It was 20 years ago today (well tomorrow actually) when two firms taught the legal world how to play an entirely different role in the world of business.

The merger of Clifford Turner and Coward Chance to create Clifford Chance, agreed on January 31, 1987, changed the shape and profile of law firms in London and across the world. It marked a new era and it acted as a catalyst - some may say a kick up the pants - to the way that the profession operated Above all, it helped to usher in a new kind of lawyer - multicultural, multilingual and multinational in outlook of a type you will now also find also at Linklaters, Allen & Overy, Freshfields and Herbert Smith. In other words, as different as possible, says Chris Perrin (now the firm’s general counsel), from the stereotype of the stuffy, conservative, cautious, uninspired solicitor that had prevailed hitherto.

This revolution did not go unnoticed. The Times reported under the headline “Solicitors’ merger creates City giant” that “two of the City’s biggest firms of solicitors are to merge to create the country’s first ‘mega’ law firm which will have a turnover of several million pounds”.

The use of “mega” was key. With one bound the two constituent firms had overleapt to double the size of what had previously been the biggest firm, Linklaters & Paines. The natural order of things had been changed dramatically.

There were many sceptics in the City. Jeremy Sandelson, now the firm’s London managing partner, recalls the observation from another firm that “putting two second-rate firms together won’t make them first-rate”. Yet there was some truth in the first half of that claim. Neither Coward Chance nor Clifford Turner was seen as a top firm. However, what they shared was an international presence and it was this — combined with the drive for scale — that was at the heart of the Clifford Chance experiment.

“We see this merger as a response to the needs of the international financial and business community,” Sir Max Williams, joint senior partner with Tom Johnson-Gilbert, said.

Significantly, though, he added: “The new firm will play its part in maintaining London as one of the world’s leading financial centres.”

This was timely. Big Bang had just happened and the architects of the merger foresaw a demand for the services of a firm operating to a consistent standard across a range of jurisdictions. The term globalisation was not much in use in 1987 but that was the arena into which Clifford Chance saw itself plunging.

The firm recognised that it needed to innovate in line with its new status. “I recall an American saying to me that whichever law firm could produce the first cross-border legal product to an international standard would instantly create a following,” Sandelson says. “We did it and that’s exactly what happened.”

The other dimension, however, was reach. The merger reflected the demand for broadly based services that could put out big teams. The respective expertise of Clifford Turner and Coward Chance complemented each other while the number of lawyers (630 at first, now 2,752) in the firm meant that it could do several large jobs simultaneously.

A much bigger firm, however, demanded much greater management skills. Traditionally, partnerships allowed individual partners a lot of autonomy. That would not work for Clifford Chance which was determinedly set on a path of international expansion. Taking over as managing partner in the early 1990s Geoffrey Howe more or less single-handedly changed the face of legal management. “I saw that we had to run the firm as a business not as just a confederation of individual partners,” he says. Under his auspices, a corporate style developed with structured committees for decision-taking. People with professional skills other than as lawyers were brought in to manage the firm and systems were introduced so that clear objectives were set and the effectiveness of individuals was monitored. “The trick we had to pull off,” he says, “was to introduce a decision-making structure that produced results without killing off the ethos of partnership.”

Instead, what held the firm together was a sense of purpose. Ask people about the DNA of the firm’s culture and they talk about driving ambition, a determination to innovate and be first, a willingness to take risks and for partners to invest their own money in developments that will not bear fruit until long after they have left the firm.

Even now though there are enormous challenges ahead for the firm. David Childs, the managing partner, points out that it has still to become the top firm in America, there is enormous scope for developing in China and India has not yet even opened the doors. “As soon as they do we shall be in there,” he says.

Yet because of the bold step it took in 1987 it is not alone. A new paradigm was laid down that other firms felt obliged to emulate. With the exception of Slaughter & May, which very profitably pursues its own model, the other “magic circle” firms, together with outfits such as Lovells and Eversheds, have found themselves imitating what Clifford Chance had done.

So the established plan now is to operate on a big scale through a worldwide partnership with coverage everywhere across the continents that your clients do business. The big question, longer term, however, is how this “London” model — that has collegiality at its heart — will fare against the American alternative where horizons are shorter and partners are more self-centred. The more that business globalises, the greater the intensity of the rivalry between the two models. But if Clifford Chance had not taken that step in 1987, London-based law firms would now be just bit players on the world’s legal stage.

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