Aligning a law firm's strategic goals with its culture is crucial in order to achieve sustainable long-term growth, which in turn requires a thorough analysis of values and behaviors within the firm itself
Key insights:
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Law firms need to align their strategy with their culture — To achieve sustainable long-term growth, law firms need to align their strategic goals with their culture.
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Make a values and behaviors assessment — Establishing a foundational understanding of the values and behaviors of partners, non-partner attorneys, and other employees through a full assessment is essential.
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Consensus over unanimity — The goal is to achieve consensus on the firm’s values rather than complete unanimity, ensuring that leadership and employees generally understand and agree on what those values comprise.
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Culture eats strategy for breakfast, goes a popular business maxim that’s variously attributed to Peter Drucker or Giga Information Group. As discussed previously, consistently achieving strategic goals requires a cohesive firm culture that aligns with and supports the firm’s growth initiatives. Often having a culture that’s poised for growth can trump having a top-flight strategy that’s tied to a culture that makes achieving the strategy a near-impossibility.
How can we align everyone to move in the same direction with shared enthusiasm and urgency? For some law firm leaders, culture is an abstract, intangible concept. They may question its relevance compared to hard metrics like profits per partner, revenue-per-lawyer, and leverage metrics.
However, make no mistake about it: culture is both measurable and just as essential to achieving sustainable long-term growth as any financial or performance metric — and analyzing culture and turning its development into actionable steps requires the right mindset as much as it requires the right tools.
Conducting an assessment
The first imperative for law firm leaders looking to cultivate a culture of growth is a willingness to take a hard, unbiased, and critical view of their own firm. Don’t assume that just because a firm is successful in terms of its finances, talent acquisition and retention, book of business, or long-standing client relationships that its culture is fully aligned with its mission. As we discussed in the first part of this blog series, culture may be more important than strategy in determining the long-term success of a firm; yet cultural clashes may be subtle and difficult to discern.
Every firm has a mission and strategies for carrying out the mission. The bigger question is whether everyone in the firm — from leadership down through the ranks — is committed to a unified set of core, firm-wide values and is willing to hold each other accountable to those standards. Only a thorough analysis of a firm culture can reveal that.
First, establish a foundational understanding of the values and behaviors of partners, non-partner attorneys, and other employees through a full assessment of those values and behaviors. While many tools are available, they are often designed for the broader business world and lack specificity and applicability for law firms.
Every firm has a mission and strategies for carrying out the mission. The bigger question is whether everyone in the firm is committed to a unified set of core, firm-wide values.
The process doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to be specific enough to yield the right insights.
Some of the questions that we use in our surveys seem basic. For example, we’ll say, Pick 10 words that you would use to describe the current state of the values of the firm; or Pick 10 words that best describe your personal values and beliefs. However, even this simple structure can reveal much about whether the culture of the firm is aligned with the values of its leadership and employees.
Surveys such as these also aim to capture the current values and behaviors within the firm and identify which ones need to evolve for future success. Comparing these insights reveals alignment or gaps. If future values and behaviors align with the present, it indicates strong cohesion and a shared drive to succeed; however, if discrepancies exist, firms will need to implement mechanisms to reconcile differences, resolve contradictions, and reinforce the values that will propel the firm forward.
Moving toward the right culture
Here are some clear steps to take when trying to foster the right firm culture:
Cover the entire firm — In addition to exploring the personal and professional values of partners, senior partners, practice group leaders, executive committee members, and managing partners, it’s also prudent to include associates and staff, as their contributions significantly influence firm culture.
Seek consensus not unanimity — There will never be 100% agreement on values with members of any organization. The goal is to achieve consensus. To achieve this, ask whether leadership and employees in the firm generally understand and agree on what the firm’s values are and whether they feel that the firm lives out those values in its policies and operations.
Look for variability between groups — If values don’t align between managing partners and associates, or practice group heads and their teams, firm leaders need to determine if their growth strategy can bridge these conflicting values or if a compromise strategy is necessary.
Go beyond values — Effective culture is more than just having common values. There are many firms in which people broadly share the same values but remain siloed from each other. Lack of interaction across a firm can leave untapped opportunities for collaboration, cross-selling, and pursuing new avenues for growth.
Watch for changes in culture — Culture is dynamic and constantly evolving. Ask whether the values and behaviors of the firm’s influential partners and leaders evolved over the years or whether the values and expectations of attorneys throughout the firm have changed.
Values are crucial because they influence the behaviors of firm leaders, attorneys, and staff. These behaviors are observed by clients, external lawyers, judges, and potential hires. To succeed in today’s competitive environment, it’s essential for everyone within a firm to align with the firm’s shared values, as this alignment paves the way for accountability and growth.
Of course, every firm is different, and every group of lawyers within a firm is different — and the culture that each firm will need to achieve sustainable long-term success is different. It’s far from one-size-fits-all; but therein lies the challenge and opportunity that each firm faces: to identify and cultivate the unique culture that will allow the firm and its lawyers to perform at their very best and to thrive together.
You can find out more about law firm culture in 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 — here
