LMA Program Synopsis: Honing your leadership skills
The Legal Marketing Association provides guidance on marketing, business development and communications within the legal profession. This article summarizes a presentation by Betsi Roach, executive director of the LMA, on important themes that emerged at the 25th annual LMA Conference held last month, as well as recent LMA developments. This excerpt covered the fourth of four conference tracks: Honing your leadership skills. This ia part five of a six-part article. For a link to the entire article, see below.
“LMA created this track to focus on the personal leadership skills marketers need to succeed in the legal market,” said Roach. “The first session discussed how legal marketers can use ongoing client and market research to drive strategy and deliver measurable results. Research budgets are growing steadily.”
Also strengthening is the predatory character of the legal marketplace. “Two out of every three law firm CMOs are taking steps to strategically target and actively hunt their competitor’s clients,” said Roach. “Even high-profile law firms are cold-calling. Smart firms are using client interviews to determine satisfaction and ‘bullet proof’ their clients. The key question in this environment is whether your firm will be predator or prey.”
Other sessions discussed professional development paths for mid-level and top-tier marketing professionals, with a strong emphasis on the use of industry research to provide the kind of value that makes a practitioner indispensable.
In addition, a panel of managing and marketing partners pointed out the characteristics they most value in their marketing professionals. A final session focused on the use of metrics and key performance indicators to demonstrate to firm leadership the return-on-investment of a law firm’s marketing efforts.
“To see how these trends continue to play out,” said Roach, “plan to join us next spring for the 2012 annual conference in
For the full article: LMA conference, updates
