CMOs Look Ahead in 2016, With New Trends Emerging and Change as the Only Constant.

• Position: TREND TALK - Cover story

Near the end of 2015, Strategies gathered some of the legal industry's most experienced and talented in-house marketing leaders from around the country. In an hourlong session, they shared their views on the top trends for 2016--and beyond. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. To read the full transcript, visit the Strategies+ blog at www.legalmarketing.org/strategies.

Strategies: What do you think has changed significantly, if anything, about legal marketing, especially for in-house marketers looking back five years?

Mark Greene:

There's been a fundamental shift in the market dynamic from a supply-driven industry to a demand-driven industry. The clients have taken control like they never have before, and I don't think that's going back.

Peter Columbus:

I think it is all now about business development. It is all about getting selected as one of the preferred firms on a panel. It has become really dog-eat-dog, trying to either maintain or slightly grow your market share at the expense of others.

Melanie Green:

Even though as we think about the change, we're still talking about fundamentals. It's just that the fundamentals have shifted a little bit to be truly relationship/communication fundamentals. We are now in the hand-tohand combat world, and so the coaching and what's needed out of our teams is to be really hitting the ground. You have to be able to have people on your teams who can get next to a lawyer and prepare them in a different way to go out and have those conversations.

Jim Durham:

I think part of what everybody's saying, and that's inherent in it, is that over the last 20 years, there's been an increasing sophistication in the buyers. But in the last five years, it's become much more acute. The quality, if you will, of in-house counsel and of senior executives when it comes to being able to recognize and manage quality legal work and processes is enhanced. I think they're more sophisticated than they were even five years ago.

Mark Greene:

This just isn't the whim of the general counsel; they are now being held to budgets like they never have before. That's putting pressure on them to put pressure on us.

Kim Perret:

Our marketing departments have to become more sophisticated. I think now we're really adding to the strategic cornerstones throughout all the firm's operations and strategies. Whether we're working with the lawyers to determine a value pricing for a client, or we're talking about key client efforts in terms of their accounts, or we're doing key client interviews, it's just all now about the client. It's things that are measurable. It's things that we've been talking about for years--that we couldn't do--that now we can actually do. We're telling the lawyers, "If we're going to do this, then it has to be measurable. It has to be obtainable. We have to be able to see the results.

Lisa Simon:

Now we have to do a better job of understanding the buyer behavior of our clients. I think it's incumbent upon us and on our departments to get that information about our clients. Why...