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Shaping Your
Firm’s Culture

Unleash the true potential of a unique firm culture

Strong organizations demonstrate congruency between strategy, structure and culture and have a clear sense of purpose and values that are reflected in their culture. Our extensive experience shows that one of the biggest reasons new hires leave or fail is because of a cultural mismatch.

We help you to define your desired firm culture​ that serves as an internal “North Star” as well as a market-facing employer​ and legal brand. We also help leverage diversity and create more inclusive cultures that enable all voices to be heard and valued.

Our approach

While culture tends to be a fluffy concept, we make it concrete by focusing on observable behaviors. In cooperation with Stanford University Professor Charles O’Reilly, we developed a tool to measure culture across eight norms by comparing 24 behaviors of individuals and groups according to two questions:

  • How characteristic is this behavior in your organization CURRENTLY?
  • How desirable is this behavior for your IDEAL organization?

Develop a Leadership Compass

Our Leadership Competency Frameworks act as a leadership compass for Partners and future Partners to hone skills and behaviors aligned with its culture that are conducive to sustainable business performance. Our Potential Model helps predict your future Partners’ ability to grow and handle responsibilities of greater scope, breadth and complexity.

They help in …

  • Putting the right people in the right places.
  • Speeding up individual development of your future Partners.
  • Building organizational capabilities by seeing and developing collective talent as well as intentionally designing talent systems to interrupt bias.

Our approach

We partner with you to develop a model that covers specific traits, skills and behaviors your future Partners will need to win now and in the future. The model will be actionable, fitting into and shaping the whole firm as well as processes such as hiring, development, promotion and rewards.

We combine our expertise with a co-creation approach that enables us to:

  • Understand the model leadership behaviors and aspirations among your Managing Partners.
  • Identify the leadership behaviors, skills and traits that will play a key role in your firm’s success.

Shape a simple, yet comprehensive model with clear definitions to ensure a common understanding across the firm.

Contributing Team

Editorial Team:​ Cheryl Martel, Luisa Zottis
Design Team: Richard Khuptong, Markus Schuler, Dora Tubik, Kamaljit Marwaha and Dapinder Pal Singh Bahl
Digital Team:​ Amadeu Porto, Becky Neems, Joanna Scheffel, Aditya Gupta, Arnab Kar