At a drinks reception last week with Slaughter and May, the familiar topic came up of how and why the firm's structurally-lite approach appears to deliver.

This is, on one hand, a deceptive point. Slaughters doesn't have a strategy in the conventional sense of the word – it has a culture and a group of common attitudes. Its strategy is merely the expression of what the partners want to do anyway.

On the plus side, that works fantastically well because it's so strongly aligned to the values of partners. It also means that the culture is naturally expressed in organisational behaviour, meaning it does a lot of the heavy lifting that rivals have to achieve through centralised management.

There is, of course, a but – and it's a big one. This model is inherently inflexible, so if the shift of the global economy starts to turn strongly against Slaughters, the baby, the bathwater and the whole house will have to go and the firm would need to come up with something very new very quickly.

But there is a more fundamental reason why Slaughters has so far weathered 25 years of a rapidly liberalising global economy, and it's got nothing to do with the occasionally grating efforts to cloud the firm in some kind of manufactured mystique: the quality of Slaughters' partners is magnificently strong. It's hard to over-emphasise the importance of this single factor – one that gets overlooked because it's so simple.

Firms get caught up on the idea of different models – single site versus global, national versus regional, leveraged against partner-led, niche versus full service. Obviously, a firm's chosen model has to bear some vague relation to the nature of its client base and ambitions.

But these factors pale in significance against the single question law firm leaders should be asking themselves: how good is my partnership? Firms that have quality across the partnership will tend to be coherent, strongly aligned and maintain excellent partner retention by definition. Oh, and clients tend to get an excellent service. Such firms also have huge ability to withstand shocks and dramatic shifts in their underlying markets (as with Slaughters).

I suspect that part of the reason law firms sometimes lose sight of the importance of partnership is that they get caught up in debates regarding the varying merits of lockstep, modified lockstep, gateways or whatever.

But such tools are merely a means to an end – the end is to build a top-notch class of highly-incentivised owner-managers. In many ways, the same is true of management – until alternative business models are really asserted in the legal market, leadership is about helping a firm achieve the kind of partnership it needs to succeed. Perversely or not, Slaughters has so far passed that test.