A looming shake-up of legal regulation is prompting British law firms to rethink their business models. A recent survey shows two-thirds of the top 100 firms plan to admit non-lawyers as partners, one in five intends to seek outside investors and one in 10 aims to list on the stock market. Such innovative thinking is welcome.

The old model of partnership between lawyers alone has its drawbacks for large law firms, which are complex businesses - the biggest are multinationals in their own right. Yet management is often weak. Compared with the best companies, they are often bad at marketing, customer relations, innovation, use of information technology and process management.