EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON IT

What the environment you operate in thinks about your law firm matters. This does not mean you begin chasing reputation management, it just means that you have to take the natural consequences of your actions into account and decide how you want to address how they affect your reputation. Repeating it again, it is more important for you to be the best lover and have the reputation for being the worst lover than to be the worst lover and have a reputation for being the best. You simply have to choose carefully and deliberately.

One reason all this matters is that it heavily affects your marketing efforts and your ability to get business. You cannot market a bad product, what will be your pitch? If word gets out about your firm and the hype is not in agreement with what your firm can actually do, then you have a deep problem.
In addition there is the matter of peace of mind, namely, enjoying your work. People work for you to get paid but they work for intangible things such as a sense of meaning, the idea that they contribute to society e.t.c. When the society firmly believes your law firm is crap no matter what you say to the contrary, your people hear the crap talk and it drains their energy levels if you have an inadequate response.

Your response is first internal by showing to your people what your law firm is through your actions and explaining to them why you take certain actions. The external response is that you then put your own case to the general society and help them to understand your law firm's position.

In the past in many realms of business, stony and haughty silence mixed with the use of armed force were the usual responses to reputation problems but those days are dead and gone. Now the tools of communication, lobbying and image laundering are the way: they are all forms of making your case.

A final example of how this works is drawn from the world of business. The wealthy elite in business were largely hated for possessing economic power, for paying terrible wages, for causing artificial rises in the price of goods and for all the ills in society. They responded with stony silence and some form of oppression and the hate got worse.
However as times got harder and they were looked upon as devils, frequently abused, attacked in their offices and homes, they changed to the approach of gradually explaining their position, presenting themselves in a better light and engaging in massive amounts of philanthropy and good works. They were now well loved.

Human nature has not changed and your law firm will do well to remember it.