Ali: So, welcome to the Passle CMO Series, where we discuss all things marketing and business development in the world of professional services. Collaboration could be a bit of a buzzword and isn't always commonplace throughout professional services. However, collaboration between lawyers, teams, and practices offers so much potential for effective marketing and BD. Today, we're fortunate enough to host the wonderful Clinton Gary, consultant, growth coach, and expert in driving collaboration for marketing and business development.

Charlie: The CMO Series podcast is brought to you by Passle. Passle makes thought leadership simple, scalable, and effective, so professional services firms can stay front of mind with their clients and prospects when it matters most. Find out more and request a demo at Passle.net. Now back to the podcast. 

Ali: Welcome, Clinton. 

Clinton: Thank you, Ali. I really appreciate it. I want to thank you, thank James and Passle for having me on. I'm a big fan. I've admired all the interviews prior, so it's a privilege to be here.

Ali: Well, that's very, very kind of you to say, and I'm very appreciative of it. And I must say, prior to starting the recording, we're talking about a bunch of the calls you've been getting recently and how a lot of it's been about going back to basics and focusing on practice groups. So it's really going to tie into the day really nicely, it feels. If you want to call it a buzzword or hot in the market right now, collaboration is one of the words that is popping up frequently, and we can talk about that.

Ali: Excellent. Excellent.  Well, I guess without further ado, to set the scene, could you talk about what you mean by collaboration and why managing partners and CMOs should have collaboration at the top of their priority list?

Clinton: Collaboration can be a fuzzy word, and I'll give it a quick fuzzy definition, and that is, in its simplest form, collaboration is we're just trying to bring people together to solve a problem or learn something new. And that sounds simple, but there's a couple of key attributes to that that are missing a lot in today's law firms. And those are, one, we want to bring together diverse talent. And by diverse talent, I mean the big D, and that is diverse in thought, diverse in geography, diverse in generation, diverse in knowledge, a very diverse team to bring the power of that diverse team together. Also, it kind of meets the definition of, you really can't do whatever you're trying to do by yourself. You can get a better result by bringing more people together to bring their collective capabilities and knowledge together. It's also mutually beneficial for all of those involved. Everybody who invests their time gains something out of the activity that you are collaborating to perform. And then the last one is it's active and it's willing. And you're not ordering people to do it. People want to come together to be able to collaborate. Collaborate is a positive word. Unlike some of the words that we use in firms that we might overlap or replace with collaboration, such as coordination or the frequently used collegiality, collaboration's different. It's a higher level of all of those. Those are required to get to collaboration, but collaboration is different. And that's what law firms are looking at today. And I like your question in which you said, why should managing partners and CMOs be interested in collaboration? Well, I would say that from my experience, they are already interested in collaboration. I don't think I've come across a strategy or an annual plan that didn't have the word collaboration in its top five objectives or listing of top five values of a firm's culture. The challenge is actually implementing it and getting more collaboration.

And there's a lot of reasons for that. I really believe right now it's pervasive, this challenge. There is a collaboration challenge in the legal industry because of many things. Managing partners, what's driving it? Managing partners, they know what it can do. They know they want their people to get together, come together, share ideas, develop thought leadership, identify opportunities with clients, then go and have those collaborative conversations with clients, and then collaboratively staff it and deliver value to those clients so they can tackle greater challenges, and then get to the next engagement and the next engagement because we've established our value and we know it's been proven, and we've all read the articles. You want to get to the holy grail of the institutional clients where you're delivering multiple practices, multiple services to them because we know it's been proven that you get better revenues, you get better profits, you get better client loyalty, and you get better attorney engagement and satisfaction and fulfillment, which is what the managing partners want. But it's a struggle to be able to get there. And it has a sense of urgency. Right now, collaboration has a sense of urgency because law firms of all sizes have gobbled up resources in the last couple of years, people, practices that are stretching across regions and countries, and they've brought in tons of laterals. So expenses have increased. So they've got to generate more revenue to cover the expenses. And I think one managing partner aptly put it in a quote, which is, “I need one plus one plus one to equal five now”, because they've gathered it together. They now have to get it all to work together. And that's kind of what we're seeing. Now, large law firms, this is not new to large law firms. They've invested for years to be able to handle the complexities of what they know of being – to get collaboration in a large law firm. But it's a lot of the other law firms, say below the AmLaw 50, that –. Have had this tremendous growth in the last couple of years, but haven't had the infrastructure and the leadership and the management style to be able to get collaboration. So it's growing pains. It's growing pains for most law firms. And they're trying to now say, how can I actively manage my firm to improve collaboration? And this is on firms of all sizes. I have firms that have 30 attorneys, 100 attorneys that have collaboration issues. So this isn't just a big firm issue, right? 

Ali: Sure. That's very interesting. I mean, clearly what stood out to me there was, you know, ultimately it's about, as you said, doing, and that's the issue people are just struggling to implement it. And I suppose, as you touched upon at the end there, if you don't have the infrastructure, then how on earth do you do that? And, you know, I guess that's where having people who have that knowledge to bring everyone together really, really helps. So just kind of bringing us on to the next question. It'd be really interesting to actually hear a little bit around your own personal journey and how you built your experience, because I'm sure that a lot of this knowledge you have around collaboration you've previously implemented elsewhere, as I know you're a name that will certainly be known within the industry.

Clinton: Yeah, it's hindsight's 2020. I can look back now and say that I've actually had a career of improving collaboration in every stop I've been at, and they've stacked together nicely, though unintentionally. The first one really is I was fortunate to have the foundation of Arthur Andersen, to be able to start there as a business consultant and then move to the marketing and business development and knowledge management leadership positions. And in big five fashion, you change roles every year or two. So I was able to be exposed to a lot of things that this world-class organization, the big five, the big four in general, do to be able to facilitate collaboration and why they're so successful and profitable. And I'll get to the details in a minute. Then after that, an interesting stop after Andersen, I was the Chief Marketing Officer at an HR consulting firm that specialized in helping companies foster a productive and collaborative culture, and that made a meaningful impression on me to combine what was Arthur Andersen, a lot of processes and structures to then going to cultures and combining that. And that led to then moving into being a Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Business Development Officer at law firms for 15 years, three different AmLaw firms, medium and large. At my last stop, I was the Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer and have to say that I've been blessed to work with some fantastic people at every stop, leaders and colleagues.

In which we did some pretty cool stuff. And most of the cool stuff we did really focused on collaboration because I kept bringing that wherever I was. And I hope they smile because they know who they are. In each of those law firms, I was also part of each law firm's largest acquisition. So the uber collaboration was getting a large group of laterals or another firm incorporated into these law firms and get them moving quickly. And that really led to several years ago, I decided to become a consultant in this area because I really felt passionate about it. And that's under the banner of the consulting firm called CREDO, CREDO Consulting. For you Latin majors, CREDO means I believe “for those”. And in the seeding of that consulting firm, several years ago, I had the absolute privilege to be able to work with Dr. Heidi Gardner and her team. Gardner & Co., her company, are leaders in this area of collaboration. And they've developed great thought leadership. And in the books that have been published of smart collaboration, smarter collaboration, and Heidi and I have, Dr. Gardner and I have published content together, and we've partnered on engagement. So I was very fortunate to be with her. So when you sum all that up, when you sum all that up, basically I've combined the experience of being a consultant and being a Chief with the latest thought leadership, but then packaging that in my knowledge of knowing the uniqueness of law firms. So that way it's practical know-how to be able to approach improving collaboration in an organization. So I do that through engagements around strategy, planning, operational excellence, and business development coaching, either through workshops. Keynotes, and engagements. My three services that I'll say that the package is, it's the collaborative firm, the collaborative practice, or the collaborative professional is the way I kind of step into my clients and say, which one seems to fit right now? So that's my experience. Strangely enough, it's all pointed to this wonderful opportunity I have to be in a market that is talking about collaboration so much.

Ali: I mean, what really comes through there is it's just kind of been this wonderful melting pot of experiences. And as you said, very early on, you got a huge amount of exposure. I suppose it was exposure throughout that's brought you to this point. And you say to be able to go into firms and look at, be it collaborative firm, collaborative practice or collaborative professional. I mean, there's so many different ways that you can look at this. Building on that, you know, was there a moment that you really started to realize just how important collaboration was when it comes to marketing business development, you know, was there that kind of light bulb moment there?

Clinton: There sure was and I'll go back to my time with the big five and it is relevant today because very similar characteristics in the legal industry today than what was with the big five several years ago. So it's highly relevant. And the three things that I learned at Arthur Andersen that I thought were pivotal in collaboration for marketing, business development, and growth were common knowledge, common methodologies, and a common purpose. These were foundational, and I'll describe those. When I did my tour of duties in practice teams, industry teams, and alliance marketing teams, I saw what those initiatives looked like, but then I was asked to lead the knowledge management for the Southeast region for the consulting arm. That's when I got an insight behind the scenes of a key component to collaboration. Arthur Andersen at the time was ranked one of the top 10 firms globally for managing its knowledge. So it's no surprise that it was successful because it invested in knowledge management. They had teams that managed knowledge in the area of collecting their best practices in serving clients. There was a global experience and skills system where you could search for individuals and key deliverables from engagements, as well as what was called a client issues matching system to be able to come in and say, "My client has an issue. What do we have to solve that issue?" That was the establishment of a foundation for a collaboration firm, because the marketing and business development team had the knowledge it needed to connect the dots and respond to opportunities to facilitate collaboration. The professionals had at their fingertips the ability to quickly answer questions that facilitate collaboration. You could quickly answer the questions of who knows who, who knows what, who’s done what for whom, and who wants to do more of what. These are key questions that people search to find individuals to start collaboration. That’s a foundation that speeds up the process of, "What are we trying to do? What do we need for collaboration?" We’re trying to get "I know you, I like you, I trust you. And when I trust you, then I'll work with you." Marketing and business development is trying to speed up that process. But before you get to that, I have to find you. So the knowledge management sped up that process of being able to find a person, which then led to faster points of collaboration—"I like you, I trust you." That’s the first one. 

Second, I was fortunate to be asked to be on the staff of the global managing partner of markets and solutions for Arthur Andersen, basically the Global Chief Growth and Marketing Officer for the firm. I was able to see, by being in that position, the development of projects we were working on, which was the go-to-market strategy, the client experience methodology, which basically outlined how all professionals across the globe should sell, staff, and service clients, and then the key account development methodology that we did. This led to the second important learning that I have, that I speak with often, which is common methodologies create common vocabularies. Common vocabularies are necessary for collaboration. It’s just like having different languages in different countries. You’ve got to be able to be on the same language for people to come together and talk and share ideas. Creating those common methodologies, which documented the points at which professionals should bounce out and collaborate with other professionals, made collaboration more identifiable. A common methodology you can train a person on. If you don’t have a common way of serving a client, how can you train a person on it? That’s where law firms struggle with this entrepreneurialism, which is wonderful. But entrepreneurialism at its base is not good because it creates complexity. What you want is entrepreneurialism on top of the standardization of the best methodologies that match the firm’s capabilities and the way they want to do work. And then you want to be adaptive. So that’s the second one. A common methodology was important in Arthur Andersen. 

The last one was a common purpose. It was not uncommon that a partner, when you started at the firm, would write down a formula, which was basically K equals P plus I to the power of S. They’d write it down. And what does this mean? A partner would come into you and immediately say to you, "We are a knowledge company. We’re a knowledge company that is made of people plus information. But the value of that is in the sharing of that knowledge." So it was ingrained in you in the beginning that every person is valuable, every person has knowledge. And it’s your job to be able to enhance that knowledge and share that knowledge for the benefit of both you as the individual, the firm, and the client.It’s great to see how initiatives were then never one-offs. Initiatives were grouped together, like I just mentioned, knowledge management, the methodologies, they were all grouped together to be able to roll up to say, "Why are we doing this? Why are we doing an industry team? Why are we doing key accounts? Why are we collecting knowledge?" Instead of positioning it as pounding on professionals, it was positioned as these are all there to help you and the firm be better because we are a knowledge company, and sharing knowledge is incredibly important for us to be successful. So that resonates throughout my entire career. Those three things that I’ve brought into law firms are common knowledge, common methodologies, and a common purpose—why we’re doing it all.

Ali: No, it’s absolutely fascinating. I mean, in many ways, it’s very simple. I mean, it’s a simple way to look at it: common knowledge, common methodology, common purpose. But what clearly the big five are doing, and you’ve taken away from it by dissecting that, they’re doing it to 100, 110% of their ability. And there was so much that it just built towards that ultimate success. And it’s really, really interesting to hear you talk about that.

Clinton: And I’ll add on to it, which is what I have learned by being in law firms is everybody, or at least the first objection is, "That’s the big five." They've got money and they could all do it in tons of people. Where I hope to say, where I'd like to say I've been successful is being able to replicate that with limited resources. So there is a way to be able to do those things with limited resources. So it's not impossible. You just have to know those limitations, those boundaries that you're dealing with from a budget, from a personnel standpoint, and make dents in each of those areas. That's why it works for small and large companies. And I can talk to that a little bit later when we do it.

Ali: I appreciate that. So what would you say there for the indicators or the smoke signals, if you will, are to collaboration being something that you should be working on?

Clinton: So here's where I'll raise the red flag. Let's look at four proxies right now for the state of collaboration. One is industry teams, classic collaborative structure in law firms. There was a survey conducted that was introduced to the Marketing Partner Forum by Thomson Reuters, I believe, two years ago, in which this survey indicated that the success of industry teams is at its lowest point right now across the industry. And we could talk about that in a minute, but that staple of collaboration is struggling mightily. So that's a red flag. Second proxy, across the data that I've seen, the average number of practices that are provided to a firm's top clients, let's say the top 100 usually, is below two. Let's think about that number. And that is you're selling or you're providing on average less than two practices are serving clients. When we know that you want that institutional three, which gets you past that threshold of having deep relationships and being invaluable to that client, it's below two. So that's a signal that we're struggling. Third, in the firms that I go, that I see, and those that I've talked to, yes, 50 of them, more than half of them have some form of knowledge management or experience management system or process in which they are trying to get to work, but across all the interviews that I have and what I hear is that professionals, our lawyers, still go to the external website to be able to find people in their firm that they then want to call and say, hey, you have something that I know you, I like you, I trust you, right? Their first stop is their external website. 

Ali: That's wild.

Clinton: And we know that marketers have been pounding on them for years to get their bio even smaller because people don't read long bios. So, there is that inefficiency of using, that's a proxy to say there's inefficiency in collaboration when people are using the external website instead of internal. That says the state of our knowledge management within the group. And then the last one, which is I do a lot of assessments, and I've been associated with a lot of assessments as it relates to collaborative business development, the framework for assessing collaborative business development law firms. And we ask attorneys to rank themselves, rank their firms in several of the key collaborative business development processes that the firm is performing. And they continually give themselves an average rating in those areas. So that is self-imposed average rating. So those four proxies really start to give you an indication that firms are struggling to have that holistic view, creating that platform for better collaboration within their firm. And how does this usually show up? We know how it shows up. It shows up in siloed practices, resistance to developing plans, the lack of knowledge sharing, lack of quality thought leadership. And sometimes it even goes to low morale, but I'll tell you where it shows up the most. The smoke signals and why I love that you use the word smoke signals is all of those are just, what you hear from the two biggest smoke signals are. Complaining within a firm. Lawyers are not bashful to say, I think that we're not doing well as it relates to collaboration. And they'll point out what they think are some of those barriers. There's a rising mumble of unsatisfaction or a lack of satisfaction in how the firm is collaborating and how they feel like they're plugged into the collaboration firm. And then the last one that's most signal is a lack of firm growth, a lack of institutional clients. Those are the two biggest areas. But those are all smoke signals. They are symptoms to what are the real underlying problems. And we could talk about that in the next one, which is those are all what you see happen based upon not solving the underlying issues in a firm for collaboration.

Ali: I was actually going to ask you, I mean, when it comes to that, you've got those four areas you spoke about, you're talking about the smoke signals. I mean, what would you say on a high level are the most common problems within firms that they need to solve when it comes to improving collaboration or are those the four key things or are there other, is that purely just a smoke signal and there's more that they need to address?

Clinton: There's more. And I like the way you phrased that. Based upon the thought leadership that's there and the experience of doing this for multiple law firms, there are roughly 10 barriers to collaboration. Those things that prevent collaboration, prevent those initiatives from being successful. And those range from strategies, lack of strategies and structures and skills and knowledge and leadership. There's 10 of them. But let me tell you the trend. And that is. Several years ago, it used to be time. I'm too busy to collaborate, which is basically another way of saying it's not easy to collaborate in my firm, right? And then it started to move towards when the growth all started. The thing that rose to the top in our assessments typically was, I just don't understand all the capabilities that my firm offers. So it's, how can I collaborate when I don't know who to call? I just don't understand it. And that's a knowledge and communication issue. But the one that's creeped up in the last few years, which is triggered by the growth and by the COVID crisis, really is trust. Trust has risen dramatically in the last few years as an issue preventing collaboration. And that trust specifically comes in the form of interpersonal trust, competency trust. And those things are based on the challenges of talent flows in and out. No longer is there a stable set of attorneys that everybody has gone to retreats with and spent time with. So I trust you implicitly and there's easy collaboration. Now half the room is new people. Half the room is new people and half the room is of different generations. So you have, and half the people now, if not more, are not coming into the office. So this trust, firms have to think about how they actively manage trust if trust is the issue, which seems to be a dominant factor. I will say two other things. In the top 10 things that are barriers, it's rarely compensation. Rarely compensation. People will talk about it. It will be voiced in conversations. But if you ask professionals, if you ask the lawyers to rank order the 10 typical barriers to collaboration, from all the assessments I've seen, compensation has never made it into the top five. So a lot of people want to use that but it's not really the core issue is compensation. It tends not to be the core issue. Small firms will struggle with collaboration as equally as large firms. I have firms as I mentioned. I have firms that are 100 attorneys in one office and they still struggle with collaboration so it's not compensation and it's not based upon size. It varies, and that leads to a key point we'll talk about, which is the heart of addressing collaboration is understanding what are your two or three unique barriers that are preventing collaboration within the firm.

Ali: It sort of doesn't surprise me, I suppose, that trust is coming towards the top now. Because you say we're now in this remote world, there are people constantly coming and going within these firms, there's that war on talent that's happening. And then that's, you know, underpinned by, say, there's the time element, but capabilities, you know, the knowledge, the communication. I mean, it's only a small example, but I remember when we were talking beforehand, you spoke about, I think it was McKinsey, and you said one of the great things that they do is that if you want to be seen as an expert in something, i.e. You want to be able to work on something, they tell you to go away and write about it first and show that you are the expert in that, and then you can start working on it. And that's just one small example that you shared with me that seems like a good way to fix some of these issues. And that would feed into the capabilities one, because you start to see that someone has the knowledge and that can be communicated. And it would build a little bit of trust as well, because you're like, oh, this person talks about something a lot.  It was only one small example that when you're talking there, it reminded me of the conversation we had ahead of this. 

Clinton: You are spot on with that. And you've hit the two big ones that can start to address trust. One of them is, can you demonstrate the knowledge before I ask you to go on a project with me? Because that's risk, right? That's risk. But you can limit that risk and speed up the trust if you've written about it.  That's where content and thought leadership plays a key role, especially at firms like McKinsey, is you want to search by experience, get their skills, and then you look at their ideas. Are they codified? Do they make sense? And that speeds up the process. The other one goes back to the methodologies, which is, are you trained in the way we do things in the firm? It's tough to establish trust when a lateral comes in and a firm says, hey, whatever you were doing before, keep it up because you had a great book of business and that's what we want you to do. That basically means that you've created this challenge of what is their standard to client service? What is their standard to client communications? What is their standard to responding to a proposal and keep plugging other individuals in? The more that a partner says, I know this individual has been trained on the core things that matter the most to our firm, those few things that we hinge our client experience on and our client service on speeds up the trust factor. So competency, thought leadership, and training are two core areas that a firm can make a dent in for improving trust. 

Ali: That makes complete sense. And that actually leads us really nicely onto the question I wanted to ask you. We sort of covered off some of those smoke signals, got a little bit deeper into the problems that exist. I mean, what does this all start to look like in practice? I would love to hear from you, Clinton, just on an example from your work where you've had a firm that you've worked on identifying and then taking practical steps to improve their collaboration. 

Clinton: Yeah, I'm going to give you two, and they're going to come from two different approaches because I think they're useful because most situations are different and most of them have a catalyst that causes the firm to say, we need to look at collaboration. The first one is top-down, and then the second one, I'll tell you, is a bottom-up in the way they test collaboration, one of our clients. Top-down was a firm that was having a leadership change, but in that leader was understanding there were rumblings of a lack of collaboration across the firm. So what we did was we surveyed those attorneys and administrative leaders to understand what's the state of collaboration of the firm? What are their unique barriers in which they had in that firm? And so that led to a retreat in which we presented the benefits of collaboration by looking at their client portfolio and looking at thought leadership to say, here's money you're leaving on the table through collaboration. But more importantly, we discussed and established the expectations the firm has for partners, for practice group leaders, and for client relationship partners of collaboration. Meaning, going back to if it's one of the six or seven bullet points that are listed as what's most important to guide the decisions and behaviors of partners, we had a discussion of collaboration is one of those six or seven bullet points. So that was a foundation of everybody's on the same page of understanding how important it is. So that's the purpose, right? That's the purpose. 

And then we went into the common methodologies. We then used the following months. This is a year-long program. We used the following months to establish a uniform practice group planning process so it all could roll up and they could find commonalities across practices. We provided practice groups the ability to be more efficient which is a standard agenda that had key points of collaborative discussion not around the horn what is everybody doing but hey here's a issue that is in our market or here is a challenge let's discuss it so we're all on the same page and then we and we established also import export reports which basically says where is a project being, which practice group is originating the project and which practice group is staffing the project. So good barometer of collaboration across practice groups, that was established for them. And then the last one was key account management process. So you can see one of the benefits when we talk about collaboration is not one-off initiatives. It's usually multiple initiatives, a few, that are mutually beneficial. They're interlocking to provide a better platform for collaboration. In this case, they went from top-down strategy, brand, expectations to then the infrastructure for it. Now, the bottom-up one, which was interesting, which is a client was really struggling with growth. Did not have institutional clients. So the idea was, so that was the catalyst, a sense of urgency.  We did the assessment and found that some of the challenge was, hey, I don't know when to collaborate and when should I collaborate? It was very individual-centric, very partner-centric in this firm. So what we did was I created a white space report for this firm to be able to identify where each partner had specific clients that looked like they had expansion possibilities. And then it was a six-month coaching program for each partner to be able to for each partner in this group to be able to say let's talk about this client specifically what would what are their issues outside of your practice and what would be partners that you would call and ask the rationale of why would you call that partner so very much what I would call almost like orchestrating conversations and collaboration at the individual level.

And then each partner walked away with two to three clients that were in the firm's top 200 clients to be able to say, now go collaborate and let's move that to new business development opportunities and revenue generation. So that's a bottom-up one. And then establish the infrastructure of, okay, now that we did that, in the next annual planning process. Each partner would identify another two or three clients with the identification of another one or two partners related to each of those clients. So a level of specificity and accountability that required that business development coaching at the basic level. So two great examples of one top down, one bottom up based upon the catalyst that they were facing. I'll add this. Sometimes it's not core to business development and marketing. For example, where one firm had trust as an issue, We looked back and said, okay, in the assessment, trust was an issue. So really the focus was on all areas in which people were meeting, all areas in which people were gathering together. How can we improve that? So it was a combination of three things. One of them was what I loved. We did monthly random lunches, which is take all attorneys and all administrative leaders. And every month it was sent out to say, you should have a lunch or at least a 30 minute conversation with this person that has been randomly selected. Sometimes it was an associate gets the managing partner. Sometimes it was the business development manager gets a partner in another or an associate in another office. This randomness created a new level of, hey, I didn't know this person. We should collaborate. So that's one. Second one is whenever an attorney was brought into the firm or at an annual retreat, we asked another attorney to interview them and introduce them to the firm, passing credibility to that individual as opposed to a person standing up and introducing themselves. And then the last one was we had administrative managers across the different departments come together frequently and talk about how they're supporting practice groups and interesting requests that they've received. That empowered those administrative managers to better connect the dots by having, say, the BD manager in the same room with the person describing the new intake process. So these weren't processes. These were people connections. So that's why it's tough to be able to say there is one way that fits everybody to improve collaboration in the firm. So it's the assessment that helps us guide towards identifying those interlocking initiatives and actions and investments to be able to start improving collaboration in the firm. I hope that's helpful.

Ali: No, I mean, it's absolutely fascinating to listen to those various examples. And, you know, there's obviously that common thread of being able to make any of this work is about the people. It's about the connections that everybody can make in different ways. And, you know, those examples you shared help facilitate how that might be possible to do that. And I think it's very, very interesting to hear you talk around it. So to close us out, Clinton, what's the one thing that managing partners and CMOs should have on their agenda to improve collaboration within their firm?

Clinton: Being a former CMO, my response when I was thinking about this was about what can they influence, right? There's big stuff that can be done, but what are those areas that a CMO can influence to be able to start improving collaboration. There's 40 different ways, roughly, that a firm can start improving collaboration in various initiatives or actions. The key is to find the three to five that are relevant to your firm. Now, if you don't do the assessment, if you don't do an assessment to hear the voice of the partners to find out what are some of those issues that you want to address to align your resources and your people, there are six or seven that I consider to be the default spine of collaboration, the infrastructure. We know what some of those are, industry teams, key client teams, appropriate planning. So these are big ones that are probably already on their agenda. But I'll offer this. So you asked the question that said, what should be on their agenda? Their agenda is to find out what are the barriers to collaboration, line up their resources and their people, their two to three major initiatives that they're doing that year around solving that problem of those barriers. That's your long-term ones, but you've got to couple them with short-term wins to improve collaboration now because those big initiatives take a long time. So I'll offer you three things, knowing that CMOs who are listening to this have responsibility for business development, marketing, and communications. So I'll offer you a quick nugget in each of those areas that they can immediately make an impact that I've seen is beneficial across firms and addresses frequently issues. So the first one comes, treat internal communications as important as external communications. The same way you think about generating content and generating messages and we've packaged up communications externally through social media because we understand there's an attention deficit disorder out in the world. There's an attention deficit disorder in law firms. Avoid the long internal newsletter and get to information sharing that will be readable and actionable internally as equally as externally and make it personable. For example, each week have either a practice group leader or an office managing partner send an email or short, quick burst on a phone call that says, here's a great example of collaboration across this firm that we want to recognize. That's internal communications that they can do right now is recognizing collaboration.

Second is marketing and let's get to content especially where it sits with passle does marketing have on a single sheet of paper what is what I would consider to be a priority client issues list so of all the things people can write about of all the things you can promote, On one list, you should really have three at the top that are most important right now that are timely to the market, timely to the majority of your clients, and you have a capability of delivering it. And then you have six or seven supporting ones. What you do is you say, any attorney that will partner with another attorney to write content aligned with our top three issues for our clients, you will get double the amount of investment from our team in promoting that content. We will promote it twice as long, and we will promote it through multiple channels, and we will invest to be able to put in multiple areas. And if three or more practices are together, you can commit that you will spend the money for the PR firm to come in and interview in a roundtable format those partners across practice groups to be able to make it easy for them to capture that information. So you're facilitating collaboration in content creation, not waiting for those partners to do it. You're incentivizing them because you will double down on people who write content across practice groups addressing a priority client issue. And everybody in the firm knows what those priority issues are. 

And then the last one is business development. Business development, two things that I see is the lack of a common methodology in business development and being used by your business development managers. Ask your business development managers when they're coaching their partners. Ask the collaboration questions. Ask relationship questions. We spend a lot of time talking about what are they going to do in the market and which clients are they going after. But talk about what are the two or three partners that you will talk to in the next six months that will expand your capability that you get value by talking to them and they'll get value by talking to you. It's interesting that we do that for laterals all the time in a three-month or two-month or a quick burst period. And we tell laterals, here's the people you got to meet. And then we let them loose. That's gold. It's relationships. Why do we not do that on a continuous basis for each attorney in the firm or each partner in the firm to say, what are strategic people you need to meet within this firm and swap knowledge? Business development. Then the last one is have your business development managers attend other practice group meetings. Business development managers tend to be siloed and if they are aligned with the practice group, they only go to their practice group meetings. Swap them out and tell other business development managers to go to other practice group meetings so they can better improve connected dots and facilitate collaboration. So big agendas, big initiatives, do the assessment and look at all things through how are you improving collaboration with your limited time and limited funds, but also have those quick wins in which you are orchestrating more collaboration within the firm. That's what I would recommend to the CMOs that are there.

Ali: That is just wonderful. And thank you ever so much for sharing all that, Clinton. I mean, there are so many fantastic takeaways here, lots of practical knowledge that you've been able to share with us. And I know that when it comes to listening to this, dissecting it, there's so much that people are going to be able to take out of it. All of those different nuggets that you've been able to drop in here. And, you know, I know that we've only just scratched the surface. There's so much more that we could get deeper into, and I would absolutely love to. But thank you again for just this wonderful conversation and really do appreciate your time.

Clinton: It is absolutely my pleasure, and thank you for the privilege of doing this.

Ali: Our pleasure, our pleasure. Take care.