Barry Solomon is the chief marketing officer at Sidley Austin LLP, a global law firm with more than 1,700 lawyers in 19 offices around the world. Barry earned his J.D. and B.A. from the University of Chicago and began his career in the legal field as a lawyer with Sidley. He left the firm to co-found Interface Software, which developed the CRM tool InterAction. Barry held senior positions with LexisNexis following its acquisition of Interface, and left the company to become CMO at Microsystems and subsequently, at Sidley.
Q. In terms of the most effective means for legal marketing and business development, what did you find to be the biggest change over the intervening years between your stints at Sidley?
When I was practicing law at Sidley, lawyers did virtually all their own marketing and business development. Bar rules prevented many of the activities that are common today, even at large law firms, and technology hadn’t yet evolved to the extent that it truly facilitated global practices. Consequently, virtually everything that law firms do today out of CMO-led and professionally run marketing and business development departments is new. Nevertheless, the basic tenets remain the same. Law firms that excel have always been the ones that provide the highest quality legal services, while simultaneously understanding the need to identify opportunities and help clients solve problems they haven’t even articulated or know they have. It’s the idea that superior legal service begins well before a matter is opened and lawyers are billing time.
Q. Sidley has a wide range of lawyers, offices and practice areas. At a high level, how do you organize your team to address the marketing and business development needs of the firm and its attorneys?
This question reminds me of a TED-type talk I heard Allen Chichester, chief marketing officer at Barnes & Thornburg, give at a recent LMA conference. One of my takeaways from Allen’s excellent speech was “When in doubt, reorganize.” The notion was partly that you can sometimes accomplish a great deal more than just organization through restructuring your team. Kind of like Rahm Emanuel’s admonition to “let no good crisis go to waste”—the opportunity to, through upheaval, do things that you could not do before.
Another essential point Allen made was that with complex, international law firms, it’s impossible to pick just one right way to organize. So it’s better to focus on what’s important rather than worry too much about structure. With that said, we’ve chosen to organize our team using the firm’s global reach as the foundation for our structure. We have over 40 global practice area teams in 19 offices, so we provide support to our lawyers by dividing our business development professionals into six regions worldwide. In addition, we have six functional areas—business development, client service, marketing communications, market intelligence, marketing operations and business development training. Each of these cross-functional teams “focuses on what’s important” from its vantage point for the firm.
Q. Where does social media fit into your current marketing and business development efforts? Do you see legal marketing and business development via social media as a long-term trend that will increase in importance in the legal field or one as to which the luster will greatly wear off in due time?
Putting it all into context, social media is just another piece of a continuum. Whatever the mediums of the moment—telephone, fax machines, email or, now, social media—as marketing professionals we always need to harness the available methods to communicate, that is to both talk and listen. Research shows that sophisticated buyers of legal services do currently use social media to evaluate which lawyers and law firms to use. As long as that’s the case, social media will continue to be important. I’m sure technology will evolve in ways that it’s hard for us to even imagine today. Yet the essence of what we do will remain the same: understand our clients and potential clients so we are able to communicate using whatever methods they prefer.
Q. Where do you see the legal marketing field five years from now?
To predict that, we need only look at what CMOs in the business world are doing that CMOs in law firms are not yet doing. When I was a CMO of a software company, I was responsible for all the areas for which I’m now responsible, plus one additional area that most law firms have yet to carve out: product management. Just like we haven’t created departments called “sales” within law firms, I’m sure we won’t create departments called “product management,” either. But the concept of nonlawyer professionals applying product management techniques to help our lawyers think strategically about our clients’ needs, and then translating those needs into innovative legal service offerings will, I predict, become as important as the marketing and business development components of a CMO’s responsibilities.
Q. What should legal marketing and/or business development departments be doing more of?
Listening to our clients, our lawyers and each other.
Q. What should legal marketing and/or business development departments be doing less of?
Talking about ourselves (I say that ironically, as I answer all of your questions about myself!).
Q. I’m having the most fun on the job when . . .
I’m collaborating with my team to motivate our lawyers to do things they hadn’t thought of doing, and then that leads to challenging and interesting legal work the firm otherwise wouldn’t be doing.
Q. From whom did you learn the most in terms of legal marketing and business development? Why that person?
How can I choose just one? I learned a ton from the hundreds of CMOs and other marketing professionals I met in the years I spent growing market share for InterAction. If I had to pick one person, though, I’d probably go back early in my career to when I was a practicing lawyer. I learned by watching, again, many outstanding partners at Sidley Austin, including Thomas W. Albrecht, managing partner for Sidley’s Asia Pacific region and who is now based in our Hong Kong office. I learned from Tom an uncompromising commitment to delivering creative and high-quality legal services. Also, that no matter how time-crunched and stressful the circumstances, it is important to always make time to listen. Tom conveyed the value of what I continue to believe is the most important skill for any marketing and business development professional: empathetic listening.
Q: What do you enjoy doing most in your free time?
I love a variety of performing arts, such as watching a play directed by my wife Luda; listening to my oldest son, Josh, and daughter-in-law, Erika’s professional band The Empty Pockets opening for comedian George Lopez or some famous band; talking about plays and screenplays with my daughter Allie, who is getting her master’s degree in dramatic writing at NYU’s Tisch school; and watching Dr. Who on BBC with my youngest son Phillip.