Unraveling the Mysteries of the Law Firm Marketing Department

How much do you know about the marketing department in your firm? What does your chief marketing officer (CMO) envision as the biggest challenges and opportunities in this tough business climate? And most importantly for you, what is your role in helping your firm win new business and sustain longstanding and profitable client relationships?

In this installment of the Private Law Libraries (PLL) Change as Action Summit, you will hear from Joe Calve and Kelly Brown of Morrison & Foerster. Calve is MoFo’s chief marketing officer, and Brown is the director of client relations. For the past year, the MoFo Research and Intelligence Group (the library) has reported to Calve and Brown in the Marketing Department. Calve and Brown bring a deep understanding of the capabilities of the MoFo Research and Intelligence team, and they are in a unique position to share their thoughts about how libraries can position themselves to become active participants in the practices of their firms by providing research at the highest level, both for business development and for client work.

This program will be videotaped and posted on the PLL website and will be available for free beginning on March 28 on AALL2go. It can be viewed by individual members or by groups. You may want to suggest that your chapter or SIS plan an educational program around the video. For example, tap a marketing director from a local firm to attend a brown bag lunch and watch the video with you; then, follow-up with a Q&A session.

This is the third in a series of five programs moderated by PLL members to provide a primer in law firm management from the view point of firm managers and administrators. The series is part of a two year program undertaken by the Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section (PLL-SIS) of AALL. The goal is to identify significant changes taking place in the legal world, to understand how these changes provide opportunities for assuming leadership roles, and to develop concrete plans for librarians to become leaders within their organizations. The culmination of these efforts, the Change as Action Summit, will take place in Philadelphia on July 23.