The Sterling Family Law Show
The Sterling Family Law Show is where successful family law attorneys share the exact systems they used to build million-dollar practices.
Host Jeff Hughes scaled Sterling Lawyers from zero to $17M with 27 attorneys.
Co-host Tyler Dolph runs Rocket Clicks, the agency in charge of supercharging Sterling and other family law practices to success using revenue-first marketing strategies.
Together, they share the playbook for building the law firm of your dreams.
If you're looking to grow exponentially, generate revenue, and get good at business, this podcast is for you.
The Sterling Family Law Show
The Law Firm Culture That Built Our $17M Practice - #152
Law firm culture isn't soft stuff - it's the business driver that took Sterling from struggling to $17M. Here's the system.
Most family law firms struggle with turnover, low profitability, and team dysfunction because they treat culture as an afterthought. After 11 years of trial and error, we've cracked the code on building law firm culture that actually moves the business needle. This isn't about feel-good initiatives - it's about systematic approaches to team retention, remote law firm management, and scaling family law practices through intentional culture design.
Learn the proven framework for building law firm culture that drives retention, client attraction, and profitability in family law practices.
📲 Subscribe Now: https://www.youtube.com/@jsterlinghughes
📝 Get your FREE Law Firm Growth Guide: https://jsterlinghughes.com/
—
📄 CHAPTERS
0:00 - Law Firm Culture: The Foundation of $17M Growth
2:25 - Why Most Family Law Firms Fail at Culture Building
6:11 - The Three Pillars: Mission, Values, and Vivid Vision
11:01 - Level 10 Meetings: Weekly Culture Reinforcement System
13:34 - Remote Law Firm Management: Video-First Connection Strategy
15:19 - Attorney Retention Strategies: Celebration and Recognition
19:58 - Leadership Modeling: Why Culture Problems Start at the Top
21:09 - The Hard Truth About Firing for Culture Fit
24:00 - Scaling Law Firm Culture: Duplicating Leadership Systems
----------------------
Ready to find the accountability partner you need to build your dream family law firm the same way we grew Sterling Lawyers?
Follow these steps:
1. SUBSCRIBE TO JEFF'S NEWSLETTER: https://jsterlinghughes.com/
2. BOOK A FREE 30-MINUTE AUDIT WITH US: https://rocketclicks.com/schedule-a-family-law-quick-audit/
3. CONNECT WITH US:
LinkedIn: Jeff Hughes, Tyler Dolph, & Anthony Karls,
Facebook: Jeff Hughes, Tyler Dolph, & Anthony Karls,
Instagram: Jeff Hughes, Tyler Dolph, & Anthony Karls
4. TELL US WHAT YOU WANT:
Tell us in the comments if you liked this episode and what other kinds of episodes you would like to see.
Our team. By and large, the vast majority of them certainly care about the clients, about each other and about the firm ultimately winning. So that comes from having a good culture that collaborates and works well together. So those are some of the most tangible benefits of focusing in on culture and what you get out of doing that.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show, the podcast designed to help family lawyers build the firm of their dreams. I am your co-host, tyler Dolph. I'm also the CEO of our family-focused marketing agency called Rocket Clicks, and I'm with my co-host, jeff Hughes, today. Great to see you.
Speaker 1:Hi everyone. I'm Jeff Hughes, ceo of Sterling Lawyers. We are a 27 attorney family law firm and doing about 17 plus million in new business this year.
Speaker 2:Incredible results. And today we're going to talk about something very close to both of our hearts, which is the culture, the heartbeat of our firms, and we're going to talk a little bit about the remote aspect of Sterling, but also just the importance of doubling down on your vision and your values and what it takes to really build a successful law firm. Jeff, it's great to be back. You know, we're taking this deep dive into Sterling and one thing that we've talked about a lot, and that I've talked about with a lot of other attorneys, is the idea of building a culture. We see so many times where small law firms who have the single attorney or the attorney that left a big firm that starts their own firm at the beginning, they're doing everything they're billing, they're collecting, cash and they're having to be a lawyer, right, yeah?
Speaker 2:because they have to be, but eventually they start to grow, and as they grow, they have to grow and change as a leader, because they have to build a culture. They have to empower others to do the work, and, as we know, sterling has done such an incredible job of this growing into two states with multiple offices and almost 90 team members and so I want to spend today talking about how you and your team were able to accomplish that at Sterling.
Speaker 1:Well, certainly, tyler. I love this topic and it's one of those things. What's interesting about culture is that it's the most dominant force that drives the success or the sub-success I want to call it failure, okay, the sub-success of a law firm, but it's the one thing. You can't go out and buy, like we can go out and buy marketing, we can go buy financial services, we can go buy all these things, but we can't buy culture. Yet it is the driver of family law firms succeeding. So I know we're going to strip down what we have done today here at Sterling on that and I want to give our audience a little bit of context so they can understand the perspective we're coming from here at our firm. So we've got 80-ish teammates okay, spread out over two countries, about 30-something in the Philippines and the rest here in the US. We're in two states and the vast majority of our team works remote. So we have four what we call hub locations where the lawyers and paralegals go to, but they're there maybe half the time. Each person, some people a little more than others, some people rarely in the office. Yet despite all the far flung teammates we've got, we've been able to build a very cohesive and powerful culture that is the driver of our profitability as a firm. We could have a crappy culture and probably eek by, but we have a wonderful culture with wonderful people that we're very, very intentional about and so, yeah, one like third party.
Speaker 1:One affirmation on this before we jump into the meat of the content I have always been kind of like sour on these best culture, best place to work type things, cause I felt like, oh, you just got to apply and you're going to win. Well, maybe a little bit, but we just recently did it and we got top place to work. But that's like big deal. Okay, that that's nice.
Speaker 1:But what was really cool is that we had 90 plus percent participation, which is really hard to get. Everyone's got to go on and do the survey and all that, and it's anonymous. But here's the thing we got a hundred percent of the respondents said it was a great place to work, and that blows my cause that I still have a hard time believing it, and maybe those few people who didn't respond were the ones that would have said it sucks or whatever. But the fact is we got a lot of participation and 100% unanimous like this is a great place to work. So that speaks to our leaders that are in the trenches with our teammates that make this such a fun place to work. It's not, certainly not on Jeff Hughes.
Speaker 2:So that's so big. And I think one thing that's really important about culture that's maybe a little nuanced is when you're building culture, you're building it for the long term, and it's so much easier to build that with a team that you trust and can rely on and that has been there with you for a while in the trenches. You mentioned that it's so much harder to do that if you're turning over team members every year or your leadership team continues to change. I know in prior conversations you talked about the longevity and the retention of your current leadership team, which I believe probably lends to your ability to create a group.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it wasn't always that way, tyler, as you know, because you've watched us build this from, you were there in the beginning, so you've watched us build it and we struggled getting our culture right and I thought, being kind of a guy who really paid a lot of attention to leadership issues, got a lot of reading and stuff, it's kind of a real passion of mine. I thought this would be like an area I would personally excel at, but it honestly took five, six years to start to get it right. And it's only been in the past few years, with Jeff Kirlin coming in and elevating some of our other leaders, that we've been really able to kind of dial it in. I didn't even want to do that best place to work thing about three years ago because we would just get hammered. It was not, would not have been good. So, anyway, back to the topic at hand. So for family, I'm going to focus on the family law firms because I can share from that experience and for all you family lawyers out there, there are some real benefits to being intentional about culture, focusing in on it and building it. So what I have witnessed, okay, is that as our culture has improved and it's gotten stronger.
Speaker 1:We have been able to retain talent and it's as you know, tyler, you go out and have to replace someone. That's extremely expensive, especially with lawyers who take a lot of clients with them out the door, not to mention the loss of training and the expense that all went into that. So our retention has improved. Our ability to attract clients has increased. So that's been probably one of the most obvious measurable results of our culture improving.
Speaker 1:Another thing our profitability has gone up substantially, and one of the factors that contributes to that the most is that our teammates care about the success of the firm. They care about the success of each other, and I'm not trying to paint this in a glossy way, that that's not true, because I'm not trying to like paint this in a glossy way. That that's not true, cause I don't. I'm not talking about ownership mentality, cause I think for two I am a little bit, but I think for someone to really genuinely feel that they have to actually have some ownership, and that that's not. That's not true in our firm. There's not, there's only a few owners, but yet you see a our team by and large, vast majority of them certainly care about the clients, about each other and about the firm ultimately winning. So that comes from having a good culture that collaborates and works well together. So those are some of the most tangible benefits of focusing in on culture and what you get out of doing that.
Speaker 2:I'd like to focus in a little bit, jeff, on how to set a great culture. I think our listeners maybe they're a little bit smaller firm, but they want to grow, they want to build them as the owner realize, like you did. Hey, it's on me. I have to be the one to pioneer this, and to me that all starts with vision right, setting the course, helping the company or the firm understand where are we going.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think there's some tools that family law firms unfortunately, a majority of them that I have talked to don't have these in place and it's kind of the foundation of building your culture, because it defines the jumping off point. Okay, and in the world of business these are very common, right? You talk about a vision, a mission or a purpose for why your firm even exists. And what are your? What are the values of their like that you're really going to die on those hills, those values hills, okay, and for us we set those early on and we have stuck to them and we constantly, weekly, go back within the firm formally and refer back to them.
Speaker 1:So, like in our case, sterling's mission or our purpose is to equip family law clients. That's it, that's the end of it period, full stop, right, so that's one. And then we have four values that we talk about, we celebrate, we reward on and all that, and then we have a vivid vision. That's a one-page document that it sounds kind of cultish here but we actually read it out loud in our weekly meeting. So it's, I think building a culture starts with those three things as the foundation of that culture, and that vivid vision is like one page long and it talks about various aspects between how we serve clients and take care of each other and that sort of thing in there and our future.
Speaker 2:So this is really about creating alignment right. It's about having everyone in the firm agree. This is where we're going. We're going to get there together and we're going to act a certain way so that we can all do this in a united front.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can literally go to someone that's been in our firm for four months and ask them what are your values and they'll be able to tell you the four values that we have. Most of them would be able to probably not everybody, but certainly anyone who's been there for any length of time. But the reality is you go to so many businesses and you ask the owners and the you know, like the leaders of the business, what are your values, and they can't tell you because they're just not, they have them on a wall, really, you know, integrated within the service of the entire firm, so that our firm does that and it helps. It does give us alignment because we know, we know what our four values are. You, you violate one of those values. You know like you get a lot of attention in a negative way for doing that. Right You're, we talk about it.
Speaker 2:So yeah, To me, values is something that that has to be lived. It can't be something that you make up or you sit in a room and like, oh, would this sound good? Do you think people would like this?
Speaker 1:It's more like who are we as people, and what do we actually believe in and how do we embody those on a day to day basis? Yeah, teller, you asked about like how we do it here. Okay, so I'm going to share with you how our firm has done it and I think there's a lot of crossover applications to every other family law firm, whether they're our size or smaller or larger. Okay, so there's, I think, a lot here that a leader of a family law firm can pull out, can modify and fit their context and put it to work. Okay. So I kind of think of building our culture. Is there some real tangibles that we can do? And there's some, some areas that are really kind of ephemeral. They're hard to kind of pin down, intangible a little bit. And there's there's one, the most important ones in intangible. I'm going to wait till the end and share that with you. But from a tangible perspective, you get past the foundational purpose mission or you know purpose values and vivid vision, your vision of your firm. Purpose values and vivid vision, your vision of your firm.
Speaker 1:The tangibles that we use is every teammate is in a weekly meeting. We call it a level 10 meeting, an L10. Some teammates may be biweekly, but certainly every lawyer, every paralegal, legal assistant and leadership team anybody in a leadership role is in an L10 every week. Now what is that? That's a weekly coming together and talking about the issues in everybody's individual jobs and departments and as issues bubble up, they're either addressed there or they're maybe escalated to some other part of the firm and that's just a real cleansing kind of meeting to clear issues and get alignment back again. And even the lawyers show up to this and they're all busy and it's usually held over lunch. People are eating and they're driving in their car. It's not like a formal thing. Everyone comes together and they got to like sign the agenda at the end. It's very kind of like driven by an agenda, but it's an issue clearing thing. So that's one thing we do.
Speaker 1:What's really important about this everyone is that in the way we have found that they work, the best is certainly do them over video, because everyone's everywhere. But we make and we require everyone to have their video camera on. Now there are some circumstances where you're not going to and we get that and it's not in every single minute of every single L10, but routinely. Have your, have your camera on every single minute of every single L10, but routinely have your, have your camera on, and that came from an idea that we got early on, where we realized that if you can see each other, there's something neurologically happens on the connection with each other than just hearing voices. Plus, you can see kind of if you're paying attention. Now you can always be looking at the screen and typing an email to your mom, right, but okay, there's always a way around the rules.
Speaker 2:But it does help. It's nonverbal right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's totally. Obviously, 80% of our communication plus is nonverbal, so that does certainly aid in that. So we require that. Another tool that we use is we have a bi-weekly all team meeting. That's not oriented around the business as much as it's oriented around social things. So what this looks like is every other week called the summons, and I did a whole podcast on this maybe a couple months ago. You can go back and find it. I actually showed one of our actual summons and then we talked about how it worked and everything, and this is an incredible tool. It does not take a ton of prep. It does to get it kind of going, but once you get it going it doesn't. So it's an all team meeting where we have people from the Philippines in the middle of the night over there and we have everyone here and we do it over lunch. Everyone's doing their thing. There's shout outs, it's celebration, it's high fives, we do lawyer success stories where we did something amazing for a client. So it's all about celebration and recognition and that is super powerful for people to feel a part of something, especially when they're working from home and they don't see their teammates butt on a screen. Okay. So that's another thing that we do. We do every other week, the opposite week from the summons. We have a newsletter we put together that we send out and that's the same thing. It's basically a written, pictorial version of the summons and it's we put all of our client testimonials from the past week and sometimes those can be like six or seven pages of testimonials. But I guarantee you, every lawyer and PL team, paralegal team that is out there they go read them because it's their clients that they're serving and their client gives them something good back. We kind of project that to the whole team, the whole firm, so they can all celebrate with each other. So we do that in there. So those are three like real, obvious things meeting wise, bringing people together.
Speaker 1:And this gets back this next one. Here it's harder to describe in like a short, pithy explanation here, but it's all about aligning the incentives, now that I'm talking about compensation incentives and for us we want our lawyers to do a great job taking care of clients. So part of their alignment is service oriented right, and so aligning incentives across the firm to, you know, row in the same direction If you're, if you're, if you're keyed on, you know, client service, making that a part of incentives. You know, profit whatever it is aligning up those incentives. You show me the incentives for a family law firm and I'll show you the results. It's a one-to-one correlation in how that works.
Speaker 1:And another thing and I've talked about this already is we do a ton of celebrating, not only in our summons, not only in our L10s, not only in the Monday memo. We bring everybody together once a year. We do recognitions there on our Sterling day. We have every team has a budget that they get together for lunches, dinners, special events on a quarterly basis. Those are again voluntary, you don't have to go, but it's all about trying to create community and connection on the local individual level, like even over in the Philippines. We fly everyone to an island once a year and we have a big deal that goes for a couple of days there, cause it's even harder to get people together over there. But, like here, all of our four individual offices get together regularly, quarterly, and and the purpose there is not talk about business, obviously, but just to bring people together for connection time and community time and that sort of thing. So those are the tangibles that we we follow.
Speaker 2:I think what I hear you saying is that, as a vision becomes more concrete, you leverage the opportunity to connect, to build more alignment, like, hey, we are now aligned, we're going in this direction, we're all going together. Now let's make sure that we're building a community so that we can enjoy each other and enjoy the journey that we've decided we're going to go on together, and also let's make sure that we're aligned on how we're going to get paid and what that whole situation looks like. And to me, the overarching message is the repetition. There's the whole narrative that you have to hear things seven times before you hear it. The first time.
Speaker 1:Well, the same. Thing here.
Speaker 2:Right, it's like you've got to create this. You've got to create the opportunity to continue to reinforce the vision and the values and the foundational culture elements for your firm all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, you said something really profound there that I hate to do because I get bored doing it, and that is repeating a message over and over and over. Do you feel like they've heard this so many times? They don't want to hear me say it again, but that's simply not the case. In your mind it's like done, you already get it, but they got to keep hearing it. That's how teammates, that's how it works. And so, like our firm about 18 months ago, realized that we had some real opportunity to improve our client services. Okay, and so we knew we had to shift away from the focus within the firm, for lawyers was on collections make as much money as you can, bring it in, bring in the business, blah, blah, blah. And we knew that we are missing it by not focusing on taking care of the client first, because if we do that, then the money will come.
Speaker 1:Well, that took a culture shift that I had to be a significant part of, because I'm the one who created the negativity on the other direction, talking so much about collections and celebrating that. We shifted from celebrating that to celebrating client service scores and every opportunity that I could and the entire executive leadership team. Every time we could. We talked about client service scores over and over and over and over again. Where I like shiny new stuff that turns me on and gets me excited, I don't like talking about stuff that's in the past or that is like repetitive. It seems like it's not useful, but it's the opposite of that. When it comes to leadership and articulating the culture of where it's going. You got to repeat those core things over and over again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we over at Rocket Clicks we have this narrative that, like once, we get so sick of saying the same thing. That's probably the first time our team heard it, so we need to like double down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you got to get stay sick of saying it another couple of months.
Speaker 2:So, absolutely so, jeff. You know you, you've been so intentional and your team has been intentional about building this culture at Sterling. If someone is is at a smaller firm and they want to start instituting some of this within their firm, what are some like just tips or tricks or, you know, watch outs that they should think about, as as they're they're building an intentional culture at their firm.
Speaker 1:Well, tyler, I think the most important contributor to a strong culture, it starts with the leaders, because it's all about modeling. It's not do what I say, it's you're going to do what I do. Maybe if we're lucky and if I'm doing it right, we'll get some people to do that. If I'm doing it wrong, we'll get most people to do that. That's how it works in real life. And so any culture that is negative and toxic, a hundred percent of the time it's the leader's fault, not 95%, not like that. It's that employee that you allowed to do that negativity. It's their fault. No, you allowed it because you didn't fire them. And so it all rises and falls on leadership. And so every culture, the most important contributing factor is the leadership in that culture. What are they modeling? What are they doing? What are they rewarding? What are they aligning up from an incentive standpoint?
Speaker 1:And so that starts and ends with the lawyer, because if there's a negative person in your culture, it's your job to get them out of the culture. And you can talk about hiring all you want. Yes, you can hire for culture, and everyone tries to do that. But reality is you don't understand who that person is until you've been working with them three to six months if you're lucky. And so it's not as much about hiring them yes, try to do that, please but it's way more about firing them.
Speaker 1:It's when someone you cannot turn in the right direction by coaching, by supporting, by loving on them, by helping them, if they won't line up with your culture and you're allowing them to stay within your family law firm, that is on you and you need to get rid of them. That's where the culture is mostly built there, because now you help them find a setting better that fits them and you sent the message to everyone that remains within your firm. This is the culture. Yeah, this is where we're going, and we're going to put wood behind that by helping teammates who don't fit that leave and find something that's a better fit for them. That sounds mean to some people, I know, but if you cared about your team enough, you will fire the people that need to be fired.
Speaker 2:You allowing them to stay is a message you don't care. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You don't care about that issue. You don't care about your value, whatever it is, your values.
Speaker 2:I made this mistake a hundred times and that you think by letting them stay, well, they'll figure it out. You know, I'm going to support them. I'm going to give them another try. The problem that happens when, when you do that is the people you actually want to stay end up leaving. So like, well, he's not going to make the hard choice, so I'm going to go find someone who will.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the two hardest fires are the ones where they have a great character, great people, but they're incompetent. They're not competent at that job. Right, that's really tough. And the other one, though, is back to this culture issue Someone who's an incredibly high performer, who's just killing it and they're just bringing in the results, but they're a toxic influence on your culture. You know you, you got to bite the bullet, you got to let them go. You just have to. You're better off and I've seen it over and over again, and I've justified it too Keeping someone well, they're such great at this or great at that, we really need them. They're hard to replace, it's a hard culture, it's a hard time to hire. That's all excuses. You got to fire them. What you're really?
Speaker 2:doing is you're changing the culture by keeping them there, because that person is now influencing a new culture like oh well, I guess that's tolerated, so I guess I can get away with that. So that's the acceptability of the culture which is shifting under your nose and you don't even know it. You know most of the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so true, so true. It's really powerful. So talk to us about, uh, future. How are you going to continue ensuring that the culture remains really strong at Sterling? What are some things you're thinking about as it relates to the continuation of this amazing culture you've built? Oh man, Well it's.
Speaker 1:It's easy to start to let what got you there kind of slip over time, right Cause we, you're, you get there. It's like, oh, we don't have to do the meeting, the summons this week, we can skip it because we're just doing so well. We're really focused on continuing to do those fundamental things that got us there and not back away. So stick with those things. And I think at this level of where we are at in our firm, it's all about empowering the leaders underneath us to get better and to grow and to have ownership over their individual team cultures as so long as it fits in with others. So it's about training and raising up leaders at this point, and that's really hard. It takes a long time to do that. It takes a long time to do that.
Speaker 1:So I'm not in any L10s anymore, so I have Jeff Kerlin runs the firm day to day. He's our president. We've got an amazing leadership team that are just doing incredible things within their team. They're all growing, they're getting better as leaders now and they're passing on our culture. So we're now at the stage of duplication. So as I look into the future, I'm seeing our teammates duplicating what God is there today, duplicating leadership, duplicating our values and living those out. And it's just, it's one of the most magical feelings. It's taken us 11 years to get there. This doesn't happen overnight. This is a slow process but if you can stick with it and you can stay disciplined on focusing on having that type of culture, the rewards are incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll leave us with this. Every Monday, I give our whole team a five-minute conversation to start the week, and today's topic was do the boring thing, and I talked about how Amazon spent 20 years on doing one thing, which was to improve the customer experience. They did on logistics and next day, shipping. Chick-fil-a became the most profitable fast food chain in America by focusing on one thing exceptional customer service. Doing the boring thing over and over and over again is actually what allows companies and law firms to get to those incredible results. It's not doing the shiny object or the next hottest thing or AI or whatever it is. It's focusing on doing the boring things and doing it great and then duplicating that across your firm. Yeah well said Well, jeff, appreciate your firm. Yeah, well said Well, jeff, appreciate your time, excited to continue this journey together and helping other family law firms learn about the great success of Sterling and continue to empower their firms as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been fun talking about something that's been so important in our firm.
