Mark Jones, managing partner of Addleshaw Booth & Co, still remembers a crucial piece of advice he was given on taking the reins at what was then Booth & Co in Leeds.

He says: 'I didn't have much formal training for the job, but I was told a list of the five most common mistakes a managing partner makes, and the one I remember most vividly is that "you can get too far ahead of the pack", which means you are out of touch with the partners.

You have to stay in touch with your electorate.'His firm, with 114 partners and offices in Leeds, Manchester and London, has just become the latest large practice to realise that frameworks based on solicitors communicating informally with each other have to change.

More dedicated managers and directors are needed, who can be trusted by the partners to get on with what needs to be done -- but who will at the same time keep in touch with these partners.Firms with different market sectors and geographical and international profiles have adapted in different ways to try to achieve these aims.

They have also recognised the need to separate day-to-day business from strategic thinking.

As Keith James, chairman of Eversheds, says: 'In a large firm you need to have some people capable of concentrating on its future development.'Eversheds, with 350 partners across 20 offices including seven overseas, sees itself as having moved from being seven regional practices to one international law firm.

Over the summer it has put into place a managing partner for the whole country, David Ansbro, who chairs an executive committee of the managing partners from each region, which meets several times a month.

The committee includes the three key heads of support services (such as finance and IT), clients' services and overseas development.Mr James now chairs the central supervisory board, which concentrates on policy and strategy, and meets nine or ten times a year.

Explaining the changes, he says: 'We needed to take decisions quicker and implement them properly.'Addleshaw Booth, formed by a merger between a Manchester firm and a Leeds firm four years ago, increased in size and complexity at a stroke, and has since grown its turnover from £40 million to £70 million, and opened a London office.The firm has responded to this fast evolution by creating an executive committee.

It has arrived at a similar structure to Eversheds by putting in a tier of deputy managing partner, one in each of the three offices.

This ensures the offices are effectively still given the same amount of time with the managing partners as they used to have when, before their marriage, one office was all that Booths or Addleshaws had.As Mr Jones recalls, his Leeds colleagues have been missing him recently: 'One of my Leeds partners one day said to me "we never see you any more".

I told him: "I was elected to a one-office firm with 40 partners and now it's a three-office firm with 100 partners -- what do you expect?".' Now the offices see the deputy managing partners all the time, and they see Mr Jones on occasion.The newly appointed deputy managing partners are members of an executive committee which also has non-lawyers among the six directors, including heads of IT, marketing, human resources and finance.

It still has a partnership board, elected by the partners, which represents their views between annual meetings.City giant Herbert Smith was another firm to put a new structure in place this summer.

Tim Parkes, the executive partner, explains: 'We were looking for a structure which better accommodates growth.'The changes take day-to-day running of the business away from its partnership council -- a committee of the partners.

Mr Parkes says: 'It was never meant to be an executive body, but because it met monthly it tended to get involved in more day-to-day affairs than it should have done.' It now meets only quarterly.A beefed-up management committee is now the only executive body in the firm -- a change which Mr Parkes describes as 'a clearer divisio n of governance.'The strategy of the firm will still be steered by the partnership council, but there is a new, smaller, practice development committee to help it react faster -- particularly to international mergers.Mr Parkes says: 'The hot debate is how we put our European ambitions into reality.

We formed an association recently with a German partner and you won't be surprised to hear it won't stop there.

It would have been terribly difficult if [this process] had been wrapped into the partnership council, which is looking at a squillion other things.'Major changes of organisation are only possible because in large firms, partners have accepted that there has to be more communication, specialisation and delegation.

At Addleshaws, for example, Mr Jones says: 'Over the last three or four years of the lives of the old firms and the first three or four of the new one, we had all been developing a view that you can't run a business wholly by consensus.' He says what may not have been acceptable to all partners five or ten years ago is now fine.Structures alone do not make for an efficient business, but they make it possible, according to specialist management consultant Lee Swimmer, who is speaking at next month's Solicitors 2000 conference.

She says: 'In my opinion there is no qualitative difference between running a small firm and a large firm well.

In a large firm, each department should be run like a smaller firm.'She stresses the importance of setting up a structure and culture that has everyone taking responsibility for decisions in their own jobs because they can see the sense and logic for the firm, not because they are being watched from above.

In management language, which is belatedly permeating lawyers' offices, this is called 'ownership'.'It is about getting people to buy in,' she explains, 'so that key objectives and goals of the firm are cascaded down.' She gives an example: 'You get lawyers who aren't billing out soon enough, or who aren't interim billing enough.

Something like being efficient in their billing can make a huge impact on the cash flow of a big or a small firm.

It's a question of getting people to understand the issues facing the firm.'Herbert Smith, for one, recognised that formal communication has to replace the old idea of networking and information trickling through a firm.

That might work with a couple of partners in one office; it does not work with more than 1,000 people and several sites.Mr Parkes says that law firms, as partnerships, have to work harder than similar-sized companies at making sure communication works.

A company structure is more hierarchical than a partnership, he explains.

'Partnerships tend to rely more on networks as a means of internal communication, and that is a mistake, certainly as you get bigger.'Underlying all the changes, there is the often unspoken question of whether solicitors are inherently poor at organising an efficient firm.

Mr Jones laughs, and says: 'One of my favourite quotes from a management consultant runs something like this: 'I like lawyers.Smart people with an intellectual challenge.

But they can't manage themselves out of a paper bag.'But Mr Jones wonders: 'Are we any worse than any other professionals? I know the accountants are better than us, because they've been doing it for longer.

Whether we're any worse than other professionals in partnerships, chartered surveyors and so on, I suspect actually not.

From other professional partnerships I talk to, I suspect we're all facing the same issues.'