Why Creating Your Law Firm’s CORE Values Matters

Discover how defining a clear set of core values can unify your legal team, enhance productivity, and build a resilient culture in your firm that meets client demand day in, day out. 

Hear practical examples from Tyler, Anthony, and JP of Rocket Clicks as they tie these values directly to daily coaching, feedback, and decision-making.

Lastly, learn how to operationalize these values so they remain visible, actionable, and beneficial to your law firm’s long-term growth.

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The 3-PART Framework to Boost Your Legal Team's Success

https://youtu.be/mbPzAwn-Cec

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📄 CHAPTERS

00:00 - The Hidden Costs of Undefined Values

02:25 - Why Your Law Firm Needs Clear Core Values

05:34 - The 3 Buckets That Drive Growth

09:54 - Overcoming Limiting Beliefs in Practice

16:46 - Leading with Authentic Accountability

20:00 - Making Values Stick in Day-to-Day Operations

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Chapters

• 0:00 The Hidden Costs of Undefined Values
• 2:25 Why Your Law Firm Needs Clear Core Values
• 5:34 The 3 Buckets That Drive Growth
• 9:54 Overcoming Limiting Beliefs in Practice
• 16:46 Leading with Authentic Accountability
• 20:00 Making Values Stick in Day-to-Day Operations

Transcript

0:00

Are you feeling the pain of team misalignment? Inconsistent client experiences or unclear expectations? It's not a hiring issue. It's a values issue. In this episode, we're diving into how the right core values can create operational clarity, boost morale, and unlock next level performance in your family. We offer. Welcome to the Revenue Roadmap Podcast, the show for family law professionals who are serious about growing revenue, increasing profitability, and building a firm that they're truly proud of. Each episode is packed with actionable strategies and insights to help your practice thrive. I am your host, Tyler Dolph, CEO of Rocket Clicks, which is a digital marketing agency focused exclusively on family law firms. We also own and operate our own family law firm called Sterling Lawyers, which has grown to over 32 attorneys across 25 offices in two different states. Joining me today is Tony Carls and JP Vander Linden. Tony is the president of our agency. He's also the co-founder of our law firm. So he brings a wealth of knowledge, both on the marketing side as well as the law firm growth, culture and management side. And then JP actually is our head of operations. He manages our entire team, helps, control and maintain our amazing culture. And I'm very excited to have them both with us today as we are breaking down how to develop and implement company values that actually work. Not the kind that you print on a poster, but the kind that define behavior guide hiring and firing decisions and fuel growth across your firm. I really hope you enjoy it. Gentlemen, we're continuing our series on building an amazing culture, an amazing law firm, and we're going to talk about developing company values that actually drive results. We've spoken in the past about, you know, if you if you crowdsource your values and they, they serve everyone, then really they don't serve anyone. And, the opportunity for law firm owners to really build, a firm that they can be truly proud of and have values that, that they embody. And so, JP, talk to us a little bit about like what values really are in a law firm and why you need them. Yeah. So if, if brand is who your company is externally, culture is who your, your company is internally and values are the biggest embodiment of your culture in day to day capacity. Either the behaviors that you expect from your team, that your team expects from each other. And that you operationalize in your business to reward, to promote, to punish and to remove. It's the ultimate filter of what you will allow inside of the walls of your organization. I love that. Did we always have values at Sterling? And we we go back to that. You know, one of the things I think we did really well, throughout is before we even opened the firm, we created, mission vision values. We created a kind of a the first version of what you guys know as the vivid vision. That's something Jeff and I read together. Once a week together. But we took time to define out what those were, and, clearly articulate them. And I would say there, I'd say why they're important. If you're if you're a firm that's not your firm, that's not really growing or there's not a lot of conflict or growth, there's like not much stress in the firm. Values may or may not be super useful. When you are in a growth firm or there is conflict or there is stress within your organization, this that's where they show up because these are the behaviors you want everybody to to be using. When we're potentially at our worst. So when we're at our worst and we or we need to perform our best, or things are changing and roles and responsibilities are changing because we're a growing company. How are we going to operate? As as people with each other. How are we going to behave? What are the rules of engagement? And that's really what your value should embody is like, how are you going to how are you to navigate, growth? Because, you know, in our, in our instance, it's it's navigating growth is stressful. Things change. It's not it's not status quo. It's constantly not status quo. You get into a season six and nine months. Now it's all changed. 6 or 9 months. Now it's all changed. What stays the same is how we behave with each other and what should stay the same is how we behave with each other. 100%. I think my favorite thing that we talk about a lot here is leveraging the values as a filter to hire, fire and reward. We've all right. So it's like it makes it really easy to give people feedback, to create conversations around what we expect because it's all there. It's in the values. But JP, maybe for, a firm who hasn't, started this down this road in this process, how how do you even begin to to structure values? You know, when you go through the the process of building values, give us a little perspective on. And how do you even start this process? Yeah. So we, we've thought about our desired behaviors, and all the ways that we want our team to behave in a day to day basis. And then we we grouped those, to what's the reason for wanting that behavior? And so you don't just want to behavior for the sake of like I want everybody to be nice. Why? Like, what do you want that to produce in your business. And so we we have three buckets for ours. So we think about them as, either going to raise the lid of the team member, either in their belief, their leadership or their operational effectiveness, and all of our values kind of fit into those three buckets, and they have a distinct outcome that we're shooting for. Interesting. So bucketing, bucketing them into three main categories. Let's, so, we'll go back to front here. So operation effectiveness. What does that mean. Yeah. So for us operational effectiveness is literally like how good are you at doing the work. Right. Are you able to show up and execute the function of your role at a high level. Because we only want to have eight players. Tony, you made a point about like, you know, differentiation kind of kind of when you're growing like it matters. I think that a players want to work with other eight players. There's a lot of evidence to support that. And one of the ways to lose those eight players is to not have your team show up, in a way. That they can count on each other for, and so we have specific values that we use for that. But like how you might think of this in your firm as you might want to think about, like, do I want people to be proactive in how they, go out into their work? Do I want them to be disciplined in how they do that work? Do I want them to be, caring and how they, like, think about how their work impacts others? Like, what do you want the behavior to be? In terms of how they show up to execute their role? Right. You could probably say what you don't want really easily. Like, I don't want them to be lazy. I don't want them to be task focused. Okay, cool. So let's flip those to the positive. That's the behavior you're looking for. I want them to be, outcomes focused. And I want them to be, you know, proactive. Right. Cool. Great. Now you've got a couple of values that you can work from. Yeah. What what I'd say here, kind of going backwards a little bit on on the buckets. You know, this is, this is like a twist and specificity on John Maxwell. Slob lid. And, specificity is in three areas. So, you know, operational effectiveness, like we've just been talking about, belief is like, what do you believe can be done? Leadership is how you influence the whole team. He told Team members accountable to accomplish a goal together. If you if you have deficiencies in any of those three, that's going to be how big your work can grow. So, for example, I think I, I think I've used this, last couple podcasts. I don't know if these are all going to come out in the same order, but we're at Rocket Clicks growing a lot right now, and like, we're, historically, we haven't had as many leads in the pipeline, to necessitate leveraging a CRM in a very disciplined way. But we're at that point now where there's consistently 8 to 12, sometimes 13, that's going to continue to grow. And Tyler, who's in charge of sales, it's really easy to keep like 3 or 4 names, you know, in your head and keep it organized. But like now we're at 812 and it's like, okay, and I'm going to this, I'm now going to be the lid on this organization unless I really start to use the the CRM. And that's obviously what you've, what you've done and leaned into and like that's why we'll continue to grow because we're not ignoring the simple things. So like you'll see this in law firms. I know we have a law firm client currently. It's a husband and wife firm, and their son is the, front office receptionist, I think paralegal for paralegal. And they use two different practice management systems to run their firm. So the husband, I think, uses Clio and the the wife uses, like, practice Panther and their systems aren't even connected. It's just a mess. And that business won't grow because the reality is, is like operationally, you can't add more people to that system because you have now you're literally building two businesses within a business and it's not going to grow, it's not going to scale, and you have to be able to have an intake team and you're not able to have a shared, shared process for scheduling consults. And like all of the things basically are broken from just one point. We can't we can't define how we're going to do things here. So this is really important. Yeah, 100%. And you have to be able to acknowledge where those leads are or where they could be and do something about it. I, you were talking about the CRM thing. I, during our all team huddle today, I wanted to increase my accountability to leveraging our CRM. So I told the entire team, okay, I'm going to show you this every day to prove that I can update it. Because I don't want to be the lid. Right? I refuse to be the bottleneck for the future growth of our firm. But it took leveraging our values and being able to, to say, listen, this is where we want to go. This is the expectation for how we're going to act. And you know what? I got to step up to the plate and pioneer that for the rest of us as well. So that was a fun moment. I think it's really important that we continue to leverage those opportunities. Yeah, I think that's I think everybody goes goes through that. Like, I know for me, I moved I moved too fast. I want to go really quick. The reality is like the the right decision at the wrong time is a bad decision. So it took me like 15 years to learn that, which is frustrating and was probably super frustrating for everybody else. But the reality is like until you lean into to your own realities, whether it's I got to learn how to use CRM or my timing is I got I got a lot of good ideas, but my timing and implementation is really poor. Or, you know, I have self-limiting beliefs on myself about what's potentially possible that I can accomplish or what my team is potentially able to to accomplish either or. That's that's where your growth is going to stuff. 100%. Can continuing down that kind of belief ideology in the next bucket? JP why is that important? Give us give us some background on the belief section. Yeah. So if operational effectiveness is how you focus and approach your work, belief is how you approach yourself. So Tony made a comment about self-limiting, beliefs. There are so many things that happen inside your business that just happen between your team members. Yours that like that becomes the thing that holds you back is, I was having a conversation with a guy in the last week. Right. And he's really good at hiring, right? He's he's got a he's just got a nose for talent. He's really great at it. And he's he was kind of going on this, this tangent about, like, you know, it's all about gut and intuition. I don't believe in all these tools and all these processes and things. And I was like, dude, I love that you've got that skill, man. That's so rare. Like, how are you going to duplicate that into your team? And he went, I don't think it can be taught like, I don't I don't think anybody can learn that stuff. It's like he just said he now has to hire every person for the rest of eternity. He just limited the growth of his business because he said, I don't think it can be done. I don't believe and I'm like, you're telling me no company has figured out how to teach, how to hire like you like guts? Not a real thing, man. Like it's just a bunch of little processes that you do like instantly in your brain. Like we can teach somebody that if we slow it down enough. If you believe, like, I really want to make this happen, you can do it. But like, if you don't believe it, no, no amount is going to isn't going to make it work. So so much of that is just like, do your employees see opportunity? Do your team members see potential or do they just see the roadblocks and the problems? And I can't and I won't. And, you know, we just never will be able to we'll just always be this way, I guess, like so much of that is just in the culture and in the language we use. And you got it. You got to root that out and get it in a good spot. So, you know, I think you're, you know, you set around the script just to, like, put a point on it. The reality is, like anybody in the marketplace that's leading, like, they're they're not they're not there because they have globally, they what they actually said at the beginning when they weren't the market leader, was, why not me? Why not me? I can do that. Why not me? I can do that. Why not us? Why not our team? We can do that. What do we need to learn? Why not? Why not me? It's. And it's there isn't really. It? There's a there's a lid on your organization. If you don't believe it can grow. Some beliefs, values kind of help you orient around like removing that limiting beliefs language or removing that type of language or thought processes out of your or. It, it's funny to see how different people wear their out on their beliefs live. Right? I think, JP, we talk about this sometimes when we're coaching our team members and we're working on, a development plan. The belief is kind of like all over the place, like people really all really believe that they can do something that they have, like no business doing or they're they're doing an amazing job, but they think they're doing a terrible job. And it's funny to watch that kind of confidence level go up and down. Yeah. And you as the you as the leader, you get to to speak a voice into that. You get to be a normalizing factor in your team to give them a healthy amount of confidence and perspective and that that hunger and desire that Tony was talking about. It's like, hey, why not us? Like, we absolutely can do it. Also, we're not great today. So like, let's stay humble and let's stay hungry. Like, you get it, you can balance those things and so you can become like the standard for your team. So there's people who are really high like you get them back in line. The people who are too low, you pick them up. And so like your influence is enormous. Big time has to come from the top. And I know that's kind of like our third bucket here is a leadership, bucket. Talk some more about that and why it's so important. Yeah. So if operational effectiveness is approaching your work and belief is approaching yourself, leadership is approaching others. And so again, going back to like what's the behaviors you want to see from your team? Like how do you want them to engage with each other. Do you want them to be direct? Do you want them to be kind? Do you want them to, try to wear other people's shoes and have empathy? Do you want, like, what do you want from your team? Do you want them to communicate transparently, like put those things down in your values so that you can tell when someone's not showing up? That way you can point to it be like, hey, hey, we're we're not living on our values here. This is an opportunity for you. And then it becomes like, you're not the bad guy giving feedback and being like, I don't like the way you did that. It's like, no, no, you agreed to this when you signed up here. We were very clear about our values and what we were putting in place. And now, like, we're just holding you accountable to the promise you made to how you're going to show up for your team. And, you know, again, we think about, like, things that are going to stop the firm from growing, right? This is another one where it's like, if your team can't figure out how to work together, work with others. You just got a bunch of like solo, you know, lone wolf folks. Like, that's really hard to scale like that. Just that does not go a long way. And so it's the, go fast alone, go far together mantra. Yeah. It's cool to see these play out too. So one of my one of my favorite podcasts is the Pbd podcast. And he runs a consulting company and an insurance company. He's a very successful entrepreneur. And one of their values is debate. And on their. So they have a four person panel podcast that they run. And there's been a couple times over the last year where they get into like a real, a real debate where it's like, Patrick will be challenging, Adam on like, how he's thinking about making decisions in his life. And it's like, it's like it's very intimate. And they're doing this live on their podcast, but it's literally one of their values, and that's why they do it. And like, Patrick is like an unbelievable CFO, an accomplish a ton. Adam works for Patrick, but Adam debates with him authentically and doesn't back down and doesn't like just kowtow because that's what you're supposed to do. Quote unquote. You know, for us, you know, we have to the way we think about, you know, the leadership values, we think about this with all three. So how do we like, create some opposing dichotomies in these. So, you know, ours for leadership are candid and empathetic. You don't get to be one or the other. You get to be both or you're not doing it. So like if you can't be direct and give honest, direct feedback without being a jerk, like you're missing the mark because basically I need to tell you that you got broccoli in your teeth. You're going to hear it and not just shut down for. So I think these are these are important. And they can be like good refinement opportunities for behaviors. And Mark kind of yeah, I would say when you come to putting your value, you know, Tony put that point about like the dichotomies, don't be afraid to put some diametrically opposed things in there and create some healthy tension in your team. I heard I heard earlier talking about this the other day, talking about like, you know, we want justice, we want mercy, we don't want one or the other. We actually want both. It's just how much in any one scenario of each one we want. And so like if you put both justice and mercy in your values, you're going to challenge your team to constantly walk that line. If you put, you know, if you put, be direct, but be kind, like you're going to challenge your team and it's going to be healthy. So don't be afraid to be like, oh no, these values don't agree with each other. It's like, do they not agree? Or are they just on a spectrum of of how you want people to behave? So that's a, that's a good call out. Yeah. It's I mean it's they're kind of similar to like healthy marriages are both spouses doing it, doing 100%, not one spouse doing 50 and one spouse saying 50. All they're doing 100% because at some point one of them will be able to do 100%. And you're going to have to pick like you're still going to have to move forward. So when you're when you're doing that, you're both 100% trying to serve the other spouse, which is extraordinarily difficult. And it's not always going to work, and it's not always going to be easy. And similarly with like these, this type of concept, you're like you're trying to walk a really hard line. But that's actually where most growth happens is when you're you're trying to do something or you're trying to do something difficult, you're actually trying to grow, not just do the easy thing. So, you know, that's so yeah. For just to kind of reiterate, so we are for each of these three buckets we have, we have two values in there. We try not to we don't I don't think it's probably wise to go beyond, you know, 2 to 3 in each bucket because that's a lot more routine is going to remember it, and it's going to kind of get muddled down pretty far. But getting 2 or 3 and really clearly defining them and then leveraging them in a, in your kind of rituals within your organization. So every Tuesday here at Rocket Clicks, we read our mission vision values with our team. So and we just kind of pop it around and then do fill in the blank or we'll do some kind of game with it. But it's, it's reinforcing reinforcing that constantly bringing people back to our main purpose. 100%, I think, JP is we're kind of closing up here, and I'm doing this for the first time. Okay? I've, I've, agreed that I should build some values. So I go through the exercise and I, you know, people closest to me or the people that I really want to lead my firm, we've built the values. Now, how do we institute that into our or how do we how do we make sure that our firm understands what we truly care about and how am I doing that on a repetitive basis? Any tips or tricks there? Yeah. So I think one of the things that you should consider, even as you're forming them, before you even start thinking that operationalizing them is like, if I was to use these on a day to day basis to give my team feedback and praise, how would that go? Are there scenarios where this wouldn't be applicable? Or I could get, you know, kind of called on on not wanting people to live out my values, and kind of challenge yourself to it because that's what it's going to look like in practice, is it's going to show up in coaching, it's going to show up in reviews, it's going to show up in the hiring process. And if you can't use it at all those cases, you want to try to find those kind of potholes for you start. So you need simple. I spent a, I spent a season in a business where they had a value called forgiveness over permission. They want to, you know, sometimes called, like, you know, they want they want a big bias towards action. They want to be able to move fast and break things. Right. Whatever version this you want to call that sounds awesome. When it's your sales team, right. That sounds awesome when it's like figuring out client success, that's pretty terrible when it's your legal team, right? That that's pretty bad when it's like, why didn't we QA this before we went out? You know, we just shipped it. Figure it out. Forgiveness or permission? You had to be like, hang on, hang on. Like, let's talk about what it looks like to actually put this in practice, because like that, like you gotta you gotta challenge these things, because that's where it's going to show up. Like those, those hard moments is highly emotional moments that, like, I got to tell you, have broken your teeth moment. That's when you're going to have to use it. And so equipping your leaders to use it in their coaching, equipping your recruiting team to use it as a screening method, putting it in your onboarding as you're bringing folks in, putting in your rituals like Tony talked about, like it's going to show up in those places. So think about what that's going to look like and be like, can I actually say this? Is this truly a non-negotiable? Or is this just like kind of feel good and maybe I'll want to use it at the time, but like when it comes up, like I don't actually want to talk about that. Yeah. I think, one thing we often say is that, someone has to hear something seven times before they hear the first time. So how many times do we have to share our values and articulate them in different ways and give different examples or shared experiences, or whatever it is before our team actually hears it? An internalizes it? And it's a lot. Right? And so the more you can get creative, and repetitive around sharing the values that actually matter to you, the faster it's going to integrate within your firm. One more tip I'll give on that is like create artifacts. And by artifacts I mean literal, physical things people can put their hands on related to your value. So print up shirts for your team and put it on the shirts. Right. We had an event last year. We printed like, laptop stickers for all these, and people were sticking them all over their computers or putting them on their mugs or what that until like now, those are living in their space. They see them all the time. They touch them, they feel them and like it just makes it more real, than when they're on a wall in the office or on a screen. It's like, figure out ways that you can get these into the reality of your team members world, where they can literally interact them with other senses. So awesome chance. Appreciate this opportunity as we continue down, building great cultures, family law firms. And I will look forward to, continuing this journey together. If you found this episode valuable, you will love our continuation of this kind of series on culture. Our next episode is developing your vision statement. Make sure to check it out here. And we will see you over there.