Legal Marketing Consultants See Growth for Some Firms, Decline for Others, Change for All.

• Position: TREND TALK

After convening several top law firm CMOs in late 2015 and asking them for their thoughts on trends for 2016, Strategies assembled some of legal marketing's brightest consultants for an hour long roundtable to ask what they thought was going to happen this year. 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's changed in legal marketing since the Great Recession began back in 2008-2009?

Silvia Coulter:

Certainly the influx of people who have sales backgrounds, who have worked on commission and managed a book of business, have started entering the legal workforce. All size firms, too. Related to that is some controversy swirling around who these people should be reporting to that's created some interesting dialogue and some dynamics. Anybody who's carried a book or managed a sales team knows that sales generally doesn't report to marketing, and might report up through a different chain of command. That, I think, is something that's going to be scrutinized more. I think a second big thing is the whole influx of project managers and billing specialists. More so in the last 10 years, maybe even more predominantly in the last five years.

Nat Slavin:

I think a major theme to impact the role of law firm marketing and business development is the re-energized focus on client loyalty: the realization that, while as important as it is to grow relationships and incorporate the role of sales, pursuit teams, and strategies to acquire new business, loyalty and retention of clients is more important than ever. Which leads to a second point: clients. There's been a power shift to them that is probably permanent.

A third theme that seems to be coming up more than ever is trying to define what "service" is--everything from the project management to the pricing to what sets an organization apart. Trying to figure out, ultimately, the answer to the question: if one size fits one, how do we determine what the right size is for every relationship and every engagement?

Ann Lee Gibson:

A huge trend in law firm marketing/business development involves firm strategy. CMOs and other marketing and BD professionals are really engaged in substantive planning for the firm, which means they are finally talking with, planning with, executing with, and having a great degree of responsibility over what happens at the law firm strategy level. At the practice group strategy level. At the industry group strategy level. We just simply have smarter, better people working at those spaces.

The second thing I see spins out of that. That is firm failures, firm mergers and just simply consolidation within the industry. In the next 10 years, there's going to be a lot shorter list of big firms in the U.S. A third thing is competitive intelligence. CI is not just business development or tactical. It's "How do we win this business today?"...