30 YEARS OF LEGAL MARKETING EXELLENCE: LMA Celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2015.

It has been 30 years since a group of forward-thinking marketing professionals came together to embark on a new industry known as law firm marketing. Founded in 1985 as the National Association of Law Firm Marketing Administrators (NALFMA), the organization was a way for these professionals to lay the foundation of what legal marketing is today. Strategies talked to Sally Schmidt, the association's first president and president at Schmidt Marketing, Inc., and she shares how the field has changed over the past three decades.

As the first president of LMA (then NALFMA), what do you recall being your first order of business?

The first order of business for NALFMA was NALFMA business. The inaugural board of directors had to set up the legal (non-profit) entity, create bylaws, develop membership criteria and put together a committee structure. We had a lot of decisions to make along the way about sharing of information, meeting frequency and structure, levels of participation, etc.

How would you describe the field of legal marketing back then?

Legal marketing was a new frontier! It was so exciting and yet a little discomforting to be part of a brand-new industry. What would the future hold? When I interviewed for my in-house position, I went to the University of Minnesota business school library to find information on law firm marketing. After coming up empty, I went to the law school library--again, nothing. I could not find a single resource on legal marketing.

The best thing about our new industry was NALFMA, where we could all figure it out together. The size of the organization made it possible for people to exchange documents like job descriptions, checklists, forms and memos. But don't get the wrong impression--just because NALFMA members were new to what they were doing doesn't mean they were less sophisticated or talented. Early LMA members included MBAs, lawyers and the occasional Ph.D., and most brought experience from other service industries. It was a wonderful shared-learning experience.

How has the industry evolved since then?

In almost every way imaginable:

* In the sizes of the law firms and the sizes of the marketing/business development staffs. Early on, there was usually one marketer per law firm, regardless of the firm's size, and the largest firm had about 500 lawyers.

* In the compensation of the marketers. Lead marketers in law firms are now getting paid what their equivalents in other industries are, and members of the...

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