Three associates left this year. Ask why and you will hear partners say it’s the market, or about a competitor who overpaid, and both of those explanations are true often enough to be believable. What you will not hear is that a partner nobody is willing to discipline drove out two of them, or that the partner compensation process says it values cross-referrals and firm-building efforts, but only rewards partners for billable hours and origination.
That is what is happening in many firms today. Somewhere along the way your firm decided that origination outranks conduct. Nobody voted on it. It got decided the first time a partner with a large book violated the firm’s core values and did something that would have ended a smaller partner’s career at the firm, and nothing happened. Every lawyer who watched read the result correctly and adjusted. The partnership has been operating under that decision ever since without ever putting it to a vote.
You know your realization rate to the decimal. You know your culture by people’s impressions, and some people are motivated to say that the culture is fine if it benefits them. Firms defend this situation by saying culture is too soft to measure. However, it can be measured.
Meanwhile culture is deciding what actually happens. A retreat can produce a growth plan for a practice group in one afternoon. Whether that plan survives contact with the partner who owns the client relationships in that group depends entirely on whether the firm rewards sharing work or quietly punishes it. The strategy document says what the partnership intends. The culture says what gets done in the eleven months when nobody is looking at the document.
The cost lands on the P&L
Your values statement probably lists collaborative and client-focused as firm values. Those words are empty if they’re not enforced. A partner can read them aloud at the retreat and go back to hoarding client relationships that afternoon, and there is no mechanism anywhere in the firm that will stop him.
The real cost shows up in numbers you already track. Attrition is expensive once you add the recruiting fee to the write-offs you absorb while a replacement gets up to speed. A senior associate who leaves because nobody would tell her honestly where she stood on partnership takes the institutional memory of a client relationship out the door with her, and the client notices even when she is replaced competently.
Then there is the partner everyone works around. His book is too large to challenge, so nobody challenges him, and he keeps costing the firm for every good associate he drives out. That cost runs for years and appears in no report, because nobody has ever challenged him.
So the case for a formal culture review is not a case about values. It is about what it costs to lose good people you have invested a lot of money and time in, and keep them highly productive and happy.
Ask questions that focus on the cost of negative behaviour
Most firms that try to measure culture ask their partners whether the firm is collegial and whether it lives its values. Those questions are free to answer well, so everyone answers them well. I have rarely seen a partner survey come back saying the firm is not collegial.
Ask about behaviour instead. Would a partner who drove out three good associates in two years face any real consequence if his origination numbers held up? Someone at your firm already knows the answer to that, and so does everyone who has worked near that partner.
Start with the people running the firm
Have your executive committee answer the same behavioural questions separately, then compare the answers. The gap between how you rate governance and how your partners rate it will tell you more than either score does alone. A leadership team that cannot agree on whether dissent gets punished at this firm has no reliable read on its own firm, and you want to know that before you put the same questions in front of your associates.
The exit interview is the culture review, run too late
Firms do find out about their culture failures eventually. The usual mechanism is the exit interview, conducted after the decision has been made, when it’s too late to do anything about it.. A culture review is the same information delivered a year or two earlier, while the person willing to give you an honest answer is still in the firm and still has a reason to care what you do with it.
This “short form” culture review takes about four minutes to run. It does not replace a full culture review, but it will give you an idea of where you stand today, and what you might consider focusing on to start.
