Project Background

Murdoch Clarke is one of Tasmania’s oldest and largest legal firms, with over 130 years of experience delivering high-quality legal services to the Tasmanian community and beyond. To strengthen its brand, improve internal alignment, and clearly articulate organisational values, the firm engaged The Project Lab to co-design a set of business values and an actionable plan to embed them across the organisation.

Challenge

Like many established professional services firms, Murdoch Clarke recognised that while values may exist within an organisation, they are not always clearly defined, consistently understood, or actively embedded in day-to-day operations.

Without well-articulated values, organisations can experience inconsistencies in decision-making, communication, and expectations across teams.

For Murdoch Clarke, the opportunity was to define a set of values that were authentic, reflected both leadership and staff perspectives, and could be practically applied across the business.

The key objectives were:

• Ensure organisational values genuinely reflected the beliefs and priorities of the firm’s leadership and people

• Strengthen alignment between culture, brand and client experience

• Create a shared understanding of expectations across the business

• Establish a practical framework to embed values into everyday decision-making and behaviour.

Solutions

The Project Lab applied a structured, collaborative approach to co-design the business values, engaging leadership, the Cultural Committee, and staff throughout the process.  

Our Approach:

• Facilitating workshops to capture insights from across the business, ensuring all voices were heard
• Identifying and articulating the core principles that underpin decision-making, client service, and internal culture
• Co-creating an action plan to embed values into daily operations, communications, and employee onboarding
• Translating abstract values into practical behaviours, rituals, and cultural touchpoints
• Designing a suite of icons and visual communication assets to bring the six agreed values to life across signage, digital channels, and internal materials.

This collaborative methodology ensured buy-in across the organisation and created a strong foundation for values to guide behaviour consistently.

Project Results

The co-design process delivered tangible outcomes for Murdoch Clarke:

• Six clear value themes emerged, reflecting the firm’s purpose and principles

• Values now guide interactions, decisions, and service delivery across the business

• Staff engagement improved through participation in defining and shaping the values

• The framework provided a foundation for consistent culture-building, internal alignment, and brand differentiation

• Murdoch Clarke is now positioned to reinforce its market leadership by clearly expressing the values that shape how they work with each other and their clients.

“Defining Murdoch Clarke’s values had been a project contemplated by the business for a long time. We were so pleased to be able to work with The Project Lab. They made the process easy, managed it in a way that incorporated the views of the whole organisation, and facilitated ideas to practice our values. It is exciting to now see the values on our wall and implemented across our business.” – Aled Vince, Partner at Murdoch Clarke

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About The Project Lab

The Project Lab delivers impactful engagements and partners with organisations and stakeholders in five target sectors. Our sectors combine industries in a traditional sector with a “this is how we do it here” approach, bringing a uniquely Tasmanian perspective to the way we can approach challenges and opportunities individually or together.

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