Take time (and money) to pin down your law firms’ culture

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Karen Tidwall and her colleagues weren’t quite sure what would come of their firm’s cultural audit, but they knew what they didn’t want.

“Our consultant said, ‘The worst thing you can do is have a cultural audit done, spend the time and money doing it and take no action and not get buy-in from the leaders of your firm,’” said Tidwall, a shareholder at Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek in Milwaukee, as well as a leader of the firm’s trust, estate and fiduciary litigation team.

“She said, ‘I’ve seen that happen more times than you can imagine,’ because you get the results and management might not like them or you get the results and it looks like everything is fine. So, unless there are action items and strategic implementation, you can be just throwing your money out the window.’ ”

It’s a message Tidwall, who was named as a Wisconsin Law Journal Woman in the Law at an awards event in June, and other members of the firm’s audit committee took to heart after they obtained approval last year to interview employees about what it means to work at WHD.

More and more firms — large and small — are taking similar steps to get themselves back in order, particularly following the latest recession.

“It’s all about survival,” suggested Dr. Jay Caulfield, an assistant professor of management at Marquette University’s graduate school of business, who is considering conducting a study on the culture within law firms. “Having a healthy organizational culture, where people want to come to work in the morning, where the attrition rate is no higher than the mean for the industry, is a competitive advantage.”

Susan Spoerk, a WestLaw account manager with Thomson Reuters, agreed. She began studying law-firm culture in 2010 — “Before it was cool,” she said. For her master’s thesis, she surveyed administrators, managing partners and practice-group leaders from the 20 largest law firms in Wisconsin.

“Most firms offer similar services, and they’re looking for a way to distinguish themselves. And, as law firms really examined themselves after the credit crisis in 2008, after they fixed everything else they could fix, they looked inward to do that,” said Spoerk, who spoke about cultural audits at the State Bar of Wisconsin’s annual conference in late-June.

The recession had no influence on the decision to conduct the audit at Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek. Tidwall said the work was instead meant to help distinguish the firm in the marketplace.

“Our main driver was diversity. We believed greater diversity and inclusion could improve the firm by attracting and retaining work, helping attorneys do better work,” Tidwall said. “You get a better work product when you have different perspectives. You get better decision-making when you have more diverse people in power. We began to make the argument that these are business issues, as well as philosophical issues. Is it the right thing to do to have an inclusive workplace and a diverse workplace? Yes, it is. Is it also good for business? Yes, it is.”

But while Tidwall and her team knew they wanted to increase diversity, she admitted, “We couldn’t really pinpoint the areas where we were doing well and where we needed improvement. It was kind of vague.”

That’s why they turned to a consultant to not only determine what the firm could change but also, and perhaps more importantly, pin down the shared habits and written and unwritten values that define the firm’s culture.

It wasn’t as easy as it might sound.

“There continues to be a lot of confusion about what is culture,” Spoerk said. “There are still a lot of law firms who think culture is: We have a retreat and happy hour on Friday.”

That, Caulfield agreed, is not culture.

“The most simplistic definition of culture is: How we do things around here. Oftentimes, it’s not in print anywhere, but it’s how you know what is appropriate.”

Although culture takes in things ranging from office décor to designated parking spots, it also includes intangibles ideas. This wide range is why it can be so difficult to define.

The Law Firm Culture Project, a joint effort among the American Bar Foundation, the Law School Admissions Council and Georgetown Law School, is working to change help make the idea of culture easier to digest by looking closely at the practices of large firms throughout the county.

Caulfield hopes to further contribute to the conversation by examining how leadership influences culture within firms. Discussions about the project began only recently and much still depends on how much interest and money can be found. Even so, Caulfield said she has reached a point where she can survey several firms and do an in-depth analysis of just two or three.

For now, it seems, firms will have to define culture and weigh its importance without having the benefit of academic analysis or, perhaps, even an audit. For many firm leaders, the decision will come down to cost.

“There was a wide, wide range in terms of cost,” admitted Tidwall, who helped interview nearly a half-dozen consultants before choosing one to conduct Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek’s cultural audit. “And it’s so dependent, as you might suspect, on what you want done. It could be anywhere from a $15,000 expenditure to hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Tidwall declined to say what the firm spent on the audit, which took about six months and included about eight weeks of in-depth individual and focus group interviews with shareholders, attorneys and support staff.

The results, obtained in September 2014, helped those at the firm to not only gain a better understanding of their culture, but also to develop a list of “small, medium and large things” that could be improved.

“We decided to do this cultural audit to challenge ourselves, challenge our assumptions and have someone outside of the firm take a hard look at us and tell us if there was a difference between perception and reality,” Tidwall said. “I would encourage other firms to do it, too.”