After growing Sterling Lawyers from zero to 30 attorneys and over $17 million in revenue, I’ve had the opportunity to study what separates the top 1% of family law firms from everyone else.
These aren’t just successful firms—these are the best of the best.
Today, I’m sharing the first four characteristics that form the foundation of top-performing practices. These focus on leadership mindset, strategic planning, decision-making, and team engagement.
1. Leadership Starts with a Growth Mindset
Top-performing family law firms have leaders with growth mindsets who listen well and invite criticism and feedback. They make it safe for teammates to share difficult truths.
I learned this the hard way when I opened up an emotional topic for debate with our entire legal staff. It devolved into chaos that I shut down when frustrated, damaging my credibility for years.
The lesson? Seek feedback in one-on-one settings, not group settings. If you have people willing to give you authentic criticism, protect that relationship—it’s precious.
2. Simple, Easy-to-Understand Strategic Plans
There’s a simple, clear plan in place. We tend to make plans complicated, but the best firms work hard to boil them down to their essence.
Our firm uses a VTO (Vision Traction Organizer) from the EOS system that distills our entire strategy onto two pages. Teammates want to be inspired by something bigger than themselves, and a big vision with a simple plan is much easier to internalize and execute.
3. Decision Velocity
High-performing firms make decisions quickly, often with only 60-70% of available information.
Yes, you’ll make some poor decisions, but the net result of many fast decisions far outweighs slowing down and being afraid. Speed itself is a strategy in family law firm execution.
4. Regular Employee Engagement Surveys
They measure and use regular employee engagement surveys for decision-making, especially around culture issues.
We survey everyone quarterly with the same eight questions, then publish all results to our team—even the bad stuff. We identify the top one to three areas for improvement and incorporate those into our planning for the next quarter or year.
These four characteristics form the foundation that enables everything else. Without strong leadership, clear strategy, fast decision-making, and team feedback loops, the cultural elements we’ll explore in Part 2 become much harder to achieve.
Next week, I’ll share the final four characteristics that focus on culture and execution—the elements that turn a well-founded firm into a truly exceptional one.
