Deep impact: rise of the chief marketing coordinator.

• Author: Stief, Andrew

I want to have a frank conversation with my fellow "new-bies" out there. If you identify yourself as an assistant, coordinator, administrator, writer, analyst or the like, this article is for you. Maybe you jumped into the legal world right out of college. Maybe you transitioned from another career. You may have even fallen in by accident. Whatever the case, we share a common circumstance--learning how to thrive in not just our firm or company, but in our trade as well.

Challenges

Do you remember the job description that was posted for your position? It probably consisted of a long, intimidating list of responsibilities and tasks, generously sprinkled with acronyms like CRM, RFP and HTML. Some of the work we have done before, some of which we have never even heard, but all of it generally can be classified as Legal Marketing 101.

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I think it's fair to say, collectively, we represent the future of our industry. I don't know about you, but one day I want to see the letters "CMO" after my name. I have a feeling many of you have similar aspirations. And though it's true that we have to learn to walk before we can run, I believe that we have a number of ways to make an immediate and valued impact at our places of business.

The simple fact that you are reading this means you have already taken a proactive approach to developing yourself as a legal marketer. There is arguably no better resource for immersing yourself in the nuances and lexicon of the trade than LMA publications like Strategies.

The work we do now will set an important foundation from which we can build off in the years to come. But we have many opportunities to add additional value to our companies and firms if we put ourselves in the mindset of a Chief Marketing Coordinator (CMC).

What is a CMC? A CMC is a CMO trapped in a newbie's body. We may just be starting our careers as legal marketers, but our energy and our ideas are much bigger than our station.

Randy Pausch, author of The Last Lecture, put our challenges into context best when he said, "The brick walls are there for a reason ... they are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something."

Over the weeks, months and years ahead, we are going to face a lot of brick walls, some of which will loom outside the realm of our expected responsibilities. We must make the extra effort to topple them and grow beyond the scope of our job description.

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