CMS aims to be recognised as the best European provider of legal and tax services. The nine member firms of CMS together have 56 offices in 28 countries and between them have over a thousand years of history. CMS has a shared culture and a common heritage that makes it distinctively European.
Clients say that what makes CMS special is a combination of three things:
- Strong, trusted client relationships
- High quality advice
- Industry specialism
We combine deep local expertise and the most extensive presence in Europe with cross-border consistency and coordination.
CMS Cameron McKenna shares the vision of CMS. We are one of the founding members of CMS and believe passionately that the CMS model of pricing work locally and sharing revenues globally allows us to provide the best possible service to all our clients, wherever they are.
Our values
We undertook a review of the values introduced last year as part of Duncan Weston’s Managing Partner election manifesto. We considered them carefully in light of our clients and our people. We confirmed that these values are what we will hold to be truly important. They define who we are as a firm. They give us a foundation on which to operate daily and are key to the implementation of any strategy. It is our values that will allow us to build a flexible and adaptive firm that can continuously change to achieve our vision.
Our behaviour must reflect our values. Our behaviour is how we ultimately will be judged as to whether we walk the talk or not. We can only be congruent and aligned with our values when our daily behaviour fully reflects our values. People will judge us not on what we say our values are but rather if we practise them on a day-to-day basis! We believe our values must shape and influence the choices we make each and every day in our work. Our values must hold us to a higher standard and help us achieve the best - both individually and as a firm.
We will achieve this by:
- Articulating clearly the values we choose to hold
- Inspiring others with our values through strong leadership
- Embodying and mastering our values daily and "walking the talk."
These are our core values that we aim to embody throughout the firm.
Trust
At the very heart of our business are relationships. Trust is the foundation that enables us to build deep relationships and to collaborate more effectively both internally and externally. By operating in a trust-based environment, we are able to fully leverage our knowledge and expertise to be trusted advisors to our clients; providing a seamless service across all our offices. Most importantly, internal trust gives us the confidence to be autonomous in all that we do and to provide an exceptional service for our clients.
Support
We support our employees to be the best they can through:
- The provision of adequate resources;
- Extensive coaching and mentoring programmes;
- A commitment to ongoing learning and development.
We support our clients by showing them we will go the extra mile and provide ongoing support through secondments, Law-Now, commercial infrastructure, knowledge sharing, connections and a full service approach to the law.
Candour
We can be relied upon to be down-to-earth and straightforward in our approach to the law. We provide real and thoughtful advice, based on broad and deep expertise that can be immediately acted upon. We are able to adopt a candid approach with our clients because we nurture enduring and trusted relationships with them. This candour will further our relationships with them and the trust they have in us.
Discipline
We are truly a client-focused business and have the discipline to act consistently across the whole firm. By remaining disciplined and focused on a key set of initiatives that reinforce each other, we can maintain our leadership edge by keeping abreast of new legislation and providing high quality advice. We demonstrate discipline by choosing leaders across the firm who have proven track records for personal and team discipline that consistently deliver maximum value to our clients.
Stretch
We are continually pushing our own boundaries by exploring all opportunities that are available to us. Our high performance culture demands we adopt a mental attitude that commits to excel in all our business areas and look for synergies across them. We support our people to stretch themselves continuously and our partners to act as thought leaders who can provide creative and innovative solutions for our clients.
Values have to be discussed at every opportunity, constantly reinforced and consistently reflected in the actions of our people at all levels.