Culture is the most dominant force that drives the success or failure of a law firm.
You can buy marketing, financial services, and technology—but culture? That’s something you have to build from the ground up. Yet it’s what separates thriving family law firms from struggling ones.
Today, I want to share how we’ve built a cohesive, powerful culture across 80+ teammates spread over two countries, with the vast majority working remotely. This culture has become the driver of our profitability and success.
Why I Was Wrong About Culture
I always thought culture would be an area where I’d personally excel.
I’m passionate about leadership, and I do a lot of reading on the subject. So I figured this would be natural for me. But it honestly took me five or six years to start getting it right.
We recently applied for a “Great Place to Work” award—something I’d always been skeptical about. We got 90% participation in the anonymous survey, which is really hard to achieve.
But what truly blew me away was that 100% of respondents said it was a great place to work. Unanimous.
Three years ago, I wouldn’t have even wanted to do that survey because we would have gotten hammered. It’s the result of years of intentional culture building, and it’s only been in the past few years, with our President Jeff Kerlin and elevated leadership, that we’ve really dialed it in.
The Tangible Benefits We’ve Witnessed
As our culture has improved, we’ve seen measurable results:
Better Retention. We’ve been able to retain talent, which is crucial when losing a lawyer can mean losing clients and training investment.
Improved Client Attraction. Our ability to attract quality clients has increased significantly.
Higher Profitability. Our teammates genuinely care about client success, each other’s success, and the firm ultimately winning. This isn’t about ownership mentality because most of our team doesn’t have equity. It comes from having a culture that collaborates and works well together.
The Three Foundation Pieces
Building culture starts with three foundational elements that most family law firms don’t have in place:
Mission/Purpose
Ours is simple: “To empower family law clients.” Period. Full stop.
Values
We have four core values that we talk about, celebrate, and reward weekly. Anyone who’s been with us for four months can tell you what our four values are because we integrate them into everything we do.
Vivid Vision
This is a one-page document that sounds cultish, but we actually read it out loud in our weekly meetings. It describes how we serve clients, take care of each other, and our future together.
These aren’t wall decorations. They’re lived principles that create alignment across our entire team.
The Systems That Make It Work
Beyond the foundation, we use several tangible systems:
Level 10 Meetings
Every teammate joins a weekly meeting—lawyers, paralegals, legal assistants, and leadership. It’s an issue-clearing meeting held over lunch. Everyone must have their video camera on because there’s something neurological that happens when you can see each other versus just hearing voices.
The Summons
Every other week, we have an all-team meeting that’s social, not business-focused. Our teams from the Philippines join in the middle of their night to meet our time. It’s all about shout-outs, celebration, and sharing client success stories. This is incredibly powerful for people working from home.
Biweekly Newsletter
On alternate weeks, we send out a newsletter with stories and client testimonials—sometimes 6-7 pages worth. Every lawyer and paralegal reads them because they’re seeing feedback from their own clients.
The Most Important Factor: Leadership Modeling
The most important contributor to a strong culture starts with leaders, because it’s all about modeling. It’s not “do what I say”—it’s “you’re going to do what I do.”
Any culture that’s negative and toxic is 100% the leader’s fault. Not 95%.
If there’s negativity, you allowed it because you didn’t address it.
Culture rises and falls on leadership.
What are they modeling? What are they rewarding? What are they aligning with from an incentive standpoint?
The Hard Truth About Firing for Culture
Everyone talks about hiring for culture, but the reality is you don’t understand who someone is until you’ve worked with them for 3-6 months.
It’s not as much about hiring as it is about firing.
When someone won’t align with your culture despite coaching, supporting, and helping them, and you allow them to stay—that’s on you.
This includes two of the hardest fires: people with great character who are incompetent in their role, and high performers who are toxic to your culture. Both have to go.
I’ve made this mistake 100 times, thinking they’ll figure it out. The problem is that the people you actually want to keep end up leaving because they see you won’t make the hard choices.
Scaling Culture Through Duplication
At our current level, it’s all about empowering leaders underneath us to grow and have ownership over their individual team cultures.
We’re now at the stage of duplication—our teammates are duplicating what got us here, duplicating leadership, duplicating our values.
This doesn’t happen overnight. It’s taken us 11 years to get here. But if you can stay disciplined in focusing on culture, the rewards are incredible.
The Boring Thing That Works
I recently told our team about “doing the boring thing.”
Amazon spent 20 years focusing on one thing: improving customer experience. Chick-fil-A became the most profitable fast food chain by focusing on exceptional customer service.
Doing the boring thing over and over again is what allows companies and law firms to achieve incredible results.
It’s not chasing the shiny object or the next hot thing. It’s focusing on doing the boring fundamentals exceptionally well, then duplicating that across your firm.
Culture Can’t Be Bought, But It Can Be Built
Culture can’t be bought, but it can be built. It requires consistent systems, strong leadership modeling, difficult personnel decisions, and years of disciplined focus on the fundamentals.
But when you get it right, you create something magical: a team that genuinely cares about clients, each other, and winning together—even when they’re spread across the globe and working from home.
