Seven years ago, I wrote a piece arguing that the Legal Marketing Association's Annual Conference needed, to put it bluntly, to raise its game. It ruffled a few feathers, which was rather the point. My argument then was that the profession of legal marketing deserved better than it was getting: better content, better ambition, and above all a better sense of its own worth.
I want to start this piece by acknowledging something that doesn't get said often enough: The game has, in many respects, been raised. The Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Business Development Officers and Chief Client Officers I meet today are more strategic, more commercially fluent and more integral to their firms than at any point in my career. Some of the sharpest thinking I hear about where the legal market is heading now comes from the business side of the house, not the fee-earning side.
This year I have spent considerable time sitting in rooms full of some of the most sophisticated legal businesses on the planet, with a familiar knot in my stomach. Because for all the progress, one thing has barely moved: law firms still do not truly trust people who are not lawyers. That distrust is baked into the language, the pay structures and the governance of the industry. And until it is dismantled, it will act as a ceiling on growth that no amount of strategy away-days can lift.
How far the profession has come
This discipline is still relatively young. Lawyer advertising was only legalized in the United States in 1977, with the Supreme Court's decision in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona. The first full-time in-house legal marketer in America was reportedly hired in 1981, and the Legal Marketing Association itself was only founded in 1985. For most of the period since, "marketing" in a law firm meant brochures, holiday cards, directory submissions and event logistics. Useful work, but firmly below stairs.
The trajectory since then has been remarkable. Consider Deborah Farone, the first person hired to build a marketing function at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where she spent fourteen years as CMO after holding the same role at Debevoise & Plimpton. At Cravath, she built a client and industry intelligence unit modeled on what she had observed at investment banks: a function that generated new business opportunities, shaped practice development plans and prepared partners for high-stakes pitches. That is not support staff work. That is the commercial engine room of one of the most profitable law firms in the world, designed and run by someone without a law degree.
In the most forward-thinking firms, the CMO now owns client feedback programs, pricing input, lateral integration, key client teams and the entire client journey. The best of them are, in everything but name, chief commercial officers.
The evidence shows this works. McKinsey's research on the C-suite found that among outperforming Fortune 500 companies, six in ten have a marketing, customer or growth leader sitting on the executive committee, and that companies with a single, empowered growth role reporting to the CEO grow up to 2.3 times faster than those where the responsibility is fragmented. Forrester’s research found that organizations with aligned revenue operations grow 19 percent faster and are 15 percent more profitable than their peers. None of this surprises anyone who has worked in any other professional services sector. It only surprises lawyers.
So yes: the game has been raised. The CMOs raised it. Which makes what follows all the more frustrating.
The trust deficit
Law firms, as institutions, extend full trust only to people who have passed a bar exam. Everyone else, however brilliant, however commercially indispensable, operates on a form of probation that never ends.
You can see it in the data. An American Lawyer survey of marketing leaders across the AmLaw 200 found that 38 percent had lasted less than four years in their previous role, and that 62 percent said their job would be easier if partners simply had a better understanding of what marketing is for. Spencer Stuart's long-running tenure studies consistently show the CMO role to be the shortest-tenured seat in the C-suite across industries, and legal makes a hard job harder. One anonymous law firm CMO in that American Lawyer survey put it perfectly: lawyers think marketing means getting work tomorrow, when marketing is about positioning, and the work may arrive three years down the road. Partnerships pull the plug on marketing leaders with a speed they would never apply to an underperforming practice group.
Chief Marketing Officers of substance should be treated on the same terms as equity partners. The same pay. The same perks. The same profile in the firm's communications.
You can see it, too, in how authority is granted. In most firms, the CMO's seat at the management table is not carried by the title; it is earned project by project, pitch by pitch, and can be withdrawn the moment a powerful originating partner grumbles. Compensation is tied to budget and headcount rather than to the revenue the function influences. The partner who wins a matter off the back of a client intelligence briefing, a coached pitch and a two-year relationship-nurturing program collects the origination credit; the professionals who built that machinery collect a salary and, if they are lucky, a thank you.
Contrast that with what the Big Four have done. Deloitte has had a Global Chief Growth Officer for years, and that person sits on the Global Executive Committee, shaping strategy alongside the practice leaders. The Big Four are not sentimental organizations. They did this because it makes them money. They are also slowly eating into legal services work year after year, and one of the reasons is precisely this: They trust their business professionals with real power, and law firms do not.
The deficit is cultural, and culture reveals itself in language. Which brings me to a word I had hoped, by now, never to hear again.
The dirtiest word in law
For over a decade I have been arguing that the term "non-lawyer" should be banished from the vocabulary of every law firm, legal publisher and bar association on earth. I have made the argument in print, on panels and, more times than I can count, over dinner tables. So you can imagine my disappointment when, on my recent trips to New York, I heard the term bandied around as freely and unthinkingly as it was twenty years ago. Including from people who would consider themselves progressive leaders of modern legal businesses.
Let us be clear about what this word does. It defines half of a firm's people, sometimes more, entirely by what they are not. No hospital calls its nurses, radiographers and chief executives "non-doctors." No accountancy firm speaks of "non-CPAs." Ralph Baxter, the former chairman of Orrick, tells the story of the moment Norm Rubenstein joined the firm as CMO and, at the very partner meeting where he unveiled the firm's new marketing mission, took Baxter aside to share his disappointment that his team were referred to as "non-lawyers." His observation, as Baxter recalls it, was that no one wants to be defined in the negative. That was more than twenty-five years ago. Since then, the industry has just shrugged.
The damage is not merely a matter of hurt feelings. When Husch Blackwell announced Paul Eberle's appointment, the American Lawyer's headline described the incoming chief executive, a man with twenty years of executive experience, as a newly employed non-lawyer. The legal marketing community rightly erupted, and the episode prompted a wider reckoning, with the American Lawyer itself later examining what the reaction to the term revealed about caste systems inside law firms: a hierarchy in which lawyers look down on the very business professionals whose advice they are paying for. Bob Glaves of the Chicago Bar Foundation has been running a one-man campaign to send the term off into the sunset for years. 3 Geeks and a Law Blog have called its use by legal journalists lazy. And still it persists.
Words are recruitment policy. The next generation of brilliant marketers, technologists, pricing analysts and client listening specialists have choices. They can go to a bank, a consultancy or a technology company, where they will be professionals; or they can come to a law firm, where they will be a "non." Every time the term is used in a town hall, a job advert or a trade publication, it tells the most talented business minds in the market that legal is a place where they will always be second class. The firms wondering why they struggle to attract and keep elite commercial talent should start by listening to how they describe it.
Same pay, same perks, same seat at the table
Which brings me to the argument that will get me the angriest emails, and the one I believe most strongly: Chief Marketing Officers of substance should be treated on the same terms as equity partners. The same pay. The same perks. The same profile in the firm's communications. And a permanent, voting seat on the executive committee, not a standing invitation to present for twenty minutes and then leave the room while the grown-ups talk.
For over a decade I have been arguing that the term "non-lawyer" should be banished from the vocabulary of every law firm, legal publisher and bar association on earth.
I can already hear the objection, because I have heard it in every one of the thirty years I have worked in this industry: The bar rules say they can't be partners in the U.S. Rule 5.4, professional independence, fee-sharing, and so on. Yes, yes. I know. The ABA reaffirmed its position on non-lawyer ownership as recently as 2022. But let us be honest about what this objection really is: a convenient shield. Because none of the following is prohibited by any bar rule anywhere:
Paying your CMO at the level of an equity partner. Nothing in Rule 5.4 stops a firm setting its CMO's total compensation at the equivalent of an equity point, structured as salary and bonus. Firms find creative compensation structures for star laterals every single week; the ingenuity deficit here is one of will, not regulation.
Giving your CMO the perks and status of partnership. The seat at the table, meaningful involvement in partner retreats, the business-class travel policy, the profile on the website that doesn't bury them under a tab marked "professionals." These are choices.
Putting your CMO on the executive committee. There is no rule of professional conduct in any jurisdiction that prevents a business professional sitting on, and voting in, a firm's management body. The firms that haven't done it, haven't done it because they don't want to.
There are numerous conversations about faceless private equity ownership in law firms, but there’s still resistance to senior executives from those firms having ownership and sharing the rewards of success.
And where the rules genuinely do bind, the direction of travel is against them. The District of Columbia has permitted “non-lawyer” partners since 1991, and a number of D.C. firms have partners who are lobbyists or communications professionals. Arizona and Utah have opened the door to alternative structures. Here in the UK, the Legal Services Act 2007 created Alternative Business Structures precisely so that firms could bring business professionals into ownership; the Act's own explanatory notes list, among the benefits, that firms would be able to reward business talent in the same way as lawyers. Irwin Mitchell became the first top-50 UK firm to convert. Newly merged Ashurst Perkins Coie is an ABS. Several UK firms are now publicly listed. The sky has not fallen.
So when a U.S. managing partner tells me the rules prevent them from treating their CMO as an equal, my answer is simple: The rules prevent you from giving them the title. Everything else – the money, the perks, the power, the respect – is entirely within your gift. If Deloitte can put its Chief Growth Officer on its global executive committee, a law firm can put its CMO on its management board. The question is not whether it is permitted. The question is whether the partnership actually believes its business leaders belong there. And too often, the honest answer is no.
The growth that trust would buy
Let me end where the skeptics live: the numbers. This is not an argument about kindness, inclusion or modern management fashion, though it would be justified on all three grounds. It is an argument about money.
The legal market is consolidating. The gap between the firms at the summit and everyone else widens every year. Clients rate law firms dismally at business development; general counsel routinely score firms below five out of ten on how they sell, and their consistent plea is for firms to understand them better. Understanding clients, positioning firms, building relationships at scale: this is exactly the work that world-class CMOs and their teams exist to do. McKinsey's finding bears repeating: a single, trusted, empowered growth leader on the executive committee correlates with growth multiples that any managing partner would crawl over broken glass to achieve.
Every firm says its people are its greatest asset. Very well: prove it. Strike the word "non-lawyer" from your vocabulary, your policies and your pitch decks, and correct it, politely but every time, when you hear it in New York, London or anywhere else. Pay your chief commercial leaders what you pay the partners whose books of business they help to build. Give them the seat, the vote and the profile. Treat them, in every respect the regulators allow and a few the regulators have never even considered, as owners of the business, because in every sense that matters, they already are.
A few years ago I asked the legal marketing profession to raise its game. It did. The lawyers are now the ones holding things back. Time, at long last, for the partnership to raise theirs.
