Summary
Sector: Law firm
Location: London, Bristol, Hong Kong, Singapore
Year founded: 1898
No. of employees: 1,150, including 500 lawyers
Tools used: Lumina Spark
Tools and models
Lumina Spark
Lumina Spark reveals your whole personality, providing a unique portrait of who you really are.
Journey to Composure
Journey to Composure is a simple development experience that enhances adaptability and resilience.
GIFT model
The GIFT model helps you plan purposeful conversations, guiding you to communicate with clarity and confidence.
Business need
RPC set out to strengthen its people-first culture by creating development opportunities that were inclusive, flexible, and relevant for everyone across the firm.
The solution
Guided by Caroline de Souza, Associate Director of Learning & Development and Paul Welling, Senior Learning & Development Manager, RPC introduced the Evolve and Empower programmes, blending virtual and in-person learning with practical tools from Lumina Spark. This shared language of development has united teams, making learning continuous, collaborative, and impactful.
The results
Stronger collaboration
Increased confidence
Sustained behavioural change
The full story
At a glance
RPC is a forward-thinking, international law firm with a distinctively human culture that sets it apart. In a sector where time is currency and the quality of service is paramount, RPC has put people development at the heart of its strategy to bring out its people’s full potential.
Through the Evolve and Empower programmes, the firm has built structured, inclusive blended learning journeys tailored to both lawyers and business services professionals. Lumina Spark is embedded throughout, providing a shared language and practical tools that help people understand themselves and each other, how to adapt their behaviour, and grow with confidence. From manager training to partner-level leadership development, Lumina Spark supports everyday learning, feedback, and collaboration. The result is more than a programme, it has become a cultural shift. Teams are more connected, people are more self-aware, and development is now a defining feature of life at RPC.
Business need
RPC is a firm that takes pride in its people. With around 1,150 employees, there’s long been a strong culture of professional development across the firm. Over time, structured development journeys had become well established within the legal teams, providing clear pathways for career growth. Recognising the value of this approach, RPC saw an opportunity to extend the same level of clarity and support to business services teams, including HR, marketing, IT, and finance. The ambition was to ensure that everyone, in any role, could access high impact development experiences tailored to their career level.
At the same time, the world of work was evolving. Hybrid working became the norm, and expectations around how, when, and where people learn were shifting. RPC saw this as an opportunity to rethink how development could be more inclusive, flexible, and relevant, ensuring that everyone, no matter their role, had the tools and support to succeed.
That cultural strength became a foundation for change. But the firm also recognised that different mindsets exist within different parts of the business. Lawyers, for example, are often highly logical, detailed, and fast-moving. Meanwhile, some senior leaders in support functions had grown up in more results-driven environments, sometimes finding it harder to lead with empathy or self-awareness.
Instead of seeing these differences as obstacles, RPC saw them as opportunities to embrace individual strengths that complement one another, encourage growth mindsets, and create stronger collaboration through valuing different perspectives. The goal was to become the law firm where people have the best experience when it comes to how they’re supported and developed. This vision sits at the heart of RPC’s people strategy, Ambition for People (AmP).
The solution
Leading this work is Caroline de Souza, Associate Director of Learning & Development and Paul Welling, Senior Learning & Development Manager. With over 30 years of experience across the military, corporate, and consultancy sectors, Paul brings a practical, people focused mindset to development. From his early career in the British Army to senior roles at BP, British Airways, and KPMG, his consistent aim has been to help individuals build confidence and capability through meaningful learning. At RPC, he’s played a key role in shaping people development and embedding Lumina Spark across the firm in a way that reflects its inclusive, forward-thinking culture.
Recognising the need for learning that reflects the modern world of work, RPC rethought its approach from the ground up. The result was two comprehensive learning journeys, the Evolve and Empower programmes, which were designed around clearly defined career levels, aligning with the updated AmP framework, and created to support personal growth at every stage:
Evolve Programme for lawyers – supporting career growth through levels from Trainee to Senior Associate.
Empower Programme for business services – creating, for the first time, a clear path for Administrators, Executives, Managers, Senior Managers, and Heads of Departments.
Lumina Spark as a common thread
What makes Evolve and Empower stand out is the way that Lumina Spark’s practical behavioural framework is woven through every stage of the learning experience to form an understanding to articulate behaviours. Rather than being a one-off learning opportunity, the Lumina Spark methodology has become a skillset and mindset to continuously adapt effective individual behaviours and evolve how to meaningfully connect with people.
Participants are introduced to their Lumina Spark Portrait early in the programmes. The visual format of the Splash, which represents their personality, gives them an intuitive and memorable way to reflect on their preferences and patterns. This often sparks new awareness of behaviours in themselves they hadn’t previously recognised.
From there, Lumina Spark remains a central reference point. As participants explore topics like effective feedback, navigating conflict, and increasing emotional intelligence, they return to their Lumina Spark Portraits to understand how their personal preferences influence their approach. Understanding their Three Personas (Underlying, Everyday, and Overextended), helped people to recognise how they can adapt in different contexts, especially under pressure.
Supporting ongoing learning
Lumina Spark’s combination of a detailed, data-driven view of people compared with being intuitive to learn from means its suitable for individuals, teams and leaders alike. Whether it’s used in early-career development or in advanced sessions for partners and client-facing leaders, it adds depth. In senior client programmes, for instance, actors take on specific personality profiles to challenge participants to flex their communication style. These scenarios sharpen emotional intelligence and commercial awareness which are two skills essential for building strong client relationships.
Participants also get access to Lumina Spark Coach, a digital tool that helps them look deeper into their top qualities, development areas, and paradoxes. With suggested actions and reflective questions, Spark Coach makes it easier to keep learning personal and continuous.
These resources are designed to last beyond the programme itself. They’re not just about one moment of change, they support an ongoing journey of growth, awareness, and development across the firm.
The design in action
The design reflects RPC’s belief that learning should be practical, relevant, and collaborative. Each programme starts by introducing key themes such as resilience, ethics, or management responsibilities. This shared starting point sets the tone and ensures everyone begins their journey with clarity and purpose.
The learning continues through a series of virtual modules and culminates in an in-person learning day. These face-to-face sessions are more than just workshops, they are opportunities to connect, reflect, and build relationships. Working in a more hybrid world where chance encounters are reduced, these human touchpoints are especially valued.
From there, participants move into the career development phase, creating a Personal Development Plan (PDP) guided by their learning and Lumina Spark Portrait. These aren’t one-off exercises, they’re revisited regularly in conversations with managers, helping to shape meaningful career direction and support continuous growth.
By building these structured, engaging, and inclusive learning pathways, RPC, using Lumina Spark as the backbone, has created something far more than training. It’s a cultural shift, grounded in self-awareness, empathy, and practical growth, with every individual empowered to move forward in a way that works for them.
Lumina Spark doesn’t just sit on the surface, it’s embedded into practical, hands-on sessions. RPC uses the GIFT feedback model in its people management development sessions, mostly in person. People apply the GIFT model to prepare and then practise giving feedback in pairs that is effective in creating clarity and positive change. Participants are then encouraged to give feedback on ways to further improve the feedback messaging and delivery, always anchoring on the GIFT model, which gives participants a structure and increases their confidence to give real feedback when they return to their teams.
In the communication and conflict modules, participants explore real workplace scenarios using the Conflict Continuum and Lumina Spark Mandala floor mat. They reflect on where their behaviours landed on the spectrum, which qualities were over- or underused, and what they could do to smartly adapt their approach differently next time for a better outcome. This is backed by the Journey to Composure, a simple tool that helps develop people’s resilience by recognising the scenarios trigger them and build a personalised response that plays to their strengths on how to act to remain effective when under pressure.
These sessions are active, discussion-based, and rooted in the realities of professional life. They encourage reflection, but always with a focus on real-world application.
Lumina Spark is also used in team sessions to collaborate and build Team Charters based on their collective strengths and communication preferences. This helps teams set clear expectations and strengthen ways of working.
In one example, a team of 35 used Lumina Spark to identify individual strengths before a fast-paced group task. The activity surfaced competitive and detail-heavy behaviours, which, while natural, ended up hindering performance. The debrief gave the team space to reflect on these patterns and make meaningful adjustments, turning the experience into a practical learning experience.
Embracing the Paradox
One of the most impactful parts of Lumina Spark is its ability to highlight paradox, the fact that people can hold seemingly opposite qualities at the same time. This helps individuals expand their sense of who they are and develop greater empathy for colleagues who work differently. For example, someone might realise they are both highly Structured and Flexible, or Measured and Demonstrative, depending on the situation. This understanding builds adaptability and psychological safety within teams.
Lumina Spark Coach’s six patterns
Tools and models
Lumina Spark
Lumina Spark reveals your whole personality, providing a unique portrait of who you really are. Spark increases self-awareness, reveals hidden potential and helps people cope better under pressure.
Journey to Composure
Journey to Composure is a simple development experience that enhances adaptability and resilience, increasing personal performance by providing a practical plan to help people be their most effective selves at work when facing challenges.
GIFT model
The GIFT model helps you plan purposeful conversations, guiding you to communicate with clarity and confidence.
Lumina Spark Coach is a great add-on tool for people as it picks out the top five for analysis and guides the learner through exploring the impact on their work and their relationships, with suggestions for development. These can then feed into their PDPs as tangible actions to take to achieve results.
Paul Welling, Senior Learning & Development Manager
Results
Since its launch, Evolve has become fully embedded across the legal teams at RPC, with new cohorts running regularly. Empower has grown across the firm’s Business Services functions. New career level programmes for Managers, Senior Managers and Heads of Departments have recently been rolled out.
The consistent use of Lumina Spark across these programmes has created a shared language that spans levels, teams, and regions of the world (two offices are in Asia). Participants report stronger collaboration, increased confidence in handling difficult conversations, and greater self-awareness. Leaders are more attuned to how their style impacts others, and teams are better equipped to work together, even in the complexities of a more hybrid workplace.
Most importantly, the investment in development is seen as part of RPC’s culture. Thanks to the strategic leadership of Caroline de Souza, Paul Welling and the Learning & Development team, Lumina Spark has moved beyond being a tool, it’s become an integral part of how RPC grows its people, builds its culture, and defines its future.
Lumina Spark is a brilliant and dynamic personal development tool and through its flexible construct, we have used it successfully at RPC for many years creating a common and consistent language; this supports our people to achieve lifelong learning.
Paul Welling, Senior Learning & Development Manager
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