Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | K N O W L E D G E M A N A G E M E N T & M A R K E T I N G T E C H N O L O G Y 53 set out to measure the scope of this challenge. We canvassed 127 first-chair law firm MBD leaders in North America and the UK to get their views on how their departments and teams are evolving in response to COVID-19. While several important themes emerged from this research, our broad conclusion is that COVID has been a catalyst for change in law firm marketing and business development. Over the past year, it has accelerated the function's ongoing transformation from a bespoke craft to a data- centric discipline. And within many firms, it has underlined the importance of increasing MBD's operational effectiveness – to accomplish and deliver more results without increasing budgets and FTE resources. Following are some key findings that provide evidence of this trend. MARKETI N G O PE R ATI O NS E M E RG ES AS A CO RE MANAG E M E NT F U N C TI O N : For many firms, marketing operations has historically been a grab-bag of administrative tasks that were the responsibility of all marketing/ business development team members. (Or, they were no-one's responsibility.) Our recent recruiting experience proves that firms are recognizing the value of hiring marketing operations leaders at the senior manager and director levels – a practice that has seen wide acceptance in the technology, financial services and consumer markets sectors. The accountabilities of these roles can include marketing planning, budgeting, technology management, process management, project protocols, ROI measurement, analytics, and beyond. Marketing Operations leadership roles are providing the gravitas and credibility needed to get buy-in and change behavior at all levels of the marketing team, and among attorneys. S HARE D S E RVI CES AN D CE NTE RS O F EXCE LLE N CE: A significant number of firms see the benefits of Shared Services operating models for their marketing teams. In fact, our survey found 20% of North American firms have a Shared Services model in place and another 15% are considering it. (UK firms – with 62% having a Shared Services model in place – are well ahead in adopting this strategy.) As one of our survey respondents stated, "The notion that business development, marketing, and communications personnel need to be located with the fee earners they support is no longer valid." marketing, and communications personnel need to be located with the fee earners they support is no longer valid." : Shared Services centers bring together expertise and resources in a specific discipline to increase value and performance. For example, many firms are pooling their RFP and pitch talent and technology into a centralized proposal function that operates across geographies and CRM/Database Management Digital Marketing Design/Creative Pitches and Proposals Research/Competitive Intelligence Directories and Awards Marketing Generalists Marketing Analytics Firms currently tend to assign the following types of roles to shared services (listed in decreasing order, the most likely areas to feature in shared services appearing first):

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