About ten years ago at a conference I showed a slide with several values and missions of Ukrainian law firms and asked people to guess which firms they belonged to.

Back then the experiment with a blind tasting of marketing bullshit was successful — nobody guessed. But it’s worth noting the task was a difficult one, because every firm on the slide had “individual approach to the client,” “proactivity,” and the holy of holies of every law firm website: “highest quality,” “professionalism,” “attention to detail.”

This year I taught a trial course “Strategies for Lawyers” at KAI and while preparing I again set myself the task of finding firms that meaningfully differ from the “average” firm. And in Ukraine I didn’t find any.

I was looking for something like Axiom Law (circa 2015), or Venture Law Group — the California firm that in the 2000s worked on equity, Kirkland — the richest firm in the world, Riverview — they market a special service delivery process, or Wachtell — the firm with the highest PPP. To be fair, there aren’t many such unique firms in the world that look different from the average firm or do something fundamentally different. Besides the brands mentioned, I can probably name only a few others.

I recently came across an academic paper from twenty years ago by professors at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their article is titled exactly that: “Why Do Firms Imitate One Another?” But the authors don’t treat copying as something disgraceful; rather, they view it as rational market behavior. Their main point is this: imitation of services, products, organizational structures, or market moves is not always a cargo cult.

First, they clarify that not everything that looks like imitation actually is. Sometimes companies simply respond in the same way to the same external shock. For example, during a recession many companies may cut staff simultaneously not because they copy one another, but because they face the same drop in demand.

So they identify two broad types of imitation.

First: information-based imitation. This occurs when companies operate under uncertainty and assume that other firms know something they do not. A firm copies a larger, more successful, or more prestigious firm because that firm seems better informed. This, it seems to me, explains the dry language on law firm websites and the identical management models of firms.

Second: competition-based imitation. This occurs when companies copy direct competitors so as not to fall behind. Today nearly every Ukrainian firm has a section on their site titled Defense — that’s an example of competition-based imitation.

Returning to the main idea of the paper: the authors conclude that imitation amplifies consequences for everyone. If the early movers chose the right path, imitation quickly spreads a useful innovation. But if the early movers were wrong, imitation can create an industry-wide failure.

From this I would draw two conclusions. First, Ukrainian law firms currently look alike because the best among us copy the practices of the best international firms, and the rest of the market copies the market leaders. In other words, being like everyone else is more profitable than trying to create something entirely new. Second, if some market catastrophe destroys this classic model of the legal business — which could be (or might not be) generative AI — the whole market will suffer.

Dima Gadomsky