This article appeared in Marketing the Law Firm, an ALM publication reporting on the latest, and most effective strategies. For Chief Marketing Officers, Managing Partners, Law Firm Marketing Directors, Administrators, Consultants. Visit the website to learn more.

Marketing and business development in law firms is no longer the exclusive domain of marketing and business development executives. Many more executives are pursuing revenue in one form or another, and those dedicated to the function should welcome this development rather than feel threatened by it. While lawyers themselves have undoubtedly gotten better at it, so too have executives of all stripes. COOs and executive directors, CFOs and pricing directors, project managers, CHROs, CIOs and directors of recruiting have all moved their own mandates toward revenue production, and the result has transformed the administrative landscape.

Lawyers Become Better Marketers

In the midst of the stock option backdating scandals of a decade ago, an executive director of an Am Law 100 firm walked into an executive committee meeting with that day's Wall Street Journal, and pointed to a front-page headline revealing an ongoing SEC investigation into a Fortune 500 company's stock option practices. He asked those sitting around the table “What are we doing about this?” Perplexed, one of the managing partners retorted, “Nothing. We're a private partnership, so this does not affect us.” It was a classic inwardly thinking reaction to a question that had nothing to do with firm management, and everything to do with a marketing opportunity to reach out to existing and prospective clients about the firm's expertise in securities litigation. A day later, the executive director called me to do a chief marketing officer search — a first for the firm.