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5 Ways to Retain Top Legal Talent: Why Employees Stay

By Richard Culberson |
December 17, 2024

5 Ways to Retain Top Legal Talent: Why Employees Stay

The following article was contributed by Richard Culberson, CEO of Moneypenny & VoiceNation, North America.

The legal profession is evolving rapidly, and so is the workforce driving it. This makes retaining top talent critical to ensuring continuity, quality of service, and avoiding the costs and disruption of frequent recruitment.

According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 47 million Americans left their jobs in 2021 alone, with millions continuing to do so each month. For businesses , this turnover presents both a challenge and an opportunity to understand what employees truly value and how to build a workplace they won’t want to leave.

Here are five steps to guide you in creating a workplace where professionals feel supported, motivated, and committed to growing with your firm.

1. Hire for Culture and Potential

The stakes are high in legal recruitment, and hiring the wrong person can have a ripple effect on morale, productivity, and client relationships. So, let’s slow down and hire right.

Instead of focusing solely on technical skills and qualifications, look beyond the resume for candidates whose values align with your firm’s culture and long-term goals. Diversity of thought and perspective is an asset in all business and adaptability is increasingly important. The first step is to revisit your hiring process to ensure you’re asking the right questions and seeking individuals who can not only excel in the role today but also grow with your firm in the future.

2. Invest in Their Professional Journey

Your people are your greatest assets, and just like your clients, they require attention and investment. You’ve spent time hiring right, now, it is time to invest in your choices, ensuring that they are set up to succeed from day one.

Make their onboarding experience seamless and engaging but also show them the culture and career path you promised during recruitment. Then, continue this thinking beyond the onboarding and provide opportunities for professional development through training, mentoring, and clear advancement pathways.

In the competitive legal sector, demonstrating a proactive commitment to employee growth and well-being is key to retaining top talent, ensuring your team feels valued and supported in reaching their full potential.

3. Foster Engagement Through Purpose

We all know that engaged employees are productive employees, but often it is forgotten that engagement starts with clarity. Do your team members understand how their daily work contributes to the firm’s overall success?

Lawyers are often driven by purpose—whether it’s delivering justice, protecting client interests, or achieving innovative outcomes. So, make it a priority to connect their individual roles to the bigger picture and, in doing so, celebrate their contributions, involve them in decision-making, and foster an environment of trust and open communication.

By aligning their goals with the firm’s mission, you create a workplace where everyone feels invested in the outcomes.

4. Lead with Empathy and Kindness

The legal world is often synonymous with high pressure and long hours, but that doesn’t mean kindness should take a backseat. Empathy and understanding go a long way in fostering loyalty and trust. It is important, therefore, to recognize achievements, whether big or small, and make time to connect with your team on a human level. From writing a personal thank-you note for a job well done to ensuring flexible working arrangements during challenging times, it’s often the little things that make the biggest difference.

Kindness isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s a powerful tool for building a resilient and loyal team.

5. Make Retention a Continuous Process

Retention isn’t a one-time initiative—it’s an ongoing commitment. Law is a people-centered business so embed employee well-being, recognition, and development into the core of your firm’s culture.

Create an environment where your people feel genuinely appreciated, understood, and aligned with the firm’s vision. By doing this, you’ll cultivate a culture of loyalty and stability, where your team thrives—and your clients benefit as a result.

Why Employees Stay

In a profession where your people are your greatest asset, putting them first is essential. A happy, engaged team isn’t just good for employee retention; it directly impacts client satisfaction and the firm’s reputation.

By investing in your employees, fostering connection, and leading with empathy, you can ensure your firm remains competitive, resilient, and ready to face the future with the best team by your side.

About the author

Richard Culberson

Richard Culberson

Commercial

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Commercial Legal Innovation

LSC Showcases Access-to-Justice Tech at San Antonio ITC

By John Freund |

The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) brought the access-to-justice conversation squarely into the technology arena with its 26th annual Innovations in Technology Conference (ITC), held this week in San Antonio. Drawing nearly 750 registered attendees from across the legal, business, and technology communities, the conference highlighted how thoughtfully deployed technology can expand civil legal assistance for low-income Americans while maintaining ethical and practical guardrails.

Legal Services Corporation reports that this year’s ITC convened attorneys, legal technologists, court staff, pro bono leaders, academics, and students at the Grand Hyatt San Antonio River Walk for three days of programming focused on the future of legal services delivery. The conference featured 56 panels—16 streamed online and freely accessible—covering topics ranging from artificial intelligence and cybersecurity to court technology, data-driven decision-making, and pro bono innovation.

LSC President Ron Flagg framed the event as a collaborative effort to ensure technology serves people rather than replaces human judgment. Emphasizing that technology is “not the answer by itself,” Flagg underscored its role as a critical tool when grounded in the real needs of communities seeking civil legal help. The conference opened with a keynote from journalist and author David Pogue, setting the tone for candid discussions about both the promise and limitations of emerging technologies.

A notable evolution this year was the introduction of five structured programming tracks—AI beginner, AI advanced, IT operations, client intake, and self-help tools—allowing attendees to tailor their experience based on technical familiarity and organizational needs. The event concluded with hands-on workshops addressing cybersecurity incident response, improving AI accuracy and reliability, change management for staff resilience, and user experience evaluation in legal tech.

Beyond the conference itself, ITC reinforced LSC’s broader leadership in access-to-justice technology, including its Technology Initiative Grants, AI Peer Learning Lab, and its recent report, The Next Frontier: Harnessing Technology to Close the Justice Gap. Senior program officer Jane Ribadeneyra emphasized the dual focus on informed leadership decisions and practical tools that directly support frontline legal services staff handling matters like eviction, domestic violence, and disaster recovery.

For the litigation funding and legal finance community, ITC’s themes highlight a growing intersection between technology, access to justice, and capital deployment—raising questions about how funders may increasingly support tech-enabled legal service models alongside traditional case funding.

Commercial

Litigation Financiers Organize on Capitol Hill

By John Freund |

The litigation finance industry is mobilizing its defenses after nearly facing extinction through federal legislation last year. In response to Senator Thom Tillis's surprise attempt to impose a 41% tax on litigation finance profits, two attorneys have launched the American Civil Accountability Alliance—a lobbying group dedicated to fighting back against efforts to restrict third-party funding of lawsuits.

As reported in Bloomberg Law, co-founder Erick Robinson, a Houston patent lawyer, described the industry's collective shock when the Tillis measure came within striking distance of passing as part of a major tax and spending package. The proposal ultimately failed, but the close call exposed the $16 billion industry's vulnerability to legislative ambush tactics. Robinson noted that the measure appeared with only five weeks before the final vote, giving stakeholders little time to respond before the Senate parliamentarian ultimately removed it on procedural grounds.

The new alliance represents a shift toward grassroots advocacy, focusing on bringing forward voices of individuals and small parties whose cases would have been impossible without funding. Robinson emphasized that state-level legislation now poses the greater threat, as these bills receive less media scrutiny than federal proposals while establishing precedents that can spread rapidly across jurisdictions.

The group is still forming its board and hiring lobbyists, but its founders are clear about their mission: ensuring that litigation finance isn't quietly regulated out of existence through misleading rhetoric about foreign influence or frivolous litigation—claims Robinson dismisses as disconnected from how funders actually evaluate cases for investment.

Commercial

ISO’s ‘Litigation Funding Mutual Disclosure’ May Be Unenforceable

By John Freund |

The insurance industry has introduced a new policy condition entitled "Litigation Funding Mutual Disclosure" (ISO Form CG 99 11 01 26) that may be included in liability policies starting this month. The condition allows either party to demand mutual disclosure of third-party litigation funding agreements when disputes arise over whether a claim or suit is covered by the policy. However, the condition faces significant enforceability challenges that make it largely unworkable in practice.

As reported in Omni Bridgeway, the condition is unenforceable for several key reasons. First, when an insurer denies coverage and the policyholder commences coverage litigation, the denial likely relieves the policyholder of compliance with policy conditions. Courts typically hold that insurers must demonstrate actual and substantial prejudice from a policyholder's failure to perform a condition, which would be difficult to establish when coverage has already been denied.

Additionally, the condition's requirement for policyholders to disclose funding agreements would force them to breach confidentiality provisions in those agreements, amounting to intentional interference with contractual relations. The condition is also overly broad, extending to funding agreements between attorneys and funders where the insurer has no privity. Most problematically, the "mutual" disclosure requirement lacks true mutuality since insurers rarely use litigation funding except for subrogation claims, creating a one-sided obligation that borders on bad faith.

The condition appears designed to give insurers a litigation advantage by accessing policyholders' private financial information, despite overwhelming judicial precedent that litigation finance is rarely relevant to case claims and defenses. Policyholders should reject this provision during policy renewals whenever possible.