The Walker Way

The Walker Way is also about striving for constant improvement. One element is the Walker Academy. The development of our team members starts on the day they join and that development is ongoing throughout their careers with us. Our team members are excellent at what they do – but we always want to make them better so that we are always delivering the very best for our clients.

For clients

The Walker Way means we are committed to being the best family lawyers that clients can access. This is not just about maintaining excellence at technical law. It is also about ensuring that our team approach resolving our client’s family law problems in the best possible way and are equipped with the skills both to deliver results and to look after our clients. The Walker Way is about delivering best practice. It is about achieving for our clients a good, fair, and swift resolution of their cases, in the right way:

To do this:

• Through our Academy we ensure our lawyers are always up to date with the latest legal developments and skills.
• All of our family lawyers are members of Resolution – a membership organisation for family law professionals which is at the leading edge in promoting law reform and constructive approaches to family law cases.
• We live the Resolution Code of Practice which is designed to reduce the “warfare” often associated with family breakdown.
• We live the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Principles and codes of practice  and are always compliant with our professional responsibilities.
• We maintain the Law Society practice management accreditation – Lexcel – which is a quality mark for client care, compliance, and practice management.
• We expect all our lawyers to gain and maintain a specialist family law or child law accreditation from the Law Society of Resolution. Any of our qualified lawyers who are not currently accredited are working towards achieving accreditation.
• We encourage all our Divorce lawyers to maintain at least one dispute resolution skills related qualification, i.e., Resolution Together, Collaborative Family Law, Family Mediation.
• In the legal work that we do for clients, we expect all our lawyers to be model professionals: we can be firm, but we are always polite, and never rude. When conducting court proceedings, we are purposeful, and outcome focussed.

• The Walker Way is also about wrapping this technical and professional approach in an outstanding level of service. To do this:
  • We have developed the Walker Service Pledge, above. This highlights our service commitments to our clients.
  • Our Walkers Service Pledge is backed by a Service Level Guarantee. Under the guarantee, if a client does not consider that they have received an exceptional service from us during the course of our engagement, they may unilaterally reduce our fee by up to 10% – no strings attached. Full details here.
  • The whole team at Walker Family Law works hard to deliver on our Service Pledge.
  • Our internal career path promotes people who look after our clients.

For our people

 The Walker Way also embodies us striving to be a great place to work, and a place where people can emerge, shine, and exceed their potential, all the time – in a nice, fair, uplifting environment:

• We enjoy working as a team, supporting, and looking after each other.
• We constantly develop our talent through the Walker Academy.
• We offer a career path which rewards hard work and commitment and doing the right things the right way, and which provides a range of opportunities for our people.
• Through our appraisals process, we aim to empower our team and support them to be the best they can be.
• We have a hard-working culture, not long-hours culture.
• We value being a fully diverse and inclusive practice, with total respect for each other.
• We all contribute to the development of the practice and winning new clients, and then to looking after them properly.
• We enjoy sharing our knowledge and experience and ideas.
• We value good communication and talking to each other and asking each other questions and answering those questions.
• We take pride in each other’s success.
• We encourage our team to enjoy activities together. Our team welfare committee organises activities throughout the year.
• We are a good business that generates the profit that brings the security that we all want.

For the world around us

 The Walker Way is also about doing the right thing in terms of how we engage with the world around us.

• A key part of the Walker Way is that, in addition to the work we carry out for private clients and High Net Worth individuals, and unlike many law firms nowadays, we are committed to retaining our excellent team of lawyers who provide a Legal Aid service. It is important to us to be providing access to justice for vulnerable clients or to clients who could not otherwise afford to access the family justice system.
• We very much encourage our team to participate in the wider family law world including participating in national committees, for example through Resolution and the Law Society, to contribute towards the development of good practice and campaigning for law reform.
• We encourage our team to engage in the wider world and to do good things. For example, volunteering and raising money for charity.
• As a practice we seek to provide focus for internal fundraising activities by working with a nominated charity.