Charlie: Welcome to the Passle CMO Series podcast, where we discuss all things marketing and business development in professional services. In this special episode, we revisit a standout session from CMO Series Live in New York, where Eugene McCormick was joined on stage by Alison Arjoon, the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Fragomen, and Luke Ferrandino, the Chief Marketing Officer at Paul Weiss. Together, they discuss how building a culture of experimentation helps aid the successful adoption of tech and the different ways technology can be used to help firms stay ahead of the curve. We're so excited to share the full discussion with you today, so enjoy.

Eugene: Thank you for joining us. I'm really excited to bring this discussion together because I actually think it's pretty unique. There's a little bit of context: we asked Alison, we said, Alison, we've got this idea, we've got this big event, CMO Series Live, and we're going to do a big talk, and we're going to talk about technology, and you obviously know a thing or two. And she said, I'll do it, but you have to get Luke involved as well. 

Luke: Really?

Alison: Yes!

Eugene: So that may be a good thing, it may be a bad thing. You can cast your vote at the end of today. But actually, we've got two fabulous people in front of us with two very different challenges at their hands, but both using technology in very innovative ways. And I'm really excited to bring it to life today. One of the things that's most interesting is that both Alison and Luke obviously worked together at Paul Weiss. Then Luke ended up at Fried Frank, then Alison moved to Covington. And then Alison started at Fragomen in 2017, and Luke started at Paul Weiss again in August 2018. And you have two very, very different challenges on your hand, but you both make use of technology, and it's really core to everything you do. So to set the scene, could you both tell me a little bit about your firms? Because Alison, you're in what we could say is a non-traditional firm, and Luke, you're in very much a traditional firm. Could you tell us about the firms you're in, the challenges you're facing, and start to explain a little bit about the role of technology in each of your firms? Alison, we'll kick off with you.

Alison: Sure. Thank you. And it's so great to see everyone. This is wonderful. And thank you for having me. Can everybody hear me all right? Good, good. So Fragomen is an Amlaw 100 firm. We're a billion-dollar law firm. I think if you've worked overseas, you tend to know us, or if you're in the space, you know us. But not everyone knows us. So I just wanted to give the context of Fragman. We focus on immigration law and various adjacent services. But that's what we do. There are obviously differences within immigration. We have government strategies and private client and litigation, but it's all under the umbrella of immigration. To your point, we're a nontraditional firm in the sense that we are using technology. It's part and parcel of what we do. It's a part of our offering. Any RFP we do, and we do about $350 to $400 a year, plus all the proposals, everything has technology within it because we're helping big companies, small companies, individuals manage their immigration and manage their processes. Technology helps them stay compliant, get ahead of the curve, do things more efficiently. So we're using AI in what we do, and we're looking at ways to use it in a predictive manner, generative AI. It's all part of what we do. The firm itself is not your traditional firm. It's part of our offering when we go to market, and we're also using it, I think, in a more aggressive way. We have a dedicated group looking at this at the firm. There's a lot of heavy investment in my team, digital marketing, other marketing technologies. So it's an exciting place to be, and it's a very exciting time right now.

Eugene: And one of the core things, it's going to come on to Luke in just a minute, but one of the core things, and Deb, you're going to love this, is everything Luke and Alison said comes back to revenue. And it comes in different ways. Some of it might be digital first driving revenue, and some may be business development core traditional methods.

Luke: Yeah, which is our strategy. So Paul Weiss is a very different firm in a lot of ways from Fragomen. We have hundreds of different practice areas. The firm really established its brand in the litigation space, but over the past decade or so really has grown in the transactional world, largely through acquisitions of very well-known partners with big books of business. Our investments in technology primarily focus on the sales support side. We look for tools that help us accomplish three things: help us understand our capabilities better, help us extract those capabilities in an easier way, help us understand the scale of our relationships with clients, prospects, and other relationships and what their needs and goals are, and technology that helps support a process to align those two things. So the capabilities with the goals—that is the lion's share of where our technology spend goes into. Other things in the world of visibility, like digital marketing, are not a particular strong suit for Paul Weiss. You're not going to see us with banner ads in The American Lawyer up until recently, which is a new development for us, but really heavily sales-focused. My team is divided into several functions. My business development function, which is focused on practice support, direct client support, and key account management, is half of our team, about 50 people. So it just gives you a sense of where our focus is.

Eugene: The saying goes, people, process, and technology. And I actually want to dive in before we get into a few specific examples. I want you both to talk about almost setting the table, how do you get your team fit, ready to play, ready to engage with these technologies?How do you hire them? How do you build that? How do you protect them? Because as you said, I remember, Luke, you once said to me, my job is I'm the umbrella. I protect my team from all the rain coming down, and then I help them rise as well. So we'll kick off with you. Talk to me about that culture of experimentation, curiosity. 

Luke: Yeah, sure. So when I think about our philosophy around really everything, but it impacts certainly our approach around technology, is we really promote a culture of experimentation within our team. Of course, I'm driving the technology strategy with my MarTech team and with my direct reports, but it's so much better if everyone on the team feels empowered to raise their hand, to kick the tires on different approaches, and feels confident enough to elevate approaches that can improve their day-to-day. We communicate that to our team. We really promote that mentality across our department. I specifically hire for curious people. People who have worked with me know that I love curious people. It's really become part of our culture. With that, we pilot as much as we can. That's really important to us to be able to evaluate a product. Many technology vendors allow you to do that. I think some firms kind of go into that, do the two weeks and kind of hope for the best. We're pretty methodical about how we run that. We make sure, number one, we have bandwidth to focus on a pilot. Oftentimes, I've worked in many places and I've seen this play out. You'll run a two-week pilot and then nobody actually plays with the tools. So you kind of come out of it with no sense for whether it's something that can contribute to the bottom line or not. So just being kind of methodical about that approach and having kind of that mentality across our department, I think, is really how we evolve as a department and as an industry.

Eugene: Alison, I want to come on to you and ask the same question, but just so everyone, make sure you're seated while you hear this. Alison has a team of 55 people. They have 60 plus offices. You've opened 17 offices since you joined and they offer support in 170 countries. A, how do you do it? B, how do you sleep at night? And C, how do you use technology to help that process?

Alison: I don't really sleep at night, which I'm trying to get better at. I've known you long enough to know that about you because there's a lot of information out there that sleep is critical. So I'm trying to get better at that. But with four kids, young kids and work doesn't always happen. But no, it's having a great team, having a great culture and doing things smartly. I'm very excited about technology and AI. And we're going to talk more as we go through this discussion about what's ahead and how we're using it and what we're doing now and what we're doing as we go forward. And it's making things more efficient. It's making things smarter. I talked about our culture being very innovative. Technology is in our DNA. I mentioned how we use it as part of our sales process. That all said, it's still when I have to go and say I want to do pay-per-click advertising or convince leadership about hiring more marketing tech folks on my team and focusing on SEO or other areas, I still have to help them understand that and why that's valuable. And why that's going to impact the bottom line. And so it's a lot of. 

And I offer this as guidance for those who are maybe not doing it as much or embarking on it, it's getting to the top leaders and helping them understand that value and laying it out and laying it out in a very clear way and talking about the guardrails and the precautions too, because at the end of the day, we are a law firm. So that partnership with OGC, that guidance that you want to make certain that you have that you do things correctly, we're also very focused on our clients and everything is very collaborative with our clients. So when I think of something that needs to be done and I put it forward as a recommendation, having a client backing or a client business case to help support the idea really helps. We have a client technology advisory board at the firm. So there are 15 of our top clients on that board and we're talking with them about different technologies, different ways of driving new machine learning, new ideas, and is it going to work and getting that feedback. I also oversee our client feedback program. So I'm interviewing clients and others on my team are doing that regularly and getting that feedback of, is this working? What else are you looking for? Again, all with it, helping them be smarter, more efficient, more productive, and compliant with their immigration programs. So, you know, we've got some of the biggest companies. We represent, I think, 67 of the Fortune 100. A thousand people need to go from Africa to Guyana. Oil is discovered there. How do you do that quickly and get them there compliantly and make sure they have the right paperwork and passports and everything? So all of that technology and just driving how that's going to be able to help them do it in a way that's better and smarter.

Eugene: You mentioned something interesting there, and I wanted to swing back to you, Luke. Could you tell us a little bit about your approach to business development on how different teams, like the Sparks program, for example, are leveraging technology and you're employing them with those tools? 

Luke: Yep, yep. So...So in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, we launched a lead generation apparatus, dedicated lead generation apparatus within our team. We started with one person. We gave them a Bloomberg terminal and access to a range of different research tools. Very expensive. But we had sponsorship from one of the largest revenue generators in the firm, which was, you know, going back to Alison's point about building trust and kind of getting leadership on board, in the conversation we just heard from the COOs about kind of getting these things over the finish line. You know, having that sponsor was so important. And what this person does is they sit in front of these research tools. They go into dark chat rooms all day. They understand because they have a close relationship and understand how this revenue-generating partner gets hired, why he gets hired for work, what clients would think of as differentiators over his competitors, and his relationship network. She learned what to look for and what the triggers could be to ideally get hired for matters. The day-to-day goal is sparks. We call them sparks. They're these things that help you inch along the sales process with your contacts to keep them warm. It could be simple things like a CEO was at a conference and said, "Hey, we're looking to do acquisitions in XYZ industry," which might be an opportunity for a conversation. It could be more sophisticated approaches, like tracking the debt maturities of a company and fluctuations in stock prices. That approach proved to be so successful that we now have a team of almost 15 people. All of them have Bloomberg terminals. Those are expensive, but we proved the business case that this is something that can be added directly to the bottom line. Going back to what I said before, we are so bottom-line oriented, and my team is so revenue-generation focused that once we proved the business case with this person, it was relatively easy to expand over the past few years. 

Eugene: To be fair, the focus is working. Paul Weiss has just passed the $2 billion mark, so I think it is working. 

Luke: That's all because of me, by the way.

Eugene: 10% commission, yeah.

Luke: I'm waiting for my commission check. They told me it's in the mail.

Eugene: I want to come back in a minute to reporting and how you report on the success of technology and these big investments. But Alison, you actually had a very interesting story talking about a cause close to my heart, Irish passports and citizenship. I'm Irish, in case you didn't know.

Alison: Yeah, yeah. So we wanted to do pay-per-click advertising, Google ads, and LinkedIn ads. I would say there wasn't a solid understanding of why that was important. So as we've been talking about going to leadership, and this was about a year and a half ago, we said, "Let's pilot it." It's a great way to target a specific demographic in a particular geography. For our pilot, we did an Irish citizenship campaign where you can get citizenship if your parents or grandparents are from Ireland, even if you're not there. We put together this program, and it was so successful that we, so let me back up a moment. It's about generating leads, getting them into the website, quality leads that we can convert to real opportunities and, hopefully, new clients. We had such an overwhelming volume within the first week. The great thing is you can track these metrics, these KPIs, and you show that data to your teams and leaders, reinforcing what you want to do. But we had such success that we had to turn it off and pause because we didn't have the people ready to support the volume generated. It was a good lesson learned. 

Luke: It's a good problem to have. It was a great problem to have. In the realm of problems, it's a pretty good one to have — too many opportunities. 

Alison: Yeah. Another word of caution in the spirit of giving advice, as you may be doing this yourselves: we made certain to understand the rules and regulations. There are a lot. We all know about GDPR and New York advertising laws, but remember, at the heart of it, we are lawyers. Google has rules, and you don't want to violate them or get blacklisted. For us, in this campaign, we couldn't use the word "passport" or "visa" because people can do that themselves. There are rules against looking like you're selling government services. So we had to get around that and monitor it very carefully. We want to make sure that everything we do is quality, compliant, and will lead to the revenue we’re focused on.

Eugene: I think it's quite a nice feeder. I'd love to spend a few minutes — I know a lot of you are interested in the nitty gritty of what we're doing, pulling back the curtain. Luke, I'll come to you next. You've mentioned your Sparks program and Bloomberg terminals. Could you give everyone an overview of how you're using technology at a firm level, BD level, broadcasting the brand, and share some tools or tricks that are working well for you right now?

Luke: Yeah, like I said, we're very focused on tools that support the sales cycle, right? Our core systems are our experience platform, CRM, and activities database. Two of those systems were built in-house on Lotus Notes databases, kind of old. Kelly McKinnon knows what I'm talking about.

Alison: I do too. 

Luke: Alison knows exactly what I'm talking about. One of our strengths has been data collection. We have processes. You remember the battle scars from those wars, trying to get people to do what we needed to get information in those systems. Over time, it became wildly successful. There's a ton of buy-in throughout the firm. Partners bought into it, their administrative assistants bought into it, and our team was obviously bought into it. So the data quality in each of those core systems is very, very good — as good as you could hope for in this industry. Our challenge has been how to harness that, considering they're built on antiquated platforms that are inflexible and don't share information. When I came back to Paul Weiss six years ago, I knew this going into the position, so we embarked on a five-year roadmap. I'm in year six now, so we're a little bit behind, just transitioning to more sophisticated platforms. We weren't going to start with CRM, but we had a hiccup there. But we moved over to Experience and just relaunched or just launched Foundation three months ago. Wildly successful project for our team. Foundation was great to work with. They helped us make some modifications to their system. The way they think about Experience is the same way that we do, which is a pretty sophisticated, I think, approach to it. They had thought through all the challenges and issues that we had been discussing through our experience over 12 years of having a system that was basically working for us, allowed us to make modifications so we can keep our core collection processes, which are hugely important to us. Like my mission number one is like, don't break something that's working. This was working pretty well. We thought we could enhance it, but I did not want to break what was working for us. So. We were able to do that. The process went relatively smoothly or as smoothly as you can expect those integration projects to go. But one of the smart things I think we did was we started training the team very early on before adoption, so like months before we launched. And we kept the team aware of kind of where we were in the project throughout. So all the high-end users were pretty much trained like two months before the project was ready to launch. So by the time we did launch, and I was concerned about adoption, right, because we had an existing platform, you know, it was pretty much adopted like right away. I mean, they knew how to use it. They understood the functionality. I monitor and track everything. So I was tracking all the usage. We kept the old system up for a little while in parallel, just, you know, make sure nothing was going to break on us. But the transition happened pretty seamlessly. So a very, a very good experience.

Eugene: Alison, I'm going to come to you in a second, but Luke, sorry to be annoying. You didn't, not everything was plain sailing. 

Luke: Never, never annoying.

Eugene: Please, come on. It wasn't all plain sailing. And I think it's quite interesting. Could you please share with the folks here your experience with CRM, your prioritization of CRM, experience management? 

Luke: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so you want me to talk about like a failure situation? I know I know what you're doing all right it was it's I wouldn't it's not really a failure it's more it's more of a lesson it's more of a lesson learned we talked about in the prep he was like talk about something you screwed up I was like there's so many to choose from but all right. So yes, so like I said when I came back to Paul Weiss technology was a huge focus for me. I knew We had great collection processes, and we just couldn't harness that information. So CRM was the first choice. We wanted to pivot from the existing platform to a more sophisticated CRM platform. It aligned with our business goals, supporting the sales process in a different way. Our existing system was fine. It's a repository of contact information, and the data is actually very good. We've gotten the data in a very good place in that system. So again, I didn't want to break what was working. So we embarked on an RFP process. We ended up deciding to move forward with a particular vendor. And we were very clear with our set of criteria at the beginning of that project. One, which was I wanted to run the old system and the new system in parallel for a short period of time just to make sure that if something broke, it wouldn't be a complete disaster. They kind of committed to it during the sales process. But when we got to the point of putting that language in a contract, they couldn't do it. And I wasted a year, a year of time kind of going through that process. So lesson for me, get in and writing early. But in the end, what could have been a pretty bad black eye for me my first year, you know, into this position, you know, because we, because we're so collaborative and communicative throughout the project, like I was talking to leadership and the key stakeholders throughout the project, they were well aware of the issues. I think it actually looked good for us that we saw the risk and decided not to plow forward with something that carried a level of risk that we just weren't comfortable with. So especially given the cost of those platforms, it was definitely the right call, but just a very, very tough pill to swallow.

Eugene: I think it was Nicole Patrick this morning who said, if you're not failing, you're not innovating. 

Luke: Yeah, I'm failing all the time, man.

Eugene: You and me both. 

Luke: Absolutely. But again, you build that trust, the culture, you've earned that credibility. I think that's one of the most important things. I mean, we talked about this a little bit in the prep session, but that relationship with your key stakeholders internally is just so critical. And it sets you up not just for that one particular technology deployment that you're working on, but just positions you to take on that next project and that next project and really kind of help your department evolve. If you, if you mess that up, you know, you'll, you only get so many strikeouts with, with your leadership, but they don't trust you. If they feel like they're out of the loop, if they don't, if they feel like, you know, you're, you're not taking the proper steps to evaluate a tool or to deploy it, you know, that those, those purse strings kind of run pretty short at that point.

Alison: So important too, so that you're building, like they see that you've got leadership involved and supportive that's going to, you know, filter down and you need to get the whole firm in. I mean, where the world is and where the world continues to go, you'll get left behind if you're not behind all of it.

Luke: Yeah, I mean, look, there's plenty of opportunity in this business for evolution, right? I mean, I think there's been a lot of change the past, you know, maybe five or ten years, and departments like ours have grown like pretty exponentially in the past few years. I mean, we had 33 when I came back after I was at Fried Frank, and we're pushing 100 right now. You know, there's been a huge investment by our firms in us, right? So it's our job to, you know, evolve and kind of, you know, help the firm realize the return on that investment.

Eugene: I want to go on to that topic in just a second. But Alison, I want to swing back to you. We mentioned the Irish citizenship and your success there. Were there any other sort of big successes or projects or key landmark ideas which you've implemented? Obviously bringing in that big technology approach, which you'd like to share with the folks.

Alison: Well, I'd say, you know, CRM is also really critical and the lead generation process because that's such a great way to get new business. I mean, we obviously still do a lot of the traditional pitching, going to market conferences and other very sophisticated targeting methods. But when you have this pipeline coming through, you use your SEO smartly. We've done a lot to get very smart with our SEO and local SEO, backlinking everything to make sure that we're there and getting those quality leads I was talking about. And then getting them into the CRM and getting them so that we can then turn them over to become actual opportunities. What we're doing now is looking at ways that AI can help. And that's what I'm most excited about because now we get a lead, a company reaches out and says, I'd like to get information on X or this country, that country. But if we can get some of that work being done by AI so that then it gets faster to us and we can turn it over more quickly, that's just revenue right to the bottom line. So that's really exciting. 

And then, you know, the other exciting thing about what we're doing with AI is just using it to make our processes on our team more efficient so that we can go and do the higher level, more sophisticated, more interesting work. So I'll give you a couple of examples. We do, I mentioned earlier, numerous RFPs, and they're always very complex and, you know, requiring a lot of input and team time. If we can use AI, so our proposal generator software is Lupio, and we're looking at ways to have AI generate those first drafts so that, again, we bring in that higher level, but it's like that early work is done for you. Same thing with my events team. So they're using it, you know, we get these big booths at these major conferences and symposiums. They give the dimensions and AI can like put it all together for you and then you can spend the time on other things that, you know, a lot of that busy work and administrative work, it's just done much more quickly. And then hours, those are hours back to your day. Our PR department, my head of PR, I was just having drinks with her last night. She's telling me, you know, we're opening a new office in the Middle East. And so she said, sometimes coming up with the quotes for our chairman on what they're saying in our press releases. So giving very specific parameters, write me a press release of opening in this particular country in the Middle East, what's happening there, bring that in context, and give me a good quote for one of our co-chairs. And it's not, it's perfect, right? It still needs her attention, her skill, but then she can be out there doing other things. And so all of that efficiency-driven efforts, our website, you mentioned we're in 65 different countries. So you can imagine the language translation and we're trying to get that. So using AI to help with that effort as well. So it's just the possibilities are endless in terms of the efficiency and helping clients and helping us. And then in the lead generation and driving business.

Eugene: I want to come on to any failures which you've had because I just want to even the playing field. 

Luke: You need another failure?

Eugene; Everyone's going to share one big failure. But actually, a question just stemming off that. Are either of your firms and are you and your teams looking to develop your own in-house solution or will you always keep reaching out to specialists, third-party suppliers? For example, Wade Gunderson, Detmer, earlier today who've created their own AI product. You're seeing more of that.

Luke: We do both, right? So we have a large internal team. Our knowledge management innovation team is involved. Our information systems team, which is our IT team, is involved. So I'm close with the leaders of both of those functions. We talk all the time. I think there's three separate task force on AI and technology and innovation within our firm. We have our own within our department. But it's great. I mean, there are limitations, right? People get busy. Those departments are just as busy. Maybe not as busy as me, but almost as busy as I am. So you kind of have to maximize the bandwidth that people have. There are a lot of companies out there now that specialize in AI development tools and bespoke tools that they can develop for you. Look, I think it's good to kick the tires with them. I mean, there's kind of a range of experiences. And I think some places are kind of marketing themselves as AI, but they're not really AI when you kind of pull like the veneer out. It sounds cool. But like I said, like going back to experimentation, just, you know, it's good to have conversations and good to kind of understand what the possibilities are. It's good to get a broad range of perspectives on those, you know, on those types of tools. I mean, we're doing similar things around AI. We have, the firm has a relationship with Harvey. You know, I got licenses for pretty much my entire department to play with. We trained everyone how to use them, put guardrails around it so they understand the limitations and the risks but I was like. Go play with this. Go figure out where it's going to help you. Obviously, on the content side, it's been like a huge boon for us. And it's been like a superpower, just freeing up my PR and my content teams. But it's coming into play all across our department. Idea generation across the team, thought leadership, lead generation, we're finding ways to use it. We have a team of people across functions that get together every two weeks and just talk about their use cases for those, you know, for that two-week period. And, you know, there's a lot of them. I mean, across functions, right? And there's also situations where we're learning that it's not helpful and it would actually take you longer. So that's just as important to know, right? So I just think it's so critical right now for firms to get in that universe. If you're not in there, hopefully everyone here is at least, you know, dipping their toes in the water. It's such a competitive advantage. And if you're not there, like, you're going to, You can't scale as well as other firms. Your team is going to be tied up doing administrative things they just don't need to do.

Eugene: And everyone put their hand up.

Alison: I was just going to say, oh, go ahead. 

Eugene: Can you put your hand up if you, in your firm, you're experimenting with something with AI or building or... Basically everyone's. 

Alison: I was just going to say for us, it's the same thing. So we, we opened an innovation technology lab, I think it's six years ago now. I've been at the firm seven years, but right, right shortly after I joined, we opened that up and really started looking at a whole bunch of new things. Um, it's so, it's so into our DNA now. And we just had our annual partners conference with a whole day on all sorts of technology and AI, and transformation was the theme. We're doing workshops where we're going, and some of it is in-house, and some of it is partnering with leaders in the space. I think you really do need both because you don't know what you don't know sometimes. It's recognizing that and benefiting from the expertise of others, but also knowing yourself and then driving your own efforts.

Eugene: I want to come on in a second just to what you see coming down the pipeline for the legal profession, your roles, and technology. But before I do that, I just wanted to swing back to something which you said earlier, Luke, about our team has tripled in size since I joined. Can you talk a little bit about reporting on the success? You're very sales-driven. How do you do that? What are both of your processes for showing ROI on your sales, your team, the technology, and so on?

Luke: So, yeah, I know we've tripled in size in six years. Look, one of the reasons why I went back to Paul Weiss from Fried Frank is because there is such an embedded business development culture there. I knew that if we could demonstrate progress, the firm would invest. It's a very successful, profitable firm. I had lots of ideas of things I wanted to do, like mad scientist kind of approaches. I knew it was a place that would sponsor crazy ideas. Since my time at Fried Frank, I think it's so important to manage up, not just make your team aware of what's going on across the department, but also communicate with leadership on a regular basis. For years, I've been writing an email every Sunday. This goes back to my Fried Frank time. Every Sunday, summarizing all the projects we're working on across the team, what we're thinking in terms of innovation, technology, where we are in certain deployments, what our pitches look like, how we got hired, why we got hired — really anything across functions. It's written kind of casually, but Eugene wanted me to show an example, but it's filled with confidential information, so it'd be just one big blackout if I put it up on the screen. I send it every Sunday as a way to initially keep my team aware of what was going on and to call out good behavior to inspire them. But I started sharing a version of it with leadership shortly after I started it. I send it to about 40 partners in firm leadership. So every week, they're getting a report from me on exactly what our team is focused on. It encourages conversation. I'll get phone calls sometimes from partners saying, "Hey, I noticed this in your report. What are you guys thinking there?" It's just a really good way to keep leadership and the key stakeholders in your firm aware of what you're up to. It's helped us focus in the right places. I'm also just a super crazy data metrics person. We report on everything in my department. You guys may do this too, but we have monthly quarterly reports on everything from pitches, our digital marketing channels, awards recognition, our alumni engagement, our key account management programs — deep dive analytical tied back to KPIs reports. That also gets shared with my full team. There's full transparency about everything that we're doing. That also gets shared with that same leadership group. I think it's important to be honest about where you are. Sometimes the projects we're working on are working out great and they're successful; sometimes not so much. You have to be honest about where you're at and recalibrate projects. I think being honest is just an important way to gain buy-in and trust with your firm. That's partly why they've continued to invest in our department.

Alison: When I joined Fragomen seven years ago, business development, marketing, and communications were three separate functions. They all came together under my leadership. We were small and lean, and I still think we are for a firm of our size and stature. We're the leader in our space. But I always have told my team, and I have this fantastic group of people — I brought people in with whom I've worked at Freshfields in the Middle East, and Clifford Chance back in the day, and someone from Paul Weiss I stole away from Luke.

Luke: I wasn't there yet.

Alison: You weren't there yet. 

Luke: No, it was my gap year.

Alison: But as I've built up the team, I really had the mantra of it's better to punch above your weight, and for the partners and others at the firm to see that we need or to start saying, "You need more people," than to ask for it all upfront, before building up that credibility and trust. That's the way we've done it. We're now at 55, and we're about to bring on about 15 more people. I've seen that growth. I also know because we've invested so heavily in technology, when I look at my C-suite counterparts for a long time, I understood why they got more of the share of the budget. However, now, with what we're doing — again, it's all about metrics, dashboards, and putting that information in front of them so they see the results and see it regularly, having regular calls, regular meetings, regular weekly emails and information — they're like, "Yeah, Allison's team needs more people." That growth becomes a natural thing when the work speaks for itself.

Eugene: Conscious of time, and I wanted to ask the — again, slightly annoying — question, of course. Technology is obviously changing everyone's daily lives, but it's very much changing your profession. When we had one of our prep calls, one of you said something interesting. "We work in a business which is very much built on a pyramid, and that's going to change. AI technology is going to help that change, and we can be a real part of that." Could you please just expand on that and talk about what you see happening now, in the next 18 months and longer term?

Luke: Do you want to go?

Alison: People have to embrace it. And I know that there are concerns about will it replace my job? It's changing. It's changing people's jobs. And like anything, remember years ago, who moved my cheese about change? Like change is a little scary, but it's also really exciting in its perspective. And so if you can look at it in a way of this is going to improve my job. And some of the examples I talked about earlier, it makes your job easier. Like I think about the more senior you get, right, you don't have to do the first drafts of things. You don't have to do the pitch. Things come to you and you review and you sign off. You basically have people working for you with AI in a sense. You can use it to say create this draft for me. You have to be careful, of course. And we talked about precautions. We talked about being mindful of regulations, partnering with your OGC, but it can really help what you're doing and make your function smarter and help drive those dollars, those revenues. So I think that spirit of curiosity, that spirit of getting people on board and bringing people along, because it's not really a question of whether or not you can do it. It's happening. So if you're not going to embrace it, I think you'll be left behind. And I think really getting your teams to embrace that spirit, bring the teams along, the partners, the associates, the other professionals across the firm, and then bringing that power to market. And again, I say partnering with your clients because your clients are doing it, looking at what they're doing, letting things be client-led, and figuring out ways together to take these things forward. It's very exciting in my view.

Luke: I completely agree with all that. I just see a huge opportunity for our industry here. I mean, we've all talked about for years how crazy busy we are, the volume of work. We can never keep pace with it. Our responsibilities keep growing and growing and growing. Like this is this is a superpower this is something that we can we can use to help make all the administrative things that we do much easier so yeah I've heard the concerns about this is going to take our jobs like there's plenty of work there's plenty of work out there to do and at the amount of time When I think about like my job and what and what I do on a day-to-day basis it's similar to what some of the COOs said when when they were up here like there's Like there's there's a range of things from like very strategic high-level things down to like reviewing an invitation list, right? I mean, it can get pretty basic for all of us sometimes. Having these tools, it alleviates stuff on all of our plates from the top to the bottom of the organization. It's going to radically change the industry. I mean, outside of marketing and BD, that pyramid model is going to, for the leverage model for law firms, that pyramid model is going to look like, I think it's a trapezoid, My geometry is terrible, but it's like, you know, more like a rectangle kind of, you know. So like less junior associates, like how does that impact to all of us. I don't think anybody knows what the future is going to look like. This is probably three to five years down the line. It's starting to happen right now. So the more that we are familiar in the language of this new technology and more people on our teams are aware of it. Like I said before, it's an opportunity for us to deliver on the promise of the investments that our firms have made in all of us and in all of our teams.

Eugene: I think we'll leave it there. Big round of applause, please, for our fantastic panelists.

Charlie: That's all for this episode of the Passle CMO Series podcast you can subscribe by your favorite podcast platform to learn how Passle makes thought leadership simple, scalable and effective visit passle.net thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.