Budgeting the Time to Plan a Budget.

• Author: Tetlow, Sarah
• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE

It's that dreaded time of year. Summer break is over, the kids are back in school and everywhere you look holiday decor is surfacing. At the office, your attorneys are returning to work from their own breaks and once again focusing on the business development events, connections, speaking engagements and conferences on which they lost focus during the summer. Similar to how most set a personal budget for these elaborate vacations, law firm marketing departments are starting to prepare their budgets for 2018, and at the same time, analyze their firm's 2017 spending and return on investments.

When preparing for vacation, the typical pattern is to dream of the future (anticipating and planning the travel), live in the present (enjoying the time away from everyday life) and reminisce of the past ("I can't believe that trip we booked 14 months ago is over!"). With this in mind, we designed the theme for this edition of Strategies to focus on the past, present and future of law firm budgeting.

In Kristen Leis and Scott Boulware's article "Budgeting War Stories," Leis, a CMO, teams up with Boulware, a CFO, to provide an in-depth review of "war stories" they encountered when preparing the marketing budget, along with how to understand competing...