Bianca Duffield with The Association Law Firm in Orlando was this year's LMASE Regional Conference Scholarship recipient. This is the first in a series of three articles Bianca will author regarding her experience at the LMA Annual Conference in 2015.
As a first-year member of LMA and a first-timer at the LMASE Regional Conference, my experience in Atlanta was overwhelming to say the least. From the pre-conference workshops to the round-table discussions, I engaged with legal marketing professionals from every different stage of their career. People from firms with over 100 attorneys swapped stories with solo marketers from firms of less than ten. I quickly began to realize that no matter how small or large the business; all of us had key programs, problems, and practices in common. The Conference proved to be extremely informational, not just in terms of furthering one's career or developing a personal brand, but also in its application to specific on-the-job challenges and potential solutions.
One of the topics I found myself drawn to during the round-table discussions was "Change Management." Immediately upon entering the discussion, we were given copies of a John Kotter article entitled "Leading Change." The 8-step process discussed in the article proved to be central to several of the key takeaways that were discussed and reinforced throughout the conference. As addressed in the article and by several of the impressive speakers who lent their expertise to us all, marketing (legal or otherwise) requires a very strategic and purposeful plan in order to generate growth. As they related to change management, the steps to the process were as follows:
- Create a Sense of Urgency (and communicate it)
- Build a Guiding Coalition (find your "marketing champion" for validation)
- Form a Strategic Vision and Initiatives
- Enlist a Volunteer Army (aka create a Marketing Committee - a critical mass of people who help to move ideas forward)
- Enable Action by Removing Barriers (fix processes)
- Generate Short-term Wins (and celebrate those wins)
- Sustain Acceleration (anchor in the new approaches)
- Institute Change (creating a new Firm culture)