Your Honor Award Member Profile:
Ezra Crawford, Director, Practice Group Business Development and Management, Crowell & Moring LLP
Winning Category:
Hall of Fame
Ezra is a born mentor. He truly cares about the growth of his colleagues as well as LMA. In his nomination for the region’s Hall of Fame, his nominator noted, “I have always turned to him for advice and he has always been willing to help anyone I ask him to help in terms of professional advice or job searching.”
He puts his own best practices to work to help guide junior members when they are deciding whether to make the leap to a new position or a new job. He asks, “What do you want to accomplish in your career? Does your role get you to that? Does your role in a few years get you closer to that? If your goal is out there, then you need to continuously be striving towards it.”
Before joining the legal marketing industry more than a decade ago, Ezra had a previous career as a financial consultant. When he realized that he couldn’t do the same thing every day for the next 30 years, he turned to Jaffe, a full-service law firm marketing and PR company, whom he had interned with while at American University. When he took the job with Jaffe, he didn’t know this would be his career. But, a year and a half in, he realized he loved working with law firms. To fully understand the market, he made the decision to go in-house to learn more. Like he advises his mentees, “all decisions to move and try new things at other firms have been career track driven.” He wanted to be the head of a department in five years – and that happened nearly to the date when he accepted a job as the first-ever Director of Marketing at a DC Am Law 200 firm.
Ezra served on International Board of Directors of the Legal Marketing Association from 2015-2016 and was the president of the Capital Chapter in 2012. He touts one of the reasons he got hired at his previous firm was because he was the incoming President of the Capital Chapter. He firmly believes in the benefits of being a member of LMA. “As legal marketers, we are often telling our lawyers to get involved with organizations – take your own advice. Once you take the plunge and get involved, you gain a network of friends and trusted advisors who become your informal support network.”
His favorite benefits of being a LMA member are career growth, community, and educational and professional development opportunities. “Less concrete, but just as important, is having the ability to call someone who is a member of LMA and ask them any question. Being able to get answers – finding out how another law firm has approached something you are considering, for examples – the lawyers love it. They appreciate the fact that we can get information that can help them.”
Ezra wants to make sure opportunities are there for the next generation of LMA members. This is a part of why he likes the role of mentor. “We should be holding ourselves to exacting standards and helping to raise the profession. Every generation of legal marketers should be better than the next because we are pushing our profession forward.”
As he coaches his mentees and lawyers, Ezra tries to take his own advice. He is still tracking his own career goals and we know this Hall of Fame award will only serve as a catalyst for further success and more involvement with LMA. Congratulations Ezra!
By Rebecca Edwards for the September/October 2017 LMA Mid-Atlantic Region Newsletter