‘They are your testimony’: Professionals, clients and the creation of client capture during professional career progression

Abstract

The relationship between professionals and clients has received considerable interest, more recently through the concept of client capture. However, little is known to date about the mechanisms through which professionals become captured by their clients. Drawing on 50 interviews investigating the promotion of lawyers to partnership in seven UK law firms, we contribute to existing understanding by exploring the creation of client capture during professional career progression. We propose that by bestowing clients with influence over who gets promoted to partnership, lawyers lose professional independence in defining the future of their firm. In addition, we illustrate how lawyers make themselves indirectly dependent on their clients by perceiving partnership as influential to client work. By doing so, they rely on their clients to legitimize partnership as the ideal career path. Based on our findings, we argue that career progression acts as an enabling mechanism for the creation of client capture as, by succumbing to the desire to advance their careers, professionals also become prone to client capture. We discuss the implications of our findings for professional–client relations and client capture, professional careers and the changing nature of professional work.

Working together: understanding value co-creation processes in professional service delivery

“…These research findings show the clients want the best expertise applied to their situation. Gustafsson et al (2017) noted that clients demand more integrated and holistic services. Thus, it is likely the clients will be interested in cooperation with professional service providers if they are ready to improve on a regular basis their knowledge and skills that are needed for client problem solving.…”

The use of mobile technologies for work-to-family boundary permeability: The case of Finnish and Canadian male lawyers

“…This stress appeared to be especially salient for Finnish interviewees and was linked to their greater participation in their children's upbringing (Eerola, 2014;Ylikännö et al, 2014). Yet, while struggling segmentors in both countries felt it was legitimate to fortify role boundaries, struggling integrators in both countries felt stiff professional pressures not to preserve boundaries because of intense competition in the market for legal services (Gustafsson et al, 2017) and 'the specter of de-equitalisation' that has made partnership increasingly dependent on ongoing performance evaluation (Galanter and Henderson, 2008). Struggling integrators understood that psychological boundary impermeability is not an option for them.…”

Professional identity and anxiety in architect-client interactions

“…Increasingly, professionals seek to exercise autonomy in complex project contexts involving a number of significant others, including clients, partners, contractors and regulators, delivering projects as a part of a broad-based collaboration (Dainty et al, 2007). In these multiorganizational contexts, powerful and influential clients (Dinovitzer et al, 2014;Gustafsson et al, 2017) participate in the development of 'shared understanding, norms, values and practice' with the professionals with whom they interact (Nikolova et al, 2009: 296). In the case of architects as one of the key players on construction projects, clients play an active role not just in terms of defining design and construction constraints but also in giving 'advice, and approval throughout the process, without which the appropriateness of the services is threatened' (Cuff, 1991: 171).…”

“…We suggest that architects' attachments to particular notions of professional self (Collinson, 2003) seemed to reinforce rather than resolve anxieties in relation to powerful clients. Similar to lawyers acquiescing to the influence of clients on partner promotions (Gustafsson et al, 2017), we were particularly struck by the lack of critical reflection by architects. Researchers have noted that, construction practitioners' ability to reflect on their expertise is 'dictated by professional associations or discourse created within the construction industry and its legal and economic imperatives' (Kanjanabootra and Corbitt, 2016: 573).…”