Jiwon Lee, Business Development Manager in the D.C. office of Nossaman LLP, leads business development efforts for the firm’s attorneys and policy advisors in its Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco offices. Her responsibilities at the 160-attorney law firm, where she has worked for the past 4 ½ years, include proposal development, attorney coaching, practice group strategy, and many other tasks. While Jiwon wears many hats in the office, she is most passionate about Nossaman’s Client Satisfaction Interview program and plays an active role in the program.
“Our culture embraces this in a very significant way,” Jiwon says. “I believe we are unique in that the firm has long invested in a formal client satisfaction interview program since the mid-1990’s and we not only have the Managing Partner conducting the interviews, but most of the interviews are conducted by the Business Development/Client Relations Managers and the Director of Business Development.”
Jiwon’s responsibilities in the program are not limited to clients of the D.C. office as she conducts these client interviews all over the country. She travels to clients’ sites, obtains feedback, and works with the relationship partner to incorporate feedback into subsequent services and develop business development strategies. The client satisfaction interview program even includes interviews with companies that did not award work to Nossaman, so that the firm can find out where it fell short and what it can do to improve.
This year, Jiwon attended her first national LMA conference. She came away from the Las Vegas event with a great many interesting thoughts and lessons.
“I was intrigued by how other firms tackle client service initiatives and it was most helpful to hear in-house counsels talk directly about their legal marketing pet peeves,” Jiwon says. “ It was refreshing to hear that potential clients are not only interested in legal expertise but also interested in how the firms internally operate. It reiterated the importance of training younger attorneys and having people dedicated to pricing and profitability.”
Jiwon started in legal marketing at what was then Hogan & Hartson from 2003 to 2005. She then moved over to Crowell & Moring and stayed there until 2008, specializing in competitive intelligence and proposal development. Nossaman entered the D.C. market in 2008 when it merged with what was then O’Connor & Hannan, and Jiwon was hired then as its first marketer. At Nossaman, she focuses on developing business for the public policy, public pensions and investments, and corporate practice groups.
Born in South Korea, Jiwon came to the United States as a teenager. Knowing little English, she was enrolled in junior high school at a boarding school in Pennsylvania. She quickly learned the language and was admitted to the University of Virginia, where she graduated in 2000 with a degree in psychology.
“I was quick at picking up the language but not so quick at picking up cultural remarks or slang, which led to rather embarrassing episodes,” Jiwon says. “The most recent example is when I went to a happy hour and was curious if a partner had been to the restaurant before. I asked him, ‘Do you come here often?’ The partner turned around and said, ‘That is a pick up line.’ We all laughed about it but if there is a course covering all American slang expressions and pick up lines, I will take it.”
When she is not in the office or traveling on business, Jiwon is a soccer mom for her boys on the weekends, ages seven and four, and enjoys date nights with her husband. Her husband is pastor of a church, the Christ Covenant Church in Columbia, Md., which identifies itself as nondenominational Protestant.
By: Jonathan Groner, public relations and writing consultant in Washington, D.C. for the March/April 2013 Issue of the Capital Ideas Newsletter.