Soon after I joined Fox Rothschild as chief marketing officer in 2019, I made a decision I have never regretted: I changed my own job title and the name of my department.

“CMO” rolls off the tongue quite nicely, and I recognized that this new title I was choosing— Chief Business Development and Marketing Officer—would take a bit more work to say. But that was kinda the point.

Words matter. I wanted to change the mindset at the firm to ensure that every lawyer would see me, the CBDMO, and the Business Development & Marketing Department as their partners both in finding new clients and in expanding work with existing clients.

Within law firms, the “marketing department” is too often thought of as nothing more than a source of passive branding elements—such as website content and advertisements—and as the organizer of events, with little or no direct connection to business strategy or bringing in revenue. Make no mistake: websites, and the communications teams that create them, are essential to a law firm’s success, and firm events—social and substantive—are vital to making and deepening connections.

But a smart approach to business development views the communications and events teams as launchpads for the firm’s overall strategy. Thought leadership and networking are not ends in themselves. They must be part of a lawyer’s or practice group’s carefully crafted business plan.

The notion of a business plan is new to some attorneys. Historically, lawyers have been on their own in developing new business. Rainmakers are typically self-taught or pick up their business development skills from mentors. Law schools generally don’t teach business development, although a handful have started to do so recently. As a result, most newly minted lawyers have been taught how to argue and win cases, but not how to woo and win new clients.

Times have changed. Business development is increasingly the prime directive of the law firm marketing department.

So, when I started at Fox, I concluded that my team needed to rebrand. Step one was to put the words “business development” first—in the name of the department and my own job title. The course I’ve charted in my first few years here at Fox has been to enhance some of the essential components of the department that facilitate business development in a modern-day law firm.

An Economy of Scale

My idea was hardly revolutionary. The department I was hired to lead was already staffed with a cadre of seasoned business development managers—or BDs for short—who work directly with individual attorneys and practice groups to cultivate new business and expand work for existing clients.

But Fox Rothschild had grown remarkably in the decade before I joined the firm, evolving from a regional Philadelphia-based firm into a truly national firm. My job was to guide the department to evolve to meet the new and more sophisticated needs of a firm that had recently joined the ranks of the Am Law 100.

Not every lawyer wants to work in a large law firm, but for those who do, the business model makes terrific sense. Put simply: if the lawyer can deliver the legal services, the firm will see to everything else.

It’s an economy of scale. Partners invest in a centralized mechanism that provides myriad resources—everything from accounting, IT and HR to paralegals and research. To attract and retain talented lawyers, this investment has to deliver. Lawyers need to see the support they receive as truly adding value: enabling them to do more and better work by building both their reputations and their books of business.

By renaming the firm’s marketing department, my intent was to cultivate a business development mindset and to underscore my department’s role in helping lawyers grow their business. That means landing new clients. Perhaps even more importantly for some of our most successful lawyers, that also means expanding the work we already do for existing clients.

I was fortunate to have the firm leadership’s support from the outset, and my approach dovetailed with the philosophy that had guided the firm’s growth.

A lawyer’s book of business can grow exponentially upon joining a national law firm, especially one with a comprehensive suite of services. Clients likewise benefit immensely when they can work through one lawyer to coordinate multiple legal services in multiple geographies.

To reap these benefits, my team finds ways to promote, support and celebrate cross-serving clients. This means guiding lawyers to think about cross-serving when crafting their business plans. It also means finding ways to share success stories, especially those that provide anecdotal evidence of how a lawyer grew the work we do for a client in meaningful ways.

Cross-serving also hinges on how well your partners know each other. We’re not selling widgets. The market for professional services is grounded in trust, so partners need to “learn the firm.”

This is yet another example of where the BD manager adds value: by serving as the connective tissue that keeps every lawyer working hand in glove with the firm. If an opportunity arises to expand the work for an existing client, the BD manager helps the lawyer craft a tailored response that showcases our experience and capacities and addresses the client’s need. Agility is essential at these moments and the assistance of a skilled BD manager can be the difference between landing new work and missing out on an opportunity.

Business Plans, Budgets and ROI

To succeed, a business strategy needs to be written down. When I joined Fox, some of the departments and groups were using some form of a business plan, but practices varied. I worked with my team to make these tools more useful and more robust.

Business plans are not a form to be filled out. I like to refer to them as “thinking tools.” Their value comes in their collaborative creation—a kind of discovery among partners within the practice.

A good business plan empowers the BD manager to assist and guide firm leaders in setting targets. It’s the product of a conversation about the year that just ended and the trends we see taking shape in the coming year. Although it includes aspirational content, the business plan must also be concrete, with measurable benchmarks that may be checked through the fiscal year.

Business plans work in tandem with budgets. And the budget document is the starting point for a conversation about return on investment (ROI).

The best way to measure the effectiveness of a firm’s marketing efforts is to track the ROI connected to major expenses such as advertising, travel, conferences and sponsorships of industry events.

The ROI conversation is often complicated for lawyers because new clients are not easily attributable to a single or specific marketing effort. Nonetheless, creating a firm culture that strongly supports a searching and honest conversation about ROI is the only way to avoid wasting marketing dollars. Over time, firm leaders will learn which activities generate business and which ones do not.

One solution is to track ROI in a way that captures not only new clients but also leads and prospects, as well as activity that may lead to referrals. While it may be impossible at times to draw a direct line from marketing activity to revenue, this approach allows for a dotted line that is given time to develop and come to fruition. Most importantly, it creates a tool that BD Managers can use to follow up with individual lawyers, prompting them to keep in touch with leads and prospects. Data shows this is vital because most new clients are landed as the result of multiple conversations or contacts.

Branding runs much deeper than names or logos or color schemes. It’s about mindset and culture. When I set out to rebrand my department—and my own position—it was just one of many steps Fox Rothschild has taken in its long and ongoing journey to evolve into a better version of the firm we already are.

Reprinted with permission from the February 2, 2023 issue of The Legal Intelligencer© 2023 ALM Media Properties, LLC. Further duplication without permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.