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Like many legal marketing professionals, Ashley Briggs, a business development coordinator at Arent Fox LLP, ended up in the profession by chance – she’d probably call it good fortune.
Back in 2013, she saw an advertisement on an online job board for a hybrid HR and business development position at Williams & Connolly.
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She was offered the job, her first in legal marketing, and stayed for two years.She was promoted to a fully dedicated business development coordinator. She moved over to Arent Fox in the spring of 2015.
Briggs works with her firm’s government relations, FDA, and health care groups. She handles a wide variety of assignments, including pitch requests, RFP responses, events, media submissions, and competitive intelligence and market research.
“A lot of what I do is focused on branding and identity,” Briggs says. “We are always trying new ways to engage our clients and attract new ones while remaining true to the Arent Fox brand. The lawyers here know how to hustle and are not ones to sit idle, and they treat the marketing staff as part of their team.”
Briggs says she’s happy with how much sovereignty she is granted by the department leadership: She sets agendas for practice group meetings, works one-on-one with attorneys on individual business development projects, and participates in the overall administration of her practice groups.
Briggs says she’s also very involved in planning the marketing budget for her groups, working closely with the firm’s practice group leaders.
“It’s nice being able to look at how the money is being spent and use that knowledge to inform your client development strategy,” she says.
Briggs has a bachelor’s degree in international business and French from Washington & Jefferson College, with course work in marketing strategy and supply chain management.
She also finds time to serve as co-chair of the LMA Capital Chapter’s Future Leaders Shared Interest Group (SIG). The group hosts monthly events, such as networking happy hours and educational programs, for people who have five years or less of legal marketing experience.
“My goal is to increase the visibility of our SIG in the new regional structure and to create pathways for our future leaders to grow professionally,” Briggs says. The SIG has about 70 members, and its last event had 25 attendees.
She says that she herself was a bit intimidated when she first joined LMA but that she met established members such as Kara Kane, business development manager at Steptoe & Johnson LLP and our Chapter’s 2014 Member of the Year. Kane and others welcomed her from the start.
Briggs says her first piece of advice to a new legal marketer would be to “slow down.”
“Even though we’re working in a fast-paced environment with many deadlines,” Briggs advises, “take steps to double-confirm things. Seek out all the appropriate approvals, ask questions, and review your work from a big-picture standpoint before you proceed.”
By: Jonathan Groner, PR Specialist and Freelance Writer, for the September/October 2016 issue of the Capital Ideas Newsletter