Legal departments in India and U.S. appear to be evolving in same direction

There is an interesting article in The Times of India business section that says, essentially, large Indian corporations are realizing that legal strategy and compliance are too important to not elevate these functions to the C-Suite.  As a result, the pay, influence, and prestige of in-house positions in India are now very much on the rise.

This is the same evolution that has occured in the U.S. over the last two to three decades, albeit the evolution appears to be occuring in India at a much faster pace.  So any temporal gap in structure is unlikely to be permanent.

This dynamic reminds me of my visit to India in 2009, when Marc Galanter and I spend time with several law firm leaders.  One of the most striking features we noticed is that all the name partners were alive and very much in their prime.  (In the U.S., the equivalant year would have been roughly 1940.)  These lawyers very much enjoyed being engaged on the future of India.  And unlike the U.S. or U.K., where the market is now defined by league tables, the topic of money never came up -- granted these Indian lawyers were all making plenty of it.  

One of the things most on the minds of the Indian law firm leaders was how they could create a vital, useful organization that would survive them.  So, much to our surprise, the India law firm leaders discussed things like Kaplan Balanced Scorecard for determining partner compensation (based on the work HBS Professor Robert Kaplan).  Another leading law firm, Nishith Desai, constructed its entire firm based on the best practices of professional services firms worldwide. This was the result of a 20-year reflection on this topic by the firm's founder, who is also still in his prime.  See Nishith Desai, Management by Trust in a Democratic Enterprise: A Law Firm Shapes Organizational Behavior to Create Competitive Advantage, Wiley Journal of Global Business and Organizational Excellence, Sept/Oct 2009.

It was almost as if the Indian bar was skipping 100 years of evolution and instead decided to converge immediately on the state of the art.  Well, the same may be happening in India legal departments.

Wondering what a Kaplan Balanced Scorecard looks like?  Here is a good sample.