What benefits, perks, or ways of working are most attractive when choosing a firm to work at? And what keeps people there?

Cameron Madgwick

CEO at Gibson Sheat Lawyers

Traditionally, the financial side of a law firm (how it was performing, where the profit came from) has sat with the partners and partners only. We decided to do things differently.

Two years ago, we introduced a staff profit-sharing scheme. That meant being far more open with our financial information than most firms are used to. We believed that if everyone shares in the firm's profit, everyone has a reason to care about it — it aligns staff with the firm's profit goals.

One of the best parts of the scheme has been the way people right across the firm are discussing and asking how we could make ourselves even better and more profitable. We’ve seen strong improvements across many of our financial metrics, and our people can see the difference each improvement makes.

The clearest signal, though, is retention. Our turnover year-to-date is 1.4%. In a market where good people are hard to hold onto, that number shows that a perk helps get people in the door, but a stake in the outcome is what keeps them.

It's been a roaring success!

Amy Brown

Practice Manager at Stratus Legal

As a small regional firm, we've had to think differently about how we attract and retain great people. Experienced professionals are hard to find locally, so we’ve embraced remote working and flexible hours as a core part of our model. This has opened the door to a much broader talent pool and, importantly, provides flexibility that appeals to people at many stages of life, particularly working parents.

The most impactful change to attracting and retaining talent has been an optional four-day week for full-time staff. We make it work by letting team members select a fixed non-working day — typically Monday or Friday — and we manage this to ensure an even spread and avoid overlap within the same practice area, so coverage is maintained.

On working days, everyone runs fixed hours, either 7:00am–5:00pm or 8:00am–6:00pm, so total weekly hours stay consistent. Working days and hours go in email signatures, out-of-office replies are required on non-working days, and there's a strong expectation around communication and handover: if something's due or likely to land on someone's day off, it's proactively passed to an assisting team member.

Since launching in September, we haven't had a single client complaint tied to the four-day week, and the response internally has been overwhelmingly positive. It's become a real drawcard in recruitment, personal leave has fallen noticeably, morale and engagement have lifted and the team are reporting a better work-life balance.

I think about my own early years in a full-time law firm role, when weekends were spent on life admin rather than actually recharging. The four-day week gives our team the space to handle that, or simply rest, which ultimately leads to happier, more productive people.

Lena Ormsby

Law Student at University of Auckland

When I think about where I'd want to work, what tells me the most about a firm is whether they've shown up at the university and in the student clubs and associations.

A lot of firms keep to the general law tutorials and law student societies, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it only shows one side of things. What I'd really like to see is firms engaging with the Māori law students' associations, alongside the other cultural groups across campus.

That kind of involvement says something a job ad doesn’t. It tells me a firm cares about the community it's part of, not just the graduates it can hire from it. A firm that's put genuine time into those spaces is one I'd trust to value the same things once I'm actually there.