Biglaw, Small Law Firms

Reinventing The Law Business: The Importance And The Danger Of A Law Firm Having 'Values'

Should your law firm have "values"? According to managing partner Bruce Stachenfeld, it depends....

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I looked at Netflix’s Statement of Values. It is kind of cool – and impressive – it starts out by saying that:

Values are what we Value.

It goes on to say:

Many companies have nice sounding value statements displayed in the lobby, such as:

— Integrity

— Communication

— Respect Excellence

Then the next page is kind of amusing as it says:

Enron, whose leaders went to jail and which went bankrupt from fraud, had these values displayed in their lobby:

— Integrity

— Communication

— Respect Excellence

They conclude by saying:

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The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewards, promoted or let go.

Netflix has its own, very unique, culture, and its statement of values is a very powerful read; however, there are two points here. One is obvious and one is not so obvious.

The obvious point is that having values means nothing if you don’t follow them and having relatively meaningless but high-sounding platitudes is really just corporate white noise.

The less obvious point is that having values is really a challenge. Because, whether you like it or not, everyone – and I mean everyone, without even realizing it – looks at management for even an iota of swerving from the values so they can say, “Aha – I knew it was all bulls**t!” I don’t think people do this to be mean-spirited; it is just that we are all a bit suspicious, and even cynical, of corporate slogans and statements of values and this induces us to find evidence that our suspicions and cynicism are validated.

So here is the story of our values at Duval & Stachenfeld….

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Long long long (yes, really long) ago, I toiled away at some Biglaw firms. I wasn’t really that happy, to tell the truth. I longed for a place in which lawyers would work together without competing with each other, where everyone did the right thing, where everyone was respected, and similar high-minded ideas and ideals. I don’t want to say that the Biglaw places I was at were not good; however, they were certainly “big,” and it was unclear if there really were values to be observed. I didn’t write these ideas down at the time but they percolated in my head.

Then, when I started a predecessor firm, I wrote down an outline of these values. It was a strange feeling as I don’t know why I wrote them that day. I remember sitting in my study at home and they just came to me and it poured out in about 45 minutes. One of my favorites was “do the right thing even when it hurts.”

At the time I wrote them, I didn’t think I could do much with them, so they went into a drawer. Something beautiful perhaps for another day…..

Then I was lucky enough to start Duval & Stachenfeld, and of course immediately adopted those values!!! False – that is not what happened at all.

Instead, when the firm started, we worked around the clock for about a year until I remembered the values. So one day I dragged them out of the drawer and kind of forced my exhausted partner and associates to read them and comment. We made a few – tired – comments – and pronounced that our firm now had “Values” and then they went back in the drawer. This all happened about 17 years ago.

Then sometime in 2001, someone gave me a book by Jim Collins called Built to Last (affiliate link). In this book, Collins talks about how great companies – what he calls “visionary companies” – have “values” that make them special and able to last for a long time. I was inspired. “I knew it,” I thought. “We have values, so we must be a great company!!!” Wow.

Of course it was not that easy, and in hindsight I was being kind of silly, but Collins’s book inspired us to really embark on a project to think through and adopt true values for our firm.

It took us about two and half years and several thousand attorney hours. Everyone in the firm participated. Senior partners – junior associates – staff – everyone. We argued about them – we fought about them – we got mad at each other – there were passionate debates – everyone had a view, and many of us had strong views.

Along the way there was a rush of excitement. Not to take on delusions of grandeur, but I felt like I thought the framers of the U.S. Constitution must have felt when they were putting it together. They were creating the principles for a nation and deciding what they thought was important to govern them then and into the future. And we were doing the exact same thing, albeit on a smaller scale!

It was very “cool,” because there was no road map. No one else in the legal world had done anything like it to our knowledge. And we knew we could do whatever we wanted. We could be different. We could be special. It was a great feeling.

We finally got done with the project in April of 2004, and I was so proud you have no idea. It was maybe the greatest thing I had ever participated in in my life. My partners and associates and administrative staff also felt this sense of pride.

But – as I started this article pointing out – adopting values is just the first step. You have to live the values or, as someone stated years ago, they just become “words on a page.”

One of our biggest challenges continues always to keep the values fresh and in front of all of ourselves as the firm grows and as new associates and lateral partners join us. This is no easy task. As managing partner, I am a steward for the values. and I know our firm will be damned if I blow it even once by not following them; however, I am only one person, and my following the values is not sufficient. Instead, the challenge is to everyone – not only the managing partner – but everyone at the firm. We all have to live these values or they become a cruel joke.

I am proud of what we have done so far as a firm. I think we have followed these values scrupulously and I hope we continue to do so. I believe that this is the heart of the reason for our success. Our values make us “us” (so to speak) – without the values we are merely 70 lawyers sharing office space until someone gets a better economic offer. The values are the glue – the common purpose – that knits us together. We don’t sing “Kumbaya” every day, but everyone knows that we are bound by these values – that when the partnership meets we are bound by the obligation to “do the right thing even when it hurts.”

Also, I am confident that if we ever swerve from these values. it will be “game over” for Duval & Stachenfeld pretty quickly, as what would be the point of sticking around in a place with fake values. And without the values, we aren’t really Duval & Stachenfeld in the first place, are we? We are just a shell with that name on the door.

So to end this article the way I began it, values are a wonderful, amazing, powerful thing for a law firm, if you develop them with internal buy-in and then follow them rigorously. Indeed, the common mission and common purpose can focus everyone on achieving a great and strong goal. However, I think a law firm is actually better off not having values in the first place if the lawyers are not going to follow them strictly and carefully, as that hypocrisy will have a much more dramatically negative effect than the absence of values would have had in the first place.

Bruce Stachenfeld is the managing partner of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, which is an approximately 70-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at thehedgehoglawyer@gmail.com.

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