How to succeed in a new law firm marketing or BD leadership role

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Stepping into a senior marketing or business development role at a law firm is an opportunity that comes with pressure to earn the trust of partners and deliver results quickly.

We invited Gillian Ward, Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer at Reed Smith, Roy Sexton, Chief Marketing Officer at Vedder, and Ivan Ivanovitch, Client & Markets Advisor at Ambition, to unpack the topic with Steven Ongenaet, VP of Client Services & EMEA Managing Director at Nexl.

Why the title doesn't matter

Gillian came into legal from a global engineering firm where everything was focused on winning work, and she expected to find the same environment.

"One of the things I noticed when I first came into legal from engineering was the lack of focus on sales—you couldn't even use that word," says Gillian. "That's changed over time. We still don't call ourselves the sales function, but there are new titles out there, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Client Development Officer, and really, we know we're here to build revenue."

Ivan has seen the same from the hiring side. "We have seen a shift over the last five years towards very commercially minded leaders: people who are focused not only on acquiring net new clients, but also the profitability analysis of existing clients," he says.

For Gillian, the vocabulary matters far less than the mandate. "I've never been hung up on what the title is. I know what my role is and that's to help build revenue."

What firms are looking for

Across C-level searches, there are three attributes that Ivan looks for: leadership, business acumen, and the ability to inspire a team.

"Is this somebody that has executive presence? Is this somebody who has gravitas? Somebody that people are going to look up to for ideas or mentorship?" says Ivan. "The person has to be authentic. They have to have vision that people are going to follow."

Underneath all three, he is looking for one behavior. "Anytime we interview a candidate, we look for a desire to have an impact on the organization, to go beyond what the role is," says Ivan. "In the context of a global firm where revenue is billions of dollars, a 1% increase in the success rate of the pitches and proposals team can translate into tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over years."

Go slow, and stay visible

The volume of work waiting on day one is often the first thing that new marketing and BD leaders notice. "It feels like you've just stepped up to an all-you-can-eat buffet and your stomach's already rather full," says Roy.

That's why Roy thinks it's important to understand the firm's expectations before you start a new job. "A question I ask when I interview is, what is your time frame for integration and success of this role? If they say anything like, you'll be up and running in one month or three months, I'm like, I don't think that's reasonable."

Once inside, he pinpoints who he needs to build relationships with first. "I don't try to know everyone up front because I couldn't possibly. So, I lean on my boss and say, where are the hot spots? Who are the key voices? Who do I need to start having conversations with? Who's the top 10% I should start to have some influence with?," says Roy. Whatever comes out of those meetings goes straight back to his team. "What's an easy thing we can quickly do or change to satisfy this individual, so they feel like traction is happening? They're going to talk to other shareholders, so if it goes well, it'll do some of my work for me."

Gillian set similar pacing expectations with her executive committee at Reed Smith. "At the three-month stage, I'd give them my first impressions of how the function was being used, where I perceived there were opportunities for growth and things that should have been done and weren't. But I made clear it will take me six months before I'm ready to talk about what that could and should look like," she says.

What she did in those months was research the client base, so that when she started talking to partners, she was bringing them something relevant. "I spent a lot of time researching the top 50 clients of Reed Smith and looking at where I thought the white space was geographically and practice-wise. When you go in with that kind of information, it takes the discussion to a different level."

Expect a website you didn't want

Gillian and Roy both walked into firms with a rebrand and website already in flight, having sworn off ever doing another one. Gillian's advice to first-time chiefs is to stop being surprised by it. "You should expect to be doing that," she says. "It might not have been yours then, but it's now your baby."

Roy is direct about the dynamic underneath this, particularly for anyone who has come up through the ranks of a firm and expects a chief title to change things. "There is a divide, for lack of a better term, between attorneys and those of us who support attorneys. It's always going to exist. Just get used to that. It's fine, you still have value," he says.

The dynamic is why he has no patience for precious attitudes about the tactical work. "Don't get on a high horse about stuff," he says. "Don't think something's beneath you, because it's going to cut you off at the knees very quickly." The reframe he uses came from his husband: "What's easy for you is hard for somebody else. So, lean into that."

Done properly, an inherited project earns its keep twice over. "What a wonderful opportunity to learn about the firm and what your team can and can't do during that process," says Roy. Plus, a year on, you have the receipts. "I got the website done. I got the brand done. You can check that off. And through doing the project, you get to know a lot of the attorneys."

Getting buy-in for a big project

New chiefs usually arrive with a list of things they think the firm needs, but Roy's advice is to leave the list alone for a while.

"I would flip the script. Don't focus on the big project first," he says. "I've got to educate them on the why first, along with my capabilities. It might take you a year before you get the green light to do that big project. That's a blessing, because you probably don't want that big project in your first year."

Gillian agrees. "If you launch into a big project at the start, you'll probably drown in it." Her approach over the first few months is to show the firm where what's being delivered today falls short of where they say they want to go before jumping into a big initiative.

Roy's approach is to find something the partners aren't paying much attention to. "Pick something that's low cost, will have a big impact, and demonstrate value quickly," he says. "Pick their bios maybe, because we all know the number one hit on anybody's website are the bio pages, and yet we all spend so much time and money, disproportionately, on everything else."

Culture change takes time

Roy arrived at his first firm with a marketing plan covering 18 months of tactics and measurables. "Nobody cared at all. They said thank you and it sat on a shelf." He puts that down to writing the plan before he understood what the partners valued. "Now I don't even go through the exercise of presenting my marketing plan too early. I have it in my head, and I wait for the right pain points to align."

He takes the same approach to team structure. "Culture change and process change does not happen quickly, and it certainly doesn't happen quickly inside a law firm," says Roy. He starts by asking how the team has been delivering value, where the internal pain points are, and who is open to being coached. That last question produces the least intuitive answer. "Sometimes you find that the more successful people on your team are less likely to take your guidance, because what they've been doing has been working for them in that environment."

On hiring, he borrows from theater, where a director once told him he cast for culture over talent. "The job description to me is a fishing pole. Yes, this is what we'd like to have, but we might not find this person, and law firms really struggle with that. They think if they don't hit every bullet in your job description, you must not hire them," says Roy. "Often the person who fits every bullet point on the job description fails miserably."

For Gillian, an organizational structure only works when your team can understand where they sit in it, which is why she spends so much time walking her team through the funnel. "You need marketing at the top of the funnel, generating demand, getting your name out into the market, building strong campaigns. Then your business development team is in the middle to convert what's happening up there into real opportunities, and then sales support at the bottom covers helping the lawyers with sales training, closing, getting your pitch and proposal team together, and all those pieces have to align. That's when the magic happens."

AI as a leadership opportunity

Both chiefs see AI as an opportunity to transform how their functions work. Gillian is building an AI program inside her team, with governance and defined use cases, and the partners have already noticed the difference in the output. "It would have taken us months to do some of this work, and now it's taking us a couple of hours," she says. The gain she cares about is speed to insight. "It gives us the ability, by accessing data, to tell a story faster and more accurately than we could before."

Roy has run out of patience for the tooling conversation. "I don't want to watch 'how to build an agent' again," he says. "The smart chiefs and strategists are looking at this for the disruptive opportunity it presents to shift and level up, versus getting fixated on, do you like Claude or Harvey?"

"We could focus on all the ephemeral elements of AI that are going to change every 10 minutes, or we could focus on how this allows us to shift the conversation forward. I think that's the point of leadership."

The longer view

Reaching chief level can change what progress feels like. "As you grow in your career, when you start at a tactical level, you're delivering something in fairly short order. So, you're getting your work satisfaction week to week, or maybe month to month. The more senior you become, Roy and I can't do that," says Gillian. "We have to sit back every three months, six months, or at the end of the year, and look back at what we achieved during that time frame, because if you looked at it week to week, those days are gone. We're not in the tactical execution level of our roles anymore, but we're leading people through that."

What replaces it is the satisfaction of watching people grow, including the ones who leave for somewhere else. Gillian's advice to anyone sitting just below chief level and seeing a narrow ladder is to widen the search. "Go somewhere else, try an accounting firm or an engineering firm, you'll still be using marketing brain power. But how they win work will be different, and you can bring that back into legal again."

Ivan sees the same value in that approach from the other direction. "When you come from outside of law, you speak the voice of the client, you understand how the clients perceive your attorneys, and you challenge them. You're in sync with what the market wants from the attorneys."

Roy's advice for new chiefs is about where the authority in these roles comes from. He sees people arrive at chief level expecting the title to do the work for them. "You're basically still the same person you were in those other roles. You still are in service to the organization. Let that be your lift."