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Are you a law firm owner looking for ways to build team culture? In this episode, Kevin Cheney, a law firm owner and co-founder, shares how intentional culture-building can be for a firm’s growth. He explains why culture—more than marketing or processes—drives retention, recruitment, client experience, and resilience. He offers a practical three-step framework for leaders to assess, envision, and build their ideal culture.
Kevin shares some steps to building culture for a firm. The first is what your culture is today. Be brutally honest with yourself and admit what you are doing right and wrong. Another thing is to think about the future of this culture. Map out a five year plan - what needs to change and how can you change it. From there, decide what is important for your firm to have in order to be successful. At the end of the day, a positive team culture drives retention and improves employee experience.
It is important to ensure your employees bond so they can work better together. Create opportunities for your staff to connect. For Kevin, he organizes happy hours and potlucks as ways for employees to have some fun and disconnect. Another option is to organize team bonding activities that build confidence and trust. Ensure to make these optional so staff are not forced but encouraged to participate.
Listen in to learn more!
- 1:07 Intentionality in Marketing, Processes, and Culture
- 2:27 Defining Culture in a Law Firm
- 6:51 Three Steps to Building Culture
- 10:40 Facilitating Employee Bonding
- 13:29 Employee Ownership Mentality
Creators and Guests
Host
Tyson Mutrux
Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.
What is Maximum Lawyer?
Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.
Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.
If you're ready to grow your firm with less stress and more support, this is your next must listen. Subscribe today.
Kevin Cheney 00:00:01 I used to think that results were the most important thing in a law firm, and that if you had results, that would drive a winning culture. Over time, I learned that that was incorrect and it was actually something else. I would be willing to bet that most people in this room have sat down and thought about their marketing strategy. If you're lucky, you do that early on when you first start your firm. If you're like me, it's after you waste, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars with bad companies and ineffective strategies. But at some point you sit down and you get intentional about your marketing. I'm also willing to bet that most people in this room have sat down and thought about their processes. If you're lucky, you do that before you hire your first employee. If you're like me, you wait until you have about four of them and you try to write them on the on the on the fly. But at some point we sit down and we get intentional about our processes.
Kevin Cheney 00:01:07 But culture is different. You know, I've spoken to hundreds of law firm owners. I'm in multiple masterminds. I mentor young lawyers who are trying to start firms. And it always is shocking to me that very few people have ever really sat down and thought about their firm culture, have really sat down and thought about what their culture is now, what they want their culture to be, and maybe five years. And what intentional steps do they need to take to build the culture that they want? So that's what we're here to talk or learn about today. Now, what do I mean when I use the word culture? My older brother and chief operating officer is currently writing a book, and he defines culture as shared experiences, Big and small, good and bad. And I agree with that. But I actually think I would go a little bit farther to me at its most basic level to, to use some Gen Z slang. The culture is the vibe of your firm. It's the vibe every single day when they come into the office, when people interact with each other, interact with clients, when they're holding themselves accountable, it is the vibe of your firm.
Kevin Cheney 00:02:27 So. How did I go about learning all of this? most of you, it was just mostly through trial and error. as they said when I was being introduced, my partner and I were best friends in law school. He was best man at my wedding. We had this crazy idea when we graduated law school. Let's just open up a firm. And so the day we got admitted was the day we opened our LLC and started practicing law. And over the last nine and a half years, we've grown from having no money, no clients. Not even the office. We used to store files in the trunk of my car. To now having 33 employees as of today, approaching eight figures in revenue. And one of the things I'm most proud of is we have never lost a single employee to a rival personal injury firm. No one has ever left. Once they've started working, we've only lost one employee total to another law firm, and we've really been successful in attracting and retaining top talent. And so I want to talk a little bit about today about the how and why that we do that.
Kevin Cheney 00:03:34 All right. Hopefully this presentation is a little better than my PowerPoint making skills. But in any event I want to talk about why culture is king. And to me, look, marketing is important. Process is important. But I believe that culture is the single most important aspect of running a law firm. So first, culture drives retention and recruitment, especially a level especially in the younger generations. Money is not enough. And that's good because none of us own the, you know, 100 million, $200 million law firms on big law in downtown and tall buildings, right? We are never going to be able to compete on money. one of the best employees I ever hired was a 23 year old recent college graduate who wanted to go to law school in a few years, and she was interviewing for a pre litigation paralegal role. Now, that role at the time at my firm paid $50,000 a year salary, and if things went well, there would be a $10,000 bonus at the end of the year if they went really well, potentially up to 20,000, but it was $50,000 guaranteed at the time of her interview.
Kevin Cheney 00:04:42 She had an offer from the US Attorney's office to be a paralegal there that paid $70,000 a year guaranteed, and at least until recent times, having the US attorney on your resume was arguably the best legal thing you could do, right? And we managed to convince her to take $20,000 less to come work at our firm. And when you ask her why she came, it was our culture. She was like, I knew someone who worked here. I had talked to them. I looked at your social media. I saw you guys having fun. I heard about your your values and what you were fighting for. And I was really intrigued that on your cover letter requirement, you had to put your favorite type of music. In the final interview, when I was interviewing her, her and I just talked about music for 20 minutes. I never asked another question, didn't I never asked about, you know, really anything else other than her? And I both liked the same type of electronic music. so that's attracting top talent, through culture.
Kevin Cheney 00:05:45 is is really fundamental and a great way to compete against larger firms that can pay more. culture also shapes client experience. They feel it without knowing it. They feel the vibe and the energy of your office or when they walk in or on their on the phone. culture keeps people accountable. You can have great KPIs, you can have great systems. But if people aren't self-policing, you're never going to have fundamental success. culture creates resilience and growth. It gets you through the tough times. It gets you through the moments that are more difficult and keeps people, fired up about showing up to work every day. And finally, culture compounds. You know, it changes daily. Your culture gets a little bit better or a little bit worse every single day. Now there are three aspects to building culture. The hardest and most important is probably what is your culture today? Now, I can't help you with that. That requires you to be brutally honest with yourself and introspective. It's difficult because culture is often a reflection of self.
Kevin Cheney 00:06:51 It's a reflection of ownership. And so you have to admit your own faults, your own weaknesses, and you have to be honest with yourself about where you're at today. The second thing you need to do is decide where do you want to be in the future. I love a five year timeline. One year. It's really hard to change a ton of stuff in one year, but in five years you can have success beyond your wildest dreams. You can fundamentally change every aspect of your business in five years if you want to. So I like to use a five year horizon. What would the perfect culture be for you in five years based on where you're at today? And then finally, and what we're going to talk about today is how do you get from number one to number two? How do you. Once you've identified what your culture is, how and what you want it to be, how do you get to that culture? Now we're going to do that by running through my firm's culture and the intentional steps we took to get there.
Kevin Cheney 00:07:48 Now, I want to be very clear. The worst thing you could do. Would be like, oh, Kevin's culture sounds cool. How can I implement that in my firm? My culture, our firm's culture is a reflection of my partner and I. It's a reflection of what we wanted. And if most people went and tried to implement a lot of these things, it would be a disaster. So I'm just using my firm's culture as an example to show you this is this was the answer to our number two. This is what we wanted our firm culture to be based on what it was at the time. And we're going to go over the intentional steps that we took for each one of these to create that culture. So first and foremost, friends, now my partner and I were best friends, right? So when we only were two of us, our our culture was naturally one of really close friends. Our second permanent hire, one of our first, our first paralegal also was one of my best friends.
Kevin Cheney 00:08:45 So And then our third permanent hire was one of my partners, pretty good friends. So when there were five of us, four of the five were really good friends and we were thinking, well, this is really easy. You know, we were all friends before, but when we have 20 and 30 and hopefully one day 100 or 200 employees, how are we going to keep people being really good friends? And the reason this was important for us is Panera CEO recently said, you know, employees are not motivated to work harder to increase shareholder, you know, the shareholder value by a penny a day, right? You know, people are not going to be busting their ass to work hard to make you money. They might do it to make themselves money. They might do it because there's some mission involved, something they believe in, but they're not going to do it just to make more money for ownership. But people will do a lot for their friends. And I know that because I will still, if one of my friends who can't afford to hire a moving company calls me and is like, hey, will you come move my couch and my bed into this truck and drive me to the new couch.
Kevin Cheney 00:09:48 I will still do that. I'm incredibly busy. I would certainly hire movers for my own life, but I will do that for a friend because your friends generally will run through fire for you if you ask them. And so that was the vibe we wanted at our at our firm. So what intentional steps did we take to make sure that people at our firm are friends? Well, first, it's a main criteria we use when hiring people. What I like to hang out with you outside of work, right? If the answer is no, you will not work at my firm, right? It's really that simple. You can be the most qualified candidate in the world. But if I don't think we can hang out outside of work, chances are you're not getting hired. Second, we ask about people's interests in our cover letter. You always should have a cover letter question to make sure people are having attention to detail. Right? So we say and buried in our job ad it says in your cover letter, you must tell us your favorite type of music.
Kevin Cheney 00:10:40 And we tend to hire people who like electronic music. I love electronic music. I'm actually going to a festival tomorrow. Ten of my 30 employees are flying to Virginia for it. we know you don't have to like electronic music to work for us. We have people that like other types of music, but if you do. Chances are we're going to be friends. And maybe for you, it's mountain biking or sports or whatever it is. But we like to hire people that chances are going to get along with our current employees. Second, we ask our current employees to find us new employees. We pay $1,000. If they find the employee that we end up hiring, anyone they recommend gets a guaranteed interview, right? If you're my friend and you have a friend. Chances are your friend's friend is going to be friends with me, right? You've already kind of self vouched. Third, we give people opportunities to hang out outside of work. We do happy hours every other month. We do a potluck.
Kevin Cheney 00:11:39 In the opposite months we have season tickets to sports events throughout Denver. Now, some of the reason we have that is to give to referral sources and business connections, but we give every employee an opportunity to go to a Broncos game, a nuggets game, an avalanche game and a Rapids game. Every year they get to go to all four if they want to, because that makes the 25 year old recent college grad and the 47 year old, you know, grandfather who don't have a ton in common. They get to go out and hang out. You know, they get to go and hang out outside of work and get to know each other and build that camaraderie. we also do four team building events each year. and so one of those events and my favorite is every year we ran a big party bus and we go to Red rocks for a concert. Everyone gets to bring their significant others. It's always optional. Everything outside of work is optional, but it's a great opportunity to get people hanging out outside of work.
Kevin Cheney 00:12:33 And finally, we have a firm WhatsApp that is only to be used for non-work related communication. That way it's optional. You never have to check it. You never have to look at it if you don't want to. You never have to worry that you know there's an assignment in there or something important. But what do people do? They share memes. They share pictures of their kids. They invite people to things. Hey, I'm going to the park. Anybody want to go? Hey, I'm going out to, you know, this bar or anyone want to meet up? It's an opportunity to communicate outside of work and build deep friendships. Second employee owned. So this is also a reflection of my partner and I, you know, politically, I'm pretty far left. I always joked that I'm a socialist that somehow ended up owning a capitalist business. My partner is deeply into labor law. He was a mixed martial artist, a professional fighter. Before he went to law school. He went to law school.
Kevin Cheney 00:13:29 He wanted to be a union lawyer and unionized the UFC. this just reflects our views of the world. If we owned any business other than a law firm, I would take some of the equity, put it in a trust and have it for the benefit of past former and future employees. With a law firm, you can't do that unless you're in Arizona. Can't have non-lawyer owners. So how could we do this? So our pay structure, our bonus pool is set to a percentage of firm profit every year. We take 30% of the firm's profit. And that is our bonus pool. And then we use it discretionary discretionary in order to keep it ethical. But there are no individual performance bonuses. There's no individual KPI bonuses. Everything is team based and my staff are compensated like owners. If the firm has a good year, they make more money. If the firm has a bad year, they make less money. We do a lot of voting in polling, right? If we want to hire more people, it's going to raise our expenses and lower the bonus pool.
Kevin Cheney 00:14:31 But it also might reduce workloads. We if we want to move to a nicer office building, we'll hold a vote, right? We do a lot of voting now, look. My partner and I still own, you know, in our view, the majority share, right? It's not a complete democracy, but like a junior partner, I have my staff weigh in. We have a staff rep on the leadership team. It's basically their union rep. They're there to lobby for the staff. So if we say, hey, let's go, you know, switch case management softwares or let's go do this big project, the staff rep will be like, who's doing all that? Like who? What, what? How much time is that going to take? Is people are we going to lower KPIs while we implement that? Right. We treat people like owners next risk taking. So in personal injury law, risk taking is very, very important. There's no guarantee. Right. And often what happens with personal injury lawyers is they go to trial, they lose and then they never go to trial again.
Kevin Cheney 00:15:32 Right. It happened to us last year. We had a $200,000 offer on the table. That would have put about $100,000 in my 24 year old client's pocket. We recommended she turn it down. We say that's not enough. We went to trial. It was a defense verdict. She ended up with $0. It was crushing. It was hard. We had worked on this case for years. It was really difficult for a lot of people that would basically scare them into taking every settlement the insurance company offered in the future, right? We don't want those kind of people at our firm. So the bonus pool is actually a great way to sort this out, because every single one of my employees could make more money guaranteed at another firm. Every single one of them could get a higher salary at a rival personal injury firm. Because we pay low salaries, we want people who are willing to take the risk who say, look, pay me less, guaranteed, but give me more upside, give me more bonuses.
Kevin Cheney 00:16:30 Right. And some years we don't make it right. Some years they end up making less money because the firm had a down year or we were in growth mode, but most of the time they end up making more money. And so we want people that are risk takers. We also incentivize going to trial, right. One of our biggest KPIs is how often you take cases to trial. So we measure how many times you're willing to roll the dice rather than taking the guaranteed settlement. And finally, we oftentimes reward failure. People who are willing to try something new, who are willing to advance a new technique, who are willing to come up with a new idea, and they try it and they fail. We will often celebrate them at our next team building meeting and say, hey, this person came up with an idea. Turned out it was a horrible idea. Everything. Everything that had failed spectacularly. We were all here for it. But you know what? That's awesome. That's awesome. Because you know what? Of the ten ideas people have came up with this year, eight of them have succeeded, and we've become a better firm.
Kevin Cheney 00:17:34 And the only way you do that is by being willing to fail. So we're intentional about creating a risk taking culture by how we do our bonuses, going to trial and also, rewarding failure. Next. This is also a reflection of ourselves but also personal injury. Right? Personal injury law is very political in that there is a constant battle between the trial lawyers on one side and insurance companies and corporations on the other, and they are constantly working down at the legislature or in Congress to change the laws to benefit either or either side. Right? One law could change, and it could massively reduce the income of a personal injury firm. One law could change and it could massively increase the income of a personal injury firm. So by nature, it's a political process. And so our firm is openly political. We donate a lot of money to the Democratic Party in Colorado, who are generally friendlier to trial lawyers. We donate money to ballot initiatives and campaigns, and because of the way we do our bonus pool, every employee essentially donates to right? Because if the firm last year we donated about $50,000, that means $15,000.
Kevin Cheney 00:18:51 Of that, 30% was from the employees. We tell people that in the very first interview. Right. You don't have to agree with me politically to work here. You can be vote for whoever you want, believe whatever you want. But are you okay with knowing that some of your money is going to be going to these causes? Right. And look, does that alienate some potential employees? Yes, it absolutely does. There are some people who probably would be great at other firms who will not work for our firm, but I can tell you this, it attracts a ton of top talent because there's a lot of people out there who are really smart, and money is not their number one goal, and they don't want to go work for corporations. They don't want to go feel like they're working for the wrong side. And so just like when I was talking about that candidate at the very beginning, she was like, I don't want to go put people in prison, right? Like, I don't want to work for the US attorney.
Kevin Cheney 00:19:43 Like that just isn't that doesn't excite me. But like fighting for Davids against Goliath's I call personal injury law. We call it Robin Hood Law. Internally we take from the rich, we give to the poor. We take a third for ourselves. And that's and that's literally that's and that that is a message that sells. Right. And so if you care about social justice, if you care about politics, you will get along well. And that helps build the culture, right? Like most of our after hours work, chat is talking shit on the Trump administration. And that may not be for your firm. But if that that that unites us, right. And it builds an excellent culture. I'm almost out of time here. But the final one is fun, right? We want it to be fun. We go out, we hang out outside of work. We try to laugh every day. We tell jokes every day. We. If anyone has any ideas for something fun like will you sponsor my friends charity golf tournament? Will you sponsor a fun run? This is my partner, Tim and the weird hat.
Kevin Cheney 00:20:42 We're constantly making memes of each other, so, like, we'll find funny pictures of each other online and turn it into memes and, like, post it around the office. So this is one of my partner holding this rose in his mouth. we got our teams at the Bronco event. Birthday parties, right? Like above all else. Like, we want people to be excited to come to work every day. So at the beginning I said that I thought that culture that results drove the culture. But to me, it's actually the opposite. Culture drives the results. And if you get intentional about the culture that you want to build, you will be putting in place the building blocks of success down the road. Thank you.