Tom is the founder of a litigation law firm in Ontario who is now enjoying life beyond the start-up phase of his practice. His firm is running smoothly, powered by a collaborative team of lawyers and support staff and supported by well-integrated technology. It did not start that way. The early years required persistence and experimentation: hiring, training, and retaining the right people, and implementing technology and workflows for efficiencies. Now, he is beginning to enjoy the benefits of those investments.
What explains Tom’s success? How did he get from those early struggles to a firm that runs smoothly and a team that steps up to take ownership of files? The answer is he had strategy, a plan, and was intentional about the culture he was creating at this firm.
There is a lot of hype out there about scaling your law firm. Technology is often touted as the solution. I agree it is part of the solution, and in my view, the easiest part. What matters most though are your people.
Law firms are people businesses. Even with AI on the scene, this is still true of most firms today. The profitability of law firms is directly tied to the intellectual output of its people. For that reason, law firms must optimize themselves to support the quality of the legal work produced by their lawyers and the staff who support them.
In the past, the question of how to do this was something of a black box. Before the emergence of neuroscience-informed leadership and positive psychology, much of management thinking came from industrial models that treated people as though they were parts in a machine. We now know this model is not only outdated but particularly ill-suited to professional work like law.
One essential fact is crucial to law firm leadership – how our human brains operate. At every moment of the day – awake, sleeping, or in between – our brains are scanning the external environment, and our internal states for one purpose: To manage our energy budget efficiently so we can survive to live another day.
Our brains are highly attuned to cues in the social environment signalling potential threat or reward. The work of David Rock and others has distilled insights from the field of neuroscience into actionable models that introduce and explain the specific cues that our brains are alert to. These models provide the data we need to manage our firms intentionally to spiral up motivation and engagement, or conversely to ratchet up stress and disengagement.
Last month in Slaw I introduced the RECLAIM model as a cultural operating system for law firms. You can read that article here. The RECLAIM model draws on David Rock’s SCARF® framework, which synthesizes a large body of neuroscience research to explain the social drivers of human motivation. It also draws on elements of Dr. Martin Seligman’s PERMA model of human flourishing from the field of positive psychology. By integrating these frameworks, the RECLAIM model provides practical daily guidance for building law firm cultures that promote motivation, engagement, and performance.
The RECLAIM model consists of six inputs that shape how people experience work at a law firm: Respect, Clarity, Learning, Autonomy, Inclusion, and Meaning.
This month I begin a series of articles that look in depth at each element of the RECLAIM model and how these inputs can positively influence motivation, engagement, and performance in a law firm team. In this article I focus on the first element of the model, R, which stands for respect.
RESPECT
Respect aligns closely with what neuroscience research describes as status. In David Rock’s SCARF® model, status refers to our sense of our relative importance in relation to others. The brain constantly scans our social environment for cues about whether we are being valued or diminished. These cues arise in everyday interactions: whether someone’s ideas are listened to, whether they are interrupted, whether credit is given, how feedback is communicated. These behaviours are experienced by the brain as signals of status reward or status threat.
The RECLAIM model focuses on respect because it translates this neuroscience insight into daily professional behaviour. Status is the underlying cue the brain responds to, and respect is the practical way organizations can build this cue into day-to-day practice.
Here are four ways to build this first element of the RECLAIM model, into your law firm’s culture.
- Develop an approach to feedback at your firm that centres learning and progress. Catching people doing things well, noticing progress, and offering insights into how to improve performance becomes the firm’s standard approach to feedback.
On the receiving side, lawyers are encouraged to compare their performance in the present against their performance in the past. Noticing improvements and professional growth is normalized as is attention to opportunities for bettering performance.
- Develop a regular practice of publicly celebrating accomplishments. One way to think about this is as if you are “sprinkling champagne[1]” on contributions, achievements, and success.
In practice this looks like a public shoutout to the paralegal who worked over the weekend on an urgent legal matter, or to the associate who presented to an industry group, or the legal assistant who stepped in to help her colleague get a last-minute piece of work done.
This “sprinkling of champagne” is something to be encouraged across the firm and all positions or job titles. One boutique litigation firm I know, built this practice into their monthly firm meetings. A regular agenda item was for firm members to share examples they saw of their colleagues modelling one of the firm’s values. Attendance at the monthly meetings grew, with everyone packing into the boardroom to take part.
- Provide lawyers with training on active listening. Active listening means giving your full attention to what is being said, providing small cues that you are listening, reflecting back understanding, and withholding judgment (the hardest part). This kind of listening delivers a powerful positive status cue and correspondingly signals respect and helps deepen trust.
Employ active listening when giving and receiving feedback, in meetings with clients, during meetings with mentors or mentees, or when handling a concern someone has come to you to discuss. In these moments, you can put away your phone, close your laptop or shut down your monitor, close the door and give the person the benefit of your focused attention.
- This fourth tip for operationalizing respect at your law firm is to adopt a standard practice of assuming best intent. I first heard of this practice from lawyer coach Amy Binder and was immediately impressed with its simplicity and effectiveness.
When you adopt best intent as your lens, you approach others with a respectful appreciation that people are genuinely trying to do their best, even when they struggle or make mistakes. This appreciation of positive intent deepens trust and supports learning. The mindset—and the trust it engenders—creates a felt sense of safety in professional relationships, where errors can be discussed openly and remedied.
Adopting best intent is one of the simplest ways leaders begin to create this kind of psychological safety.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, whose research brought the concept of psychological safety into mainstream organizational leadership discussions, explains in The Fearless Organization that teams perform best when people feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and acknowledge mistakes without fear of embarrassment or punishment. Environments that foster this kind of psychological safety are far better able to learn, adapt, and improve.
Returning to Tom, his smoothly operating business owes a lot to the culture of respect he fostered at his firm. His team members trust his leadership. He is clear about expectations and has taken a systematic approach to the professional development of associates at the firm. They can count on him to be available to answer questions and to provide insight into how they can up their performance. Support staff are also encouraged to take ownership of their work. All team members are equally valued for the roles they play in supporting the clients through their legal challenges. The team gathers monthly at a local restaurant to enjoy each other’s company. The culture at Tom’s firm supports people to place their focus on delivering excellent legal work, without the distractions of internal politics, job insecurity, and other perceived threats.
Having explained the R of Respect in the RECLAIM model, I want to return to where I started. Respect is not simply a nice-to-have cultural value. It is a way of building positive neurological cues into day-to-day interactions at your law firm.
If you could see deep into the minds of everyone at your firm, you would see two large neural networks constantly scanning the social environment for status cues. This process is happening every minute of every day.
Take the opportunity to intentionally sprinkle positive status cues and signals of respect throughout your interactions with colleagues and clients. Small signals of respect accumulate, shaping a healthier workplace and a more engaged team.
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[1] Thanks to Carina Bittel, advisor with The Lawyer Coach and Flourishing Law Centre, for introducing me to the celebratory term “sprinkling champagne” and for being such a proponent of this culture-enhancing practice.
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