One of the topics I’d like to devote more time to here on "Adam Smith, Esq." is marketing and business development. It matters. It’s harder than it looks. Some people seem preternaturally gifted at it and others seem to have no clue, and what distinguishes them is mysterious. In short, it’s intrinsically interesting.
So why don’t I have more to say about it? One reason is that so much of it—at least how it works in our profession—is one-on-one human interaction and relationships and there’s simply not much, intelligent and memorable and insightful, that you can say about that. It would almost be like offering marriage advice: It really really depends, and without knowing all the gory details I have nothing to say.
Another reason, more important, is that great marketing is an astuteful exercise in divining, distilling, and describing the essential distinction of your firm. In the field of professional services, this is exceptionally hard work, and very few firms seem, based on my observation, to be able to pull it off; many seem to be essentially variations on a theme to the effect of, "we have great lawyers," "we do great work," "we’re really really client-centric and responsive."
This takes us to the topic du jour. Last week I had the opportunity to interview Dave
Egan, Chief Marketing Officer at Reed Smith. Dave has had an unusual career trajectory, in that he spent 20 years at a leading advertising agency before moving into law-firm-land with no prior experience in the industry. But as you’ll see, that makes more sense than may first appear to the eye. I hope you find the summary of my conversation with Dave enlightening.
Dave joined Ketchum Advertising in Pittsburgh out of college and, as noted,
spent 20 years there, starting as a junior account executive and ending as
President of the Pittsburgh office. Clients ranged across a broad array
of industries from consumer packaged goods and manufacturing to professional
sports marketing. After 20 years, Ketchum was taken over by Omnicom
and Dave started became President of a start-up broadcasting company.
When he sought advice on how to exit his new firm from his long-time friend
at Reed Smith, Greg Jordan, the conversation took an unexpected turn as Greg
had just assumed the chairmanship of Reed Smith and was seeking to build
a team of top C-level executives. In a word, Greg asked Dave if he’d
be interested in becoming the firm’s CMO.
Initially, Dave was highly skeptical given the, shall we say, checkered track record of CMO’s at law firms at that time (that time being 2002), but a series of conversations with senior management at Reed Smith convinced him that the firm was serious about a professional, respected, integral-to-the-firm, marketing effort.
At Reed Smith, Dave reports to Greg Jordan and Michael Pollack, Director of Strategy, and in turn is responsible for branding and communications, business development across the firm (including the US, the UK, and the Mideast), and new initiative called "clients and markets" intended to understand the firm’s clients better and anticipate their changing needs. This includes team-based approaches to the firm’s top 40 or so most strategic clients, as well as client interviews (in person for the most important clients, and online surveys for another 1,000/year), and finally a "Director of General Counsel Relations," Marti Candiello, who is responsible for communicating with key clients and ensuring relations are strong (and fixing them if they aren’t).
I asked Dave what had been easier and what had been harder than he anticipated. Easier:
- The bromide about "herding cats" was not as true as he’d feared; he’s found that, particularly with senior-level people, they’re bright, collegial, and exceptionally easy to work with.
- Fascinatingly, he believes that the characteristics of high-performing lawyers (bright, opinionated, outspoken, and generally of the view that they could do your job at least as well as you if they had any interest in it) are extremely similar to those of "creative’s" in the advertising industry, and thus that his experience handling and managing creative’s was an invaluable piece of his background.
- Another dimension of his advertising firm experience that bore one-to-one correspondence with his role at Reed Smith was his account management background. (For those of you unacquainted with the lingo, "account management" is the function within agencies of managing the relationship with the client, coordinating the activities of the creative, research, and media departments, and essentially developing the core strategy of each marketing campaign.) Dave reported that this had equipped him surprisingly well for dealing with his "clients" at Reed Smith: The partners at the firm and their clients.
- The intellectual level of discourse at law firms is far higher than at ad agencies; you can assume that essentially everyone in sight is bright, analytic, and articulate.
Harder:
- Holding on to good people. This surprised me, so I asked Dave to elaborate: He reported that as marketing is increasingly perceived as a peer-group, eye-level, professional discipline and function within law firms, on a par with finance and IT, the demand for qualified and competent professionals exceeds the supply. This puts pressure on recruitment and retention. I took this report "from the trenches" as a leading indicator of how marketing is and will be viewed by forward-looking firms, and infinitely more credible than any breast-beating screeds by "it’s all marketing, all the time" apologists, believers, and zealots.
While Dave is responsible for "integrated" marketing for Reed Smith, meaning:
- advertising
- public relations
- events
- direct mail and one-on-one meetings
- CRM, or customer relationship management,
- and business development,
he reported that the most critical communications platform by far for the firm was its website. Somewhat surprised at the fervency of his endorsement of our medium (but, between you and me, deeply pleased), I asked Dave why he felt that was so, and he replied that while he loved and was a big believer in advertising, the audience Reed Smith wants to reach is hard to find in substantial concentrations in conventional media, and, more importantly, inherently skeptical and critical. So the "one-way" monologue of traditional advertising is less effective (because less meaningful to the audience) than the two-way interactivity of the website. Which, of course, is precisely why you’re reading "Adam Smith, Esq." on-screen instead of receiving it monthly in the mail.
Clearly, the challenges ahead for Dave and his team, and Reed Smith overall, are daunting: The Richards Butler (London) merger was just formalized as of 1 January, and the merger with 140-lawyer Chicago-based Sachnoff & Weaver is due to be finalized in March (having been formally approved by both partnerships late last year). In his time at Reed Smith, the firm has gone from being a well-regarded mid-Atlantic firm with strong Pittsburgh roots and some financial-services expertise to a truly international firm with a serious footprint in global cities (NYC, London).
My takeaway:
- Twenty years (15? 25?—pick your number) after law firms realized marketing was something corporate America takes for granted as an essential core competence, they’re finally getting serious about walking the walk.
- A career in advertising agencies is not a bad background, at all, for a law firm CMO—and a smarter, savvier, and more astute choice by far than what your average linear-thinking headhunter would recommend: Someone who’s already CMO at a smaller law firm (yawn).
- The challenge of marketing sophisticated professional services calls for senior-level marketing pro’s at the top of their game, who can go toe-to-toe with your most critical (shall I say acerbic?) partners and stand their ground.
Your resolution might be to take another look at your marketing effort; mine shall certainly be to write more about this once-neglected dimension of our industry.
