Core Values That Drive Firm Success

00:00 Speaker 1 Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda, and I'll be your host. 00:23 Speaker 2 Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another edition of the Effective Lawyer podcast. I'm Kevin Tully, the Chief Marketing Officer at Zinda Law Group, and today we're going to be talking about why your law firm needs core principles and how to use them. With me is Jack Zinda, our founder and lead trial lawyer. Jack, how's it going? 00:39 Speaker 1 Great, man. How are you doing, Kevin? 00:41 Speaker 2 All right. Well, today, core principles. Maybe we can start out by just talking about what exactly are core principles? 00:47 Speaker 1 That's a great question. To me, core principles are the constitution of your law firm. They're the Bill of Rights. They're the guiding North Star. There's things that you're not going to violate no matter what. You're willing to lose money to uphold your core principles. You hire and fire people based on your core principles, and it's how you act and how you practice law and how you run your business. 01:12 Speaker 2 Got it. Just to clear up a couple things, because I think when we talk about core principles, people can get a little confused with mission statement core principles. Do you use them internally only? Do you use them externally in your marketing materials? If you could distinguish for me a little bit about between how you think of those things and specifically how core values should and should not be used. 01:37 Speaker 1 That'S a great question. So, you know, we have two key parts of that. One is our core purpose, which is to help as many people as possible through the practice of law, regardless of wealth. And if you notice that's kind of built in a really specific way, and that's what we do. So core purpose is, and some people might call it their mission statement. And there's a lot of different ways you can put that together. Core principles would prescribe conduct. So how do we achieve that objective? So one of our core principles is excellence always. Which to us means that we do things the right way, whether it's big or small. One thing we talk about is, you know, we all tie our shoes the right way. And there's analogy behind that ties to that core principle. So it prescribes conduct. 02:27 Speaker 1 Where is a core purpose is kind of like your mountaintop. What is it that we do? Why are we here? A core purpose can be really helpful in keeping you aligned with whether you take a case, what types of cases you take, what types of law firm you are. So, for example, if you notice with ours, we say, regardless of wealth. So that means we want to be a contingency fee practice. We want to help individuals, we didn't say corporations. And we want to help a lot of people. And we use law to achieve that objective which precludes other areas of the law. That means we're not going to represent a business. It means we're not going to charge money up front to represent people. And we also want to help folks. 03:12 Speaker 1 So all of those tie together with what we're trying to achieve in different areas of law we would pick to work on or not work on. 03:19 Speaker 2 Right. Okay. So you mentioned one of the core principles. Would you mind just sharing the rest of them so we have the full list to talk about? 03:30 Speaker 1 Yeah, no problem. So our core principles, which we've had for man, probably at least 12 years. The first is failure is not an option. Like I said, that means we do everything the right way, big or small. And this came from the concept of, you know, if a paralegal files something the wrong way or sends a fax the wrong way back when we send faxes or, you know, an attorney is doing routine discovery and there's typos in it, that might be considered, quote, a small mistake. But my belief is if you make small mistakes, you're going to make big mistakes. And the way you practice is the way you get results. So by doing the little things right, no matter what level of the organization you're in, that'll lead to really big results. 04:17 Speaker 1 A great story that I like to tell that I heard about John Wooden, who for those of you who don't know, John Wooden is a famous UCLA basketball coach. And I apologize if I get this story wrong. It's kind of handed down third version and I'm probably going to retell it a little off. But John Wooden was the most, was kind of the coach k on steroids of his time, had won 11 championships in a row, was at UCLA, had some of the best basketball players in the world. You know, Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Bill Walton were on the same team. And the first day of practice every year he would have the players come in to practice and. And he would spend the first 10 minutes teaching them how to lace up their shoes. 05:01 Speaker 1 And you can imagine you have these superstars around the world, around the country, and their coach is telling them how to lace up their tennis shoes. Which seems kind of ridiculous, but his theory on it was if you lace your shoes up the right way, you weren't going to get blisters. And if you got blisters, you're going to hurt your ankle. And if you hurt your ankle, you're going to miss games. And if you miss games, we don't win championships. And I love that analogy because it takes something that seems insignificant and shows how it can have a major impact. Our next core principle is failure is not an option. 05:34 Speaker 1 And to that, we really look at it through the lens of being an attorney, that if our clients have a problem and we've decided to take on that problem to solve it in our case, you know, helping someone with a personal injury case or a wrongful death case, we're going to assume there's answer there and we're going to figure out how do we go over the wall, under the wall, around the wall, through the wall to solve the problem for our client? A lot of people come at problems and they say, well, there's no answer and they give up. We don't believe in that. We believe in failure is not an option. The next is we only want people that strive to be the best to work at our law firm. So it's only the best to us. 06:12 Speaker 1 That doesn't mean that people are at the pinnacle of their career. It means that they're an A player for the role they're in at the firm and that they are constantly striving to get better. And as you can see, these can also tie into, like how you hire people, what types of people you hire. The next core principle is we outwork our opponents, which means that we're going to put in as much work as possible to achieve the results we want. That doesn't mean we're workaholics, but it means that if there's a problem on a case, we're not going to give up till we find a solution. And we're not going to let the defense outwork us to win a case. The next is we all take out the trash. 06:55 Speaker 1 And this kind of came from the idea of a lot of attorneys have really big egos and, you know, they don't treat the staff well or they don't treat everybody the same. And I didn't want to have an organization like that. And so from the beginning, we all take out the trash has been a really key piece to what we're all about. Which means if you're a partner or you're the newest level legal assistant, everybody has a job to do and everybody's treated well and nobody's above or below doing anything else. And the final one is we make data driven decisions so we try to use our experiences to draw out things that happened to help make future decisions. And that's one thing that I think sets us apart from other law firms is we're really big into data and analytics. 07:41 Speaker 1 And so those are the core principles we use to help us hire, fire, make decisions, and avoid doing things that may violate those. 07:51 Speaker 2 So how hard was it to come up with those? 07:55 Speaker 1 You know, it's actually pretty challenging, to be honest. And they built over time. I think the first one was excellence always, and the second was we all took out the trash. Data driven decisions used to be we run the firm like a business. And that was because a lot of law firms don't really pay attention to their financials. And we decided to tweak that to be we make data driven decisions because that more lined up with what we're trying to say. But it's very hard. I mean, it took a while to put those together. 08:27 Speaker 2 Yeah, I would imagine. How do you think about evolving them over time and should they evolve? Or is it something where you set them once and these are the guideposts and they never change? 08:38 Speaker 1 I'm a believer in change, and I think change is constant. Now. Core principles, like a constitution, should not be amended very often, or they're not very good core principles. Ours have modified, on average, probably once every couple years, we'll make a modification and you want to revisit them no less than once a year to see do they still apply to what we're trying to achieve and what our objective is. For example, if our firm decided, you know, what, we want to start doing commercial litigation on a contingency fee, we probably have to tweak our core purpose a little bit, because now we're not just helping people, we're helping businesses. You know, if we felt like data driven decisions wasn't really critical to our success anymore, we might tweak it and substitute a different one in or just remove it completely. 09:38 Speaker 2 This podcast is presented by Zynda Law Group, a nationwide personal injury firm. For over 10 years, the experienced lawyers at ZLG have been partnering with outside counsel across the United States on all types of personal injury and wrongful death cases. With over 30 attorneys, Zynda Law Group has paid out millions in referral and joint venture fees since 2015. To learn more about partnering with Zynda Law Group, please email us@re referralsindalaw.com we'll schedule a time for you to meet with Jack Zynda or one of our trial lawyers to discuss your case. So We've talked about kind of the purpose of them, maybe how to set them a little bit. Actually, here's another question about setting your core values. Were these things that you came up with on your own or did you work with a leadership team to establish these? 10:33 Speaker 1 A little bit of both. So when I started the firm, there wasn't a lot of people around, but I would talk to people I trusted and kind of back to the process of how you want to put your core principles together. You know, first you want to envision where you want to be, you know, say 10 years from now. When you consider whatever success is in your own mind. You want to think through what do I want to be doing, what do I not want to be doing? What are the things that I think are not right for me? What sort of behaviors do I want to encourage, what sort of behaviors do I want to discourage? 11:05 Speaker 1 And then I would go into a room with a whiteboard and just write all of that type of behavior out without any consideration of is it a core principle or not? Get it all out of your head and then look at it and see is there some commonalities there? And don't put pressure on yourself to be perfect. I think this is why it took me so long to put them together at the level I was happy with is I was trying to go for perfection versus getting something that applied in the moment, then iterating and making it better and better. But I really think that vision, process, and a lot of times people will put core principles together that don't make sense for themselves. 11:46 Speaker 1 If you are a high volume practice, you don't want to put a core principle in that indicates you're going to handle a low number of cases or you want to be true to yourself and also true to what you want your organization to be, not what somebody else is or what you might hope to pretend it would be. If that makes sense. 12:06 Speaker 2 Yeah, it does for sure. I think one of the stigmas around establishing core values for your organization is that people are going to think, oh, this is cheesy, right? Like these are lines that people just say, but there's not meaning behind them, or it's just the whole thing is just a little goofy. I think where they're most effective is when they're really authentic to your organization and to who you are as people, even especially those core people that establish the organization. So I think authenticity is really important for what we'll talk about in a minute, which is getting the buy in from the rest of the team on those core values. 12:43 Speaker 1 You know you came from before you joined our organization, a couple really big companies. I know one was indeed. What was the way they handled their core principles and how does it compare to the way we do it? 12:57 Speaker 2 It's pretty similar. We had kind of the same framework of core purpose, which it indeed was. We help people get jobs and then they laid out the core values. I'd be lying if I said I could remember what they all were, but I knew them while I was there. And then yeah, in other organizations I've been in sort of handled them in a variety of different ways. But I think this firm especially has done a really good job of laying them out, explaining how to use them, which I think is something that often gets lost. People might know, okay, these are our core values, but how do I use them when hiring? How do I use them when rewarding? If we have to let someone go, what purpose do they play in that process? 13:46 Speaker 2 So I'd like to talk to you a little bit about that, the mechanics of it, how do you apply them in the day to day and then we'll get to from there, hiring, training on them and then reminding folks down the line. 14:01 Speaker 1 One thing that I realized is you have to communicate them a lot. And again, everything I'm saying in this podcast just so I don't violate copyright is taken from some book I read or someone told me I heard a speech on it. So this is. None of these are my own ideas. Okay. So just for the record, so it doesn't seem like I'm taking credit. So you've got to say it over and over and over until it is like driving you crazy that you say it so much. Because as the founder or an attorney or a key leader in an organization, you don't realize how few times you communicate these things to folks when you're saying it over and over again. So I think you. We repeat it at every monthly meeting we have with the lawyers. 14:48 Speaker 1 We repeat it at every executive team meeting, we repeat it at every all hands meeting. And it's just like wash, rinse, repeat, refresh. We hit it every time we hire a new person. That's a big part of the of that. So I think you have to reiterate them over and over again. And then when you're thinking about the best way to use them, I think there's kind of three or four opportunities. One is in the hiring context and we actually put our core principles in our job postings. I find that does a couple things. One it discourages the wrong type of people from applying. Number two, it gives someone a sense of what type of organization we are and it'll get the right type of people excited to work here. And I think that can be super helpful. 15:43 Speaker 1 And then when we're interviewing people, we actually use a scorecard and we have certain questions that tie to the core principles. And we'll score somebody on a core principle based on their experiences and how they interact with, answer certain questions we have, which holds it true to that decision making framework. 16:04 Speaker 2 And then I've seen that we kind of apply a similar process for reviews and continuing to coach people throughout the course of their tenure here. Talk about that a little bit, how it's used and rewarding and just check ins. 16:22 Speaker 1 Yeah, we have. So I'm looking at a document that we have that we use internally. It's called the people Analyzer. And we use the people analyzer to evaluate performance. And then if someone's struggling to figure out what the struggle is. And within there we have the core principles listed. And we have, for example, for an attorney, we all take out the trash means that I have a help first and a positive can do attitude. So if someone's struggling at work and we're like, gosh, they just have a bad attitude, they're not nice to the staff, they're kind of rude, they're getting the job done, but people really don't like them and they're tough to work with. You know, that would be a violation of, you know, we all take out the trash. So say, okay, that's a violation. 17:08 Speaker 1 And then the way we score it is a plus would be, you know, almost all the time they exhibit that core principle. A minus would be almost none of the time they exhibit it. And a plus minus would be some of the time they don't. And if someone has a minus, then we need to course correct to get them to a plus. And we only allow a certain number of plus minuses. It's the same process when we're looking for raises and promotions. We go through a similar analysis and see what is making this person great. Which core principle are they really shining on? You know, this paralegal, they are always perfect on their discovery excellence, always. They went out of their way to learn the new local rules and the new jurisdictions we joined, okay, we're infinite learners and we use that. 18:02 Speaker 1 And people that are really doing great in those areas get promoted and get to the next level. The other thing that we do is we share that with the person that we're evaluating. I'm a big believer in honesty and kind of explaining where we're coming from. Now, one thing to know, just because someone violates a core principle doesn't mean they're a bad person. They just might be a bad fit for your organization or they don't know it. Right. That example, someone is difficult to work with. They may not even know that's the case. 18:38 Speaker 1 One of my favorite people at the firm who's been here forever was having some issues with some turnover with their paralegals and super nice guy, you know, and we sat down and kind of talked through it and he was just being perceived the wrong way because he was busy and, you know, his cadence was taken as aggressive when it was just rushed. And so we gave him some tools like, hey, you know, why don't you start doing team lunches? Want to get to know your team a little bit better and see if that solves the problem. And sure enough, it did. 19:09 Speaker 2 Nice. That's a great application to keep in mind. What do you do? And this is going to be, I think, the hardest question of the interview. Let's call it. When you have a. There's this concept of the aberrant star performer, as it's called in the book Trillion Dollar Coach, which is about Bill Campbell, a famous executive coach in Silicon Valley. And he describes having someone on your team. And I think the example in the book is a developer who's very strong at what they do, but despite trying to course correct on core values, still doesn't align with. With that company's core values. Is there a situation that's come along where you have a top attorney, a star performer of some kind, that can't align on the core values, and what do you do in that situation? 20:01 Speaker 1 You know, that is a. That is always a difficult situation. And I think a lot of times people try to avoid that problem by just letting the person stick around at the organization. I think unfortunately, you have to part ways or you have to change your core principles. I think they're in conflict if you try to do both. There's been instances where, not with the attorney roles, but with other roles where we move someone to a vendor, you know, a contractor, and they're able to do their job by themselves and it'll really affect the organization. I could see, for example, you know, if someone was a graphic designer who, you know, just was good at doing the graphics but, you know, terrible employee, that they could just be a contractor and not be Part of the team. 20:51 Speaker 1 But I think if you're going to have it as a core principle, you have to be willing to fire based on those. Even if it is a painful decision or it's not really a core principle. It's more of a suggestion. Now, I don't know what the. I should probably ask you what the trillion dollar coach said, because that's probably the right answer, not what I said. 21:11 Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it was pretty. Pretty in line. I'd have to be honest. Go back and read it. It's been a minute. But to try to coach them through, to try to get them to align with the core values as much as possible, and then if they're really that much of a superstar and they're still not able to align, that you try to silo them as much as possible, which is what you're describing. And I don't know that they suggested turning them into a contractor or vendor, although I think that's a great idea. I think this was a little bit more about you as the manager. Need to be that buffer and to try to shield them from the rest of the team. Because the concern is that attitude then becomes pervasive throughout the team. 21:59 Speaker 2 Or others look to them and say, well, if they're getting away with this kind of behavior, I can too. And so you have to, as the manager, be the shield, at the very least, between those. Those two things. 22:08 Speaker 1 Yeah, I completely agree. And I think, especially in the law context, if they're an attorney, that is very difficult. And I do always worry about that emperor has no clothes situation where we say all of. But everyone knows that if you make you enough money, it don't matter. And that really scares me in the form of, like, ethics issues. Right. You know, in what we do. So I think it's very difficult if it's an attorney or a paralegal to silo them. I could see in other roles it being effective, but quite honestly, we've had positions that were administrative in nature, and I knew that I was ignoring the core principal issue. And it never worked out. It never. I was never able to silo them correctly. You know, I kept hoping that it would change. 22:54 Speaker 1 And I'm not talking about situations where we're able to coach and you see change in behavior. It's where it's like, this is clear. This ain't changing. I've always regretted it. And it usually takes me, you know, six months to finally, you know, get it. And then when I do, it's like, okay, that's a Much better decision. Not just for me, but for the person as well, usually because they sense it, like, they send some things off also. 23:16 Speaker 2 Yeah. What else do you want to add about core values? 23:19 Speaker 1 Well, I think number one is create your own. Don't put pressure on yourself to make them perfect, but have them tweak them over time and review them once a year. Don't put pressure on yourself to do all the things that we're doing. But if you want to, you could start including them in your interview process, your evaluation of people. I use it to evaluate myself, frankly. You know, if I'm not happy with how I'm performing, I say, which core principle am I not living up to? And it might be excellence, always, because I'm too busy. I'm not putting enough work into something. You know, maybe I'm acting too big for myself because I'm the, quote, CEO, so, you know, I'll take out the trash. So. My wife reminds me of that all the time. She's like, you're not above. 24:05 Speaker 1 She's like, nobody's above cleaning toilets. That's what Joyce tells me. So I think, use them to evaluate yourself and your team. Have them be able to explain them. Don't steal someone else's and be true to yourself. I don't look at them as moral documents. It's like what you want to be or who you are. Not necessarily like some pie in the sky thing. It's like, I'm a nice person. That's not really what they're designed to be. It's like, you know, it could be. I show. We show compassion for all of our clients. 24:39 Speaker 2 Yeah. 24:39 Speaker 1 You know, that could be one. 24:41 Speaker 2 Just to underscore one of the things you said there is to explain them. I've been in some situations where they get repeated often, and there are a few in there that nobody knows what they mean. You know, they've been wordsmithed in a way that they're snappy and they're memorable, but you actually don't know what it's supposed to be conveying. So I always like that when we go over our core values, there's kind of a subtext to each one, like, here's what this means in practice, and examples for the different groups around the organization of how they might apply them. So I always think that's helpful. 25:15 Speaker 1 And, you know, they've worked. If you hear people saying them, that's the other thing. If you hear other team members repeating them, you know, that's like sticking. 25:22 Speaker 2 Yeah. You know, it's funny. The way that comes up sometimes in even like a joking context. Right. Like with if somebody has to do something, you know they don't want to do that somebody in the room is saying, hey, we all take out the trash. And kind of in a sort of way. But it is a good way to see that they're sticking. Well, Jack, thanks so much for spending time on this topic. Any other resources or places you want to point people to if they're interested in pursuing this topic? 25:49 Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a couple really good books. One is called Culture Code, which has some good stuff on building culture, which kind of ties into the core principles process. And we can add the author in the show notes. And there's a ton of resources out there on this topic. So if you're really struggling, you know, pick up a book that talks about it and you'll get there pretty fast. Great. 26:14 Speaker 2 Well, thanks for the time, Jack. We appreciate it. 26:16 Speaker 1 No problem. Good time. Kevin. 26:22 Speaker 2 Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com. As always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.