SLG's Mission Statement: an Ode to Our Values

At SLG we recently crafted a new mission statement with the amazing and talented Nellie Cohen, founder of Baleen, a branding agency dedicated working with sustainable companies. It was an all-day process filled with personal reflection, group brainstorming and wordsmithing. If you’ve ever gone through this branding process, you may have felt it was part Mad Libs and part poetry. It certainly felt that way to us. Filling in adjectives and verbs around the mutual aspirations of your team is an exercise that we highly recommend undertaking for any business or nonprofit that seeks to make an impact.

A mission statement should authentically answer the questions “what do you do?” and “How do you do it?” It should stem from your collective values. Here is ours:

“We offer creative legal counsel rooted in respect and compassion towards our clients, communities and selves.”

We arrived at this ode to our work through a tried and true process of considering first our individual and collective values, our purpose, and then finally a simple expression of what we do.

It’s probably obvious that, as a law firm, our mission is to provide legal counsel. But it might seem out of the ordinary to combine “legal counsel” with the words: “creative”, “respect” and “compassion”. And it may be even stranger for a law firm to apply such concepts to more than just the client, but also to its communities and selves. That is, it might seem strange if you’ve never worked with us. These three words: “creative”, “respect” and “compassion” are our core values.

Creative Legal Counsel

Creativity is core to our legal counsel because our clients, and their legal needs, are unique. The creative process starts with listening deeply to what our clients need, and then looking for several paths forward. For example, we also look for solutions to clients ongoing needs that do not necessarily involve legal advice. We created a panel for the 2019 B Corp Champions Retreat in Los Angeles to address common issues that our nonprofit clients have when working with for profit sponsors. Since we know the B Corp community is dedicated to working with their communities and nonprofits, we thought they would be particularly interested in hearing from the local nonprofit community about best practices for working with them. It was a powerful session which brought our nonprofit panelists and the B Corp audience members together to work toward a common goal. One of our nonprofit panelists even discovered that a new funder was attending the audience, and that funder was thrilled to be able to learn the best approaches to working with this nonprofit.

Respect

Respect within our mission statement is the glue that holds up our relationships with our clients, each other and our colleagues at other firms. Respect is something that unfortunately seems to have gone missing in the legal profession recently. Lawyers have a reputation for being sharks, bull-dogs, fixers, and liars. This is baffling to us given that the profession is based on the principles of fairness and justice. When it comes to how we handle any matter, we hold ourselves, our clients and other attorneys accountable. Opposing counsel that think that using bullying as a pressure tactic, get nowhere with us. Instead, we focus on getting the deal done without the drama, respecting everyone in the process. Sometimes, our own client acts disrespectfully toward our attorneys or staff. Many years ago, I had a wealthy entrepreneur client who made inappropriate #MeToo level comments during one of our business meetings among other unsavory acts. This was a rare situation, as we pride ourselves on working with clients who are ethical and self-aware. However, in this instance where the client clearly overstepped boundaries, I had no problem withdrawing my representation. Groveling for clients that do not show us respect is never worth it in our estimation. We have decided to work only with those clients that we believe in and be all-in for.

Compassion

Compassion might be lacking in the world today, but at SLG, we can’t help but wear our hearts on or sleeves. This is easy to do when many of our clients are nonprofits and businesses dedicated to making the world a better place. However, compassion is probably most clearly demonstrated in our estate planning practice. When I was first starting out as a lawyer, I litigated an elder abuse case for siblings whose mother had ended up in a coma as a result of her doctor’s negligence. Their mother was subsequently neglected and abused physically by nursing home staff. This was a devastating situation that no one would want to have happen to their loved ones, or themselves. What made the situation even worse was that the siblings disagreed about when and if they should let their mother pass or keep her on life support. As a result, she languished for over a year while the entire family’s lives were upended. We will never know if the mother wanted to be kept alive in these circumstances or not, and I wish she had the opportunity to express her wishes to her children. We practice estate planning because we’ve seen what a lack of planning does to a family, just like these first clients of mine. We help our clients create estate plans that ensure that their own wishes are followed, giving their loved ones, who are charged with making tough decisions, a roadmap. This kindness gives our clients and their loved one’s peace of mind, and this is compassion at the highest level.

Clients, Communities and Selves

Underlying our mission of creative legal counsel, respect and compassion, is our commitment to the 360 degrees in which operate these values. Not just towards our clients, but to the community and ourselves. This, we feel is the most authentic way we can show up in our work. It would not be compassionate towards our clients for us to fail to take care of our own health and wellness. It would not be respectful to our client if we were to act like animals in the process of negotiating a deal on their behalf, giving the other party a bad impression of our client. And, it would not be creative legal counsel if we were not also considering outcomes for our clients that are solutions for all parties and stakeholders alike.

Our mission statement is a true reflection, an ode, to what we do and how we do it.

How about you? What is your mission statement? Please share it with us at: admin@slg.law.

Becki Ueno

Partner, SLG