Law firm culture — which includes shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices — is more crucial for achieving sustainable success than having a well-defined strategy alone
Key insights:
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Leveraging culture for success — A well-defined strategy alone cannot guarantee law firm success; firms need to pay close attention to crafting a firm culture that reflects the firm’s values, goals, and practices.
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Alignment of culture and strategy — A law firm’s culture must align with its mission and the values set by its leadership and attorneys to be able to execute a strategy successfully.
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Impact of cultural misalignment — Cultural misalignment can lead to unintentional friction and disrupt a firm’s success, even if the firm has a bold and innovative strategy.
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As a robust 2024 for many law firms has turned into a more uneven, unpredictable 2025, the question increasingly turns from whether firms will be as successful this year in finding ways to achieve more sustainable growth. Potentially transformative disruptions also loom, including the uncertainty of how generative AI (GenAI) will continue to impact the legal industry and the announcement earlier this year that KPMG has won approval to become the first of the Big Four consulting firms to begin practicing law in the United States. And all this came after firms managed to first weather the pandemic and then the subsequent talent wars.
As firms scramble to map out new strategies, however, they may not even be looking at the right factors. Maybe they don’t need a better strategy, maybe they need a better culture that fits their strategy. Firm culture is not just a trendy buzzword — it’s a key strategic lever that can determine whether a firm is on track for sustainable success, or whether it will face struggles to keep up with more agile competitors and a rapidly evolving market.
I’ve witnessed lack of cohesive culture derail many a strategic framework, merger, lateral acquisition of a practice group, geographic expansion plan, or succession roadmap.
The importance of culture
All firms will claim to have a strategy; yet executing a strategy successfully requires more than merely selecting the right direction. It requires operational excellence, and that happens most often and most effectively when a firm’s culture aligns with its mission as well as the values of its leadership and attorneys.
As firms scramble to map out new strategies, however, they may not even be looking at the right factors. Maybe they don’t need a better strategy, maybe they need a better culture that fits their strategy.
Firm culture comprises shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that influence how an organization functions, according to the Harvard Business Review. This includes several attributes of the firm: for example, the operational norms the firm exhibits in getting things done on a daily basis. Also, the character or collective personality of the firm; and the cohesiveness of all the members of the firm acting in common towards mutually agreed-upon goals.
Having a strategy may matter less than having an effective culture that enables strategies to be more likely executed successfully. Where mismatches, clashes, or lack of alignment exist between a firm’s culture and its strategy, even the boldest, most innovative strategies can be rendered moot and powerless. For example, if a firm’s lawyers sense that what the firm leaders are saying does not align with the daily practices of how the firm operates or with the lawyer’s personal values, this misalignment produces a disruptive culture more prone to dissonance and discord than long-term success.
Managing culture clashes
Cultural clashes don’t necessarily mean conflict or hostility. Cultural misalignment can take on the form of unintentional or even unseen friction that can nevertheless grind the gears of seemingly otherwise successful firms. I worked with a major global law firm in which practice group leaders in one office, without realizing it, were often competing for business that the firm already held in another office. They simply weren’t communicating with each other. A simple re-alignment of firm values that expressed that each office was not in it for themselves but instead contributing to the success of the entire firm was all it took to unlock a culture of true growth.
While each firm’s culture is unique, firm cultures can often be classified as falling into one of several major buckets. Certainly, money is often one such bucket. There are firms that, at the end of the day, are simply focused on profit above all else, and that drives values and behaviors. Some firms are practice-driven and want to be market leaders in given specialties; and other firms are driven by innovation and the desire to be seen as being on the cutting edge.
Further, there are firms at which the culture values collaboration. Each member of the firm wants to feel that they are contributing to its success, and that they, in turn, feel that they are valued for it. Similarly, an increasing number of firms are built around the well-being of their lawyers as much when they’re working as when they’re away from work.
Having a strategy may matter less than having an effective culture that enables strategies to be more likely executed successfully.
In the end, it’s less important what a firm’s specific culture is, and more important the way by which the firm lives out its culture every day. In this way, culture becomes how a firm expresses its values and how closely those values align with the personal values of its attorneys as well as their expectations for the firm.
That drives not only the success of a firm’s strategy, as mentioned earlier, but also brings important new perspectives to help determine which strategies the firm ultimately pursues. Does a firm really want to open that new office in Denver? Is the firm better off growing organically or pursuing a merger? What are the avenues of growth that make the most sense for it — and for what it is as a firm?
The recent lies in something far more fundamental: firm culture.
A new Thomson Reuters Institute report, Law Firm Culture: Keys to Unlocking Firm Growth & Lawyer Engagement — based on the latest research from the Institute’s 2025 Stellar Performance / 2025 Stand-out Lawyers Survey — explored how top lawyers feel about the importance of firm culture, and how it can impact talent retention and productivity.
In our next installment, we will look at how a firm can determine what its culture will be, and how that impacts its strategies for talent, firm growth, and more.
You can find out more about the issues the legal industry faces around talent and culture here
