Linklaters

But leadership is not confined to partners. We expect everyone to take responsibility for leading, by living the firm’s values. Our teams also need to work together towards shared goals. Finally, our firm-wide culture needs to provide the confidence and common purpose required to deliver consistent client service.

Our shared values

We have shared values, which guide how we conduct our relationships with one another and our stakeholders, while working towards achieving our vision:

• We strive for excellence, value teamwork and encourage imagination.
• We are determined – whatever the challenge, we will deliver.
• We do all this exercising commercial judgement and integrity.

In a firm of more than 500 partners and 5,000 people across 26 offices, how do we foster this culture and leadership?

One direction

We have more than 500 partners across the world. Most of them own the firm; they are all its leaders and managers. How do we make sure they are all pulling in the same direction?

It takes a combination of things. For example, when identifying future leaders, we look for people who live the firm’s values, whatever their background. We discuss our vision in depth at leadership training courses. And our “lockstep” profit sharing structure motivates partners to make decisions for the benefit of the whole firm.

Teamwork

Our people work in teams every day: practices, sector teams, client teams, business services functions, the list could go on. How do we get these teams, and the individuals within them, working together as one firm? It is essential to get this right if we are to work smoothly across borders, jurisdictions and sectors.

Our approach is to build teamwork into our culture and encourage people to develop their own relationships with colleagues in other practices and offices. We encourage secondments between our offices and with clients. We also run conferences at practice level and global training courses, providing opportunities to network and share approaches to dealing with matters. This means that when they are called upon to work on cross-border deals, many of the team already know one another.

Initiative and innovation

The nature of our work means we often find ourselves creating a path through unexplored territory. Innovation is an important part of our offering to our clients, but it also creates challenges. How do we make sure our people have the confidence to try new things? And how do we encourage innovation while expecting technical excellence and ensuring prudence?

We believe in creating an open working environment where people understand that there is room for honest mistakes and that learning from them is part of being an innovative firm. Junior lawyers share offices with senior lawyers and work under high standards of supervision.

Maintaining the quality of our work means checking everything meticulously before it goes to a client, creating a culture of consultation, having an “open door” policy and providing for peer review whenever it is needed.

Sustaining our culture.

One of the responsibilities of being a global firm is to make sure our clients and people receive the same experience of Linklaters everywhere in the world. To make that a reality, we have to reinforce a strong culture.

We talked above about the values we share as a firm. These are the building blocks of our culture. To build this culture, everyone in the firm – from the most senior to the most junior – needs to live these values. We reinforce them through our induction programmes around the world and on many of our global training courses. They are regularly referred to in our decision making processes.