data analysis method, resulting in 4 themes: recognizing the legal ecosystem and legal firms are open systems, but organizational subsystems often function as semiclosed systems; acknowledging that while DT represents the most significant potential challenge in the near future, the immediate challenge is improving technology, which requires organizational adjustments; recognizing the need for firms to invest more heavily in innovation generation activities; and realizing the need for increased utilization of augmenting technologies, such as AI or ML, to streamline nonadvisory outputs. The findings of this study might support best practices for addressing DT and contribute to social change by outlining ways in which firms can lower costs to clients while increasing access to legal services for those in underserved communities.

In professional partnerships, partners have to agree how to split their income between each other. Such a profit sharing system (PSS) must be perceived as being fair and motivating to ensure the enduring success of the partnership. Surprisingly, quite different systems are in use today in otherwise comparable firms. The understanding of a “fair share” and how to motivate best varies con-siderably. Existing literature on professional service firms rarely discusses in which circumstances the different PSS types are adequate; non-economic per-spectives are scarce. Using semi-structured interviews with senior partners from large German law firms, this study evaluates their understanding of trust, fairness and motivation, and how that links to their respective PSS’s. It adds the otherwise missing peer-to-peer perspective to existing organisational research on fairness, trust and motivation. The findings include the presence of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation through money, but also through peer pressure. Different fairness ideals clearly link to PSS types. Mutual trust, based on knowing each other, is key in all but one PSS type. An important, but yet overlooked differentiator between PSS’s is whether profit distribution decisions are made based on algorithms or on human (committee) decisions. A new framework is developed that links the beliefs and values of the partners with the specific characteristics of the PSS, which are systematically assessed for the first time. This framework offers partners from law firms and potentially other professional service firms a methodical approach to identify and discuss their needs and to identify the most appropriate PSS for their specific situation.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-10T10:47:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 WALTER JOSE DE SOUZA NETO.pdf: 1477257 bytes, checksum: 2dd18a48fb1663418dd5980246695608 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-09-24 / This present paper - linked to the strictu sensu Post Graduation Program in Law, Foreign Affairs and Development of the Pontifical Catholic University of Goias State - intends to analyze the practice of the legal profession under the influence of globalization and the legal market . It is based on the assumption that the globalization and consolidation of economic blocks in detriment of the national borders are a 21st century reality. The free movement of people and the needs that result from it require the adaptation of the States and of societies, especially when speaking of the movement of goods and services. The legal service provision follows this world trend, resulting, within the Brazilian legal profession, in the incorporation of the term legal market . Nevertheless, the consolidation of this historic moment depends on the solidification of projects that allow greater flexibility for the practice of Law, through two main hypotheses: the transnationalization of the legal profession in the scope of MERCOSUR, allowing cross-border practice among State parties; and the association between Brazilian and foreign law firms, allowing foreigners to indirectly practice the legal profession in Brazil. / Este trabalho vincula-se ao Programa de Pós-Graduação strictu sensu em Direito, Relações Internacionais e Desenvolvimento da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Goiás e analisa o exercício profissional da advocacia sob os efeitos da globalização e do mercado jurídico. Parte-se de pressuposto de que a globalização e a consolidação dos blocos econômicos em detrimento das fronteiras nacionais são realidade no Século XXI. A livre circulação de pessoas e as necessidades daí advindas requerem a adaptação dos Estados e das sociedades, notadamente quanto à circulação de bens e serviços. A prestação de serviços advocatícios tem acompanhado essa tendência mundial, o que culminou com a incorporação, pela advocacia brasileira, do termo mercado jurídico. A consolidação desse novo momento histórico depende, entretanto, da concretização de projetos que permitam maior flexibilidade ao exercício da profissão no Brasil, merecendo destaque duas hipóteses: a transnacionalidade da advocacia no âmbito do MERCOSUL, de modo a permitir que profissionais dos países componentes do bloco atuem nos Estadosparte; e a associação entre sociedades de advogados nacionais e escritórios estrangeiros, viabilizando uma atuação indireta dos estrangeiros em território nacional.

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to interview four legal jurists in order to explore how they conduct CSR activities within their service corpora-tion, with primary focus on SME law firms. Background: A current issue to address concerning the conduct of business these days is CSR activities. Although, the previous research concerning CSR activities and the service sector is limited. Theoretical Framework: The theoretical framework is divided into four parts; a general part concerning the concept of CSR activities, a review of earlier studies of CSR activities, the stakeholder theory and finally the theory about the triple bottom line. Method: A qualitative case study was employed in order to answer the purpose. The most suitable research approach was a combination of a deductive and partially an inductive approach. The primary data consisted of semi-structured interviews. The secondary data were used in order make a comparison in relation to manufacturing corporations. Empirical findings & Analysis: As for all corporations an integration of voluntary social and environmental concerns in their business operations are considered as CSR activities. A significant concern is CSR activities that the inter-viewed service corporations experienced was the lack of human and economic resources to deal with CSR activities. Furthermore, the lack of stakeholder pressure does not facilitate the matter of implementing more CSR strategies into the corporations‟ business conduct. As a result of the lack of stakeholder pressure the interviewed corporations tend to only take part in CSR activities that create goodwill value for the corporation. According to the interviewed service corporations CSR activities is a new phenomenon that is likely to become a bigger part of their business conduct in the future. Conclusion: The interviewed corporations tend to focus their CSR activities to-wards the social activities since this is the kind of activities that is closely connected to the core business.

<p>Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to interview four legal jurists in order to explore how they conduct CSR activities within their service corpora-tion, with primary focus on SME law firms.</p><p>Background: A current issue to address concerning the conduct of business these days is CSR activities. Although, the previous research concerning CSR activities and the service sector is limited.</p><p>Theoretical Framework: The theoretical framework is divided into four parts; a general part concerning the concept of CSR activities, a review of earlier studies of CSR activities, the stakeholder theory and finally the theory about the triple bottom line.</p><p>Method: A qualitative case study was employed in order to answer the purpose. The most suitable research approach was a combination of a deductive and partially an inductive approach. The primary data consisted of semi-structured interviews. The secondary data were used in order make a comparison in relation to manufacturing corporations.</p><p>Empirical findings & Analysis: As for all corporations an integration of voluntary social and environmental concerns in their business operations are considered as CSR activities. A significant concern is CSR activities that the inter-viewed service corporations experienced was the lack of human and economic resources to deal with CSR activities. Furthermore, the lack of stakeholder pressure does not facilitate the matter of implementing more CSR strategies into the corporations‟ business conduct. As a result of the lack of stakeholder pressure the interviewed corporations tend to only take part in CSR activities that create goodwill value for the corporation. According to the interviewed service corporations CSR activities is a new phenomenon that is likely to become a bigger part of their business conduct in the future.</p><p>Conclusion: The interviewed corporations tend to focus their CSR activities to-wards the social activities since this is the kind of activities that is closely connected to the core business.</p>

Univ., Diss.--Bochum, 2005.