Alistair: Welcome to the Passle CMO Series Podcast, where we discuss all things marketing and business development in the world of professional services. Now, today's conversation is going to evolve around navigating an ever-evolving role within legal marketing, and as we all know, that role of the legal marketer is constantly evolving. What could be yesterday's cutting edge quickly becomes something that's more of a standard practice. So shaping how your role evolves is something that every marketing and business development professional should be thinking about, no matter what your role is. 

So today we have the Passle CMO Series Podcast, and we're excited to be joined by the wonderful Jennifer Shankleton, Chief Growth and Development Officer at Brennan Manna & Diamond. This was actually a title that was coined by her Managing Partner, who recognized that that marketing label was no longer reflecting the scope of Jennifer's role. So Jennifer's actually, to give you a little bit of overview, she sits on the executive committee, works across BD, coaching, and strategy, and in fact, does a whole host of associate mentoring. Jennifer joins us to discuss building something from nothing, pushing past that marketing label, and what it actually takes to run a function that wide inside a mid-sized firm that has serious growth ambitions. 

Charlie: This episode is brought to you by CrossPitch AI, the new cross-selling tool from Passle. Cross-selling should be the easiest way for law firms to grow, but most firms struggle. Why? Lack of awareness, lack of trust, and frankly, fear of selling. The result? Missed revenue. CrossPitch.ai fixes that. It breaks down silos, helps professionals connect, and delivers timely, relevant insights to the right people inside the firm and out. There's no heavy roll-outs. Just switch it on and try it today. Head to crosspitch.ai to book your demo and make cross-selling happen. Now, back to the podcast

Alistair: So, welcome Jennifer. 

Jennifer: Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here today. 

Alistair: Oh, we're thrilled to have you on. As we were discussing just now, a little bit around sort of what you've had on so far this year, and you were saying that you recently finished your whole attorney retreat, which is always no small undertaking. 

Jennifer: Absolutely. We are thrilled to have that in the books for 2026, and that is a wonderful get-together. We include all attorneys, not just partners, associates as well, and spouses, and it's three and a half days of both socializing, catching up, since we have offices, both in Ohio and Florida, and a few in between. And we, of course, work in some business development type education and workshops, business of law updates, and the like. And we were in the beautiful Clearwater, Florida area this year, and the weather could not have been better, so us Ohio folks were very excited.

Alistair: We love that. We love that. And now that you've got it behind you, it sort of frees you up, not only probably you've got lots of great ideas bubbling away in your mind, but also frees you up to actually think about doing this podcast. So I'm excited to get into it with you. 

Jennifer: Thank you so much. I'm excited as well. Let's do it. 

Alistair: Amazing. So to kick us off, you started in B2C marketing and made that move over to legal back in around 2007, I believe it was. So could you tell us about your background and how you came to your current firm?

Jennifer: Sure. Sure. So I did start out as a B2C marketer, public relations was my background, public relations and business and organizational communication, and that landed me in two different roles on the B2C side. I actually worked for a dinner theater that produced musicals, that was my first job out of college. And that was being thrown into the lion's den, but where I learned everything that I could about marketing. I'm a creative and also have quite an imagination and wanted to write, and so that job was really a PR major's dream coming right out of college, that was a really fun role. And I forayed in bank marketing for a couple of years, and that was my first taste of professional services marketing, which as you can imagine, it was quite a culture shock going from theater and actors to bankers. 

Alistair: I'm sure. 

Jennifer: So it was a community bank, I was there for a couple of years and learned a ton about B2B, and so luckily I'd had that little bit of experience behind me before I was recruited to my first law firm in 2007 and I was brought on as a Marketing Manager at that first firm, which was an institutional firm, 100-year-old firm, great group of people, and I was able to try many different projects and initiatives in my first law firm setting, which was different, right? I was thinking to myself, did I make the right decision? This is a completely different universe, how am I going to make my way? And it was quite an interesting journey. So, I was with that firm for 10 years.

They had had a variety of marketing professionals in a variety of roles, really everywhere from, you know, an admin who had been promoted up to marketer, to attorneys who were titled marketing partner, and so I was the first person hired from outside of the legal industry. They were specifically looking for that to kind of bring the business side to the firm. And worked with a group of folks who were interested in evolving a department that was, you know, doing the typical, what you would assume, sponsorships, events, ads in industry publications, but they wanted to take it to another level.

So over the course of several years, I was able to, determine from chatting with this new community that I had of legal marketing to figure out how was I going to build this and make it happen, and built a small team and was able to do things like hire in professional coaches for business development, rebrand the firm and build out a new website and do a very, very cool client service initiative with the former managing partner where we talked to 20 of the top clients in the firm. So, as you can tell, that first law firm experience was very rich and, you know, set the background and the landscape for me to take the next leap.

So, I did that in the 2016, '17 timeframe and joined a boutique law firm as their CMO, and also helped consult for a technology, ancillary company that they were building, to build a client app. And I did that for a few years. Really exciting, that project was super interesting for me and like nothing that I had done before. I was able to build a great team and get some interesting projects off the ground. And then I met a couple of attorneys, through a fellow contact who were looking for someone back in Akron, which I live in the Akron-Canton area, and had been commuting to Cleveland for a couple of years. I was a working mom, my husband was traveling, and I was trying to do all of the things. 

I was trying to do all the things. Yeah, so when this opportunity came up to get back closer to home and cut that commute, but also do something really interesting, I listened. And from that conversation with those attorneys from Columbus, that turned into a hiring process, and I ended up at my current firm right before COVID hit in 2020. 

Alistair: Yeah. I mean, amazing. And actually, I think that whole background really helps to shape what you've then gone on to do with your current firm, Brennan Manna & Diamond, which is absolutely amazing. And from what I understand from our conversations, you joined there around sort of mid-2020. You know, there's no marketing infrastructure at the firm, you've got a pandemic unfolding, so how did you actually navigate those early days and decide what to prioritize when that ground was shifting underneath you? As we just spoke about, you actually had this amazing background, you'd done all of these lots of different initiatives, really rich experience. So how did you focus on, this is what I'm gonna do at the start to form those foundations?

Jennifer: So this was quite a change for me. And I did struggle with the decision and I think I told you when we were chatting earlier, some of my friends in legal said, "What are you doing? You wanna start a marketing department from scratch?". But I was enamored, and I was impressed by this leadership team. I was excited to go in and help them because I had done it multiple times, right? I'd either built on an existing, you know, very small team or built a team from scratch. And I was excited about the thought of building a marketing function from the ground up, and being able to influence that myself and share with the firm what I thought needed to happen to make this successful. So there we were, six weeks before the pandemic, I hit the ground running, I was doing an audit of what the attorneys were doing with existing marketing and business development activity. And it's an entrepreneurial firm, Ali, so each attorney essentially was managing their own business, and they were very active, but in no sort of organized way. So some of them were writing, they were all presenting, some of them were already doing podcasts and all of the normal things you would expect, but there was no scaffolding around it. 

Alistair: Sure. 

Jennifer: And they weren't promoting themselves, right? So they had all of this going on, which was highly marketable and I was able to put some plans in place and build a little bit of strategy, and they said, ‘go for it’. So I started to do all of that in six months, and then the country shut down, right? So this firm that was growing and active, was not putting any content out whatsoever, and I remember having a conversation, we're going to need to change our priority here because the phone is going to start ringing off the hook. We're a full-size firm, full service firm, with a big healthcare and labor and employment practice, and corporate practice of course. 

And so clients are going to be looking to you for guidance, and we need to start sharing some information in an organized manner. And so I helped build their LinkedIn page and convince the lawyers to write content and putting it out there in an organized manner, and that worked very, very well for them throughout the pandemic. And then we had an established brand, and clients were looking for more from them. So that was number one. Once I got that underway, naturally other opportunities and ideas started to flow and all of a sudden, these lawyers who were used to doing things in their own way, and very successful in their own right, but they realized the influence and the injection of these additional marketing ideas and activities in an organized manner with someone who could direct them and give them advice and help them build this, was very attractive to them. And so we just kept going from there. 

Alistair: Yeah, I can imagine. Having that opportunity to kind of come in, well, firstly start doing an assessment and then have everything thrown up in the air by the pandemic must have just thrown everybody out. I remember I actually started at Passle about six weeks prior to the pandemic as well. So it was one of those, it was a crazy time for all of us. But, I imagine, yeah, coming in and sort of seeing everybody essentially doing their own thing, going off in all these different directions and none of it being particularly cohesive. Yeah, you said that was your first point of priority, like how can I bring everybody together and then really focus that? And actually, I guess, you know, whilst it was obviously a really difficult and turbulent time for everybody, something like COVID really did help to focus that because everything went online immediately.

 So you say, there are those almost quick wins you start to prioritize, you talk about the LinkedIn there and building out the business development side of actually focusing on the content they were putting out. I mean, that's, that's really, really awesome. And I guess only since then your role's just continued to shift significantly in terms of that evolution of it and I imagine in many very rewarding ways. So do you think you could break down some key milestones in that evolution of your role and what those big changes have looked like? 

Jennifer: Absolutely. So we had established the content, and I remember saying to our Marketing Partner, ‘you know, there are many different things that we could implement here that would take our marketing and BD and our client engagement to the next level. I would love to build out a team’. Initially, that was the plan, you know, to hire me and then allow me to build out a team. However, COVID threw a wrench in those plans and so that was a little bit delayed. I was able to do that and find some really great team members over the course of three years. And with that team in place, it allowed me to refocus, and think about what else should the firm be doing to think about growth. 

And I pitched a business development coaching program, and none of them had used, I think they probably had some consultants in over the years that helped them with maybe the strategic plan or, you know, projects like that, but none had used a coach or a coaching program in any sort of organized way. And again, remember, these were all very successful lawyers. So, coming in and saying to them, I would love to focus, put a value and add a budget around business development coaching. But in order to do that, I need the time to build it, and I need the time to meet with lawyers and in order to do that, we have to build out a team, which meant hiring additional people, right? So it wasn't immediate but I said to them, let me show you, let me just show you what this could look like.

 And so in addition to running a regular MarCom department like we all do, I was taking my time to promote the fact that I could help coach and mentor the younger lawyers, associates, senior associates, those that we promote from associate level up to what we call our partner level, and then on to member, which is our version of a shareholder. And so, finding the sweet spot when those lawyers were thinking about, "Okay, now it's time for me to start developing my own business," I reached out to those and, or if we hired new laterals in and said, you know, “I'd love to work with you, here's what I wanna talk about, are you interested?" And slowly, I started to build a cohort of lawyers who were interested in this type of training and coaching, something that they hadn't had before.

And what was really fun is that I started to hear from our member shareholders that they were getting unprompted comments from the younger lawyers on their teams, "Oh, you know, last week I met with Jen, and we talked about this, and so I went to this event and, now I've engaged, my first client." And so that was all coming to me, and I kept collecting the feedback. Collecting the feedback, tracking the activity, tracking the meetings, what we were talking about, started building out workshops. And it was at that time that this group who was already, they were already champions of me and what I was doing, but it was the first time that I think they realized this was different.

This was adding value. Marketers are seen as a cost center in many firms still and, why did we need a team? Why can't we survive with this one marketer who's doing a pretty good job? But I was able to show them in black and white, and anecdotally, not only, with the impact of clients being engaged by some of our younger lawyers, but the journey and the anecdotal story of meeting with them, getting to know and understand their practice and where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do, and giving them real coaching advice and strategy and tactics to be able to accomplish it. I was able to show that, and tell that story. That was when things shifted in the firm. 

Alistair: Oh, interesting. And when you start to think about that shift and the development of the firm, you touched upon how successful everybody already was, the firm was growing, so how did you manage to ensure that some of those initiatives you were putting in, like the business development coaching, et cetera, how did you manage to ensure that was serving both the firm's goals as well as your own growth because I'm guessing, based on what you were saying, they had sort of a vision of where they were going. Was that from the strategic plan? I'd love to hear a little bit more around that and how you ensured that, I guess, both were going in the right direction for the firm and yourself. 

Jennifer: Absolutely. So in my hiring process, I remember being very impressed and surprised that the strategic plan had already been implemented, and that's not usual. And it was a growth plan, and one of the pieces of that plan was to establish this department that I had started working on. And I did say, you know, this is a no-brainer, I would be happy to help you with this piece, but where I really see the firm taking off is if we implemented this part of the program, how can we add value? And I can show you by implementing one of these coaching programs. 

And, you know, honestly, I would've been fine, sticking with the MarCom side of the department, but the coaching piece, Ali, was one of the things that I enjoyed so much in my prior firms and I wanted to find a way to work it in to my role because that's what's most fulfilling for me, but I knew it was going to be a challenge because again, there were some, individuals who thought, "Well, I, I'm doing just fine. I don't need any of this, of this help, I'm already successful." But when I was able to demonstrate that I could, help their teams, and by helping their teams and their younger lawyers, I was in turn, investing in them and their practice and making them more successful. 

And so I started to get some of that feedback, "Well, I might not use Jen directly, but I'm recommending that all of my associates in my office or all of my laterals meet with her, attend her workshops." And so the buzz started to grow and I have a little bit of that, of course lawyers, like many of us are, competitive and so when they started to see their neighbor, you know, "Oh, well, how did you get the idea to do that?" Or, "Where did you hear this?". And so they started talking to each other and slowly, slowly, over the course of a couple of years, it built out to programming and education and mentoring and coaching that most people want to take advantage of.

Alistair: It's amazing when you say at the start you almost need to just start out with that coalition of the willing. And you said in one of your previous answers how you started to get all this amazing feedback from senior partners going "Oh, yeah, I heard from so-and-so that this is happening," and it's just from your perspective helping to drive both the firm's growth and your own personal growth, it just plays hand in hand. I guess with all of that, it'd be really interesting to understand how, I suppose, you brought people along with you on that journey because I know when we were talking beforehand, you know, you mentioned there was no function, you've built this function out, you've made some hires. There were obviously other C-suites at the firm already, or maybe new people came in at a similar time to you. How did you sort of bring people along with you on that journey? And it'd be great to hear how you've done that successfully. 

Jennifer: Sure. So when I was hired, I was the third of a group of three that the strategic plan had included. So there were no business department heads in- 

Alistair: Wow, okay.

Jennifer: In the firm before, I wanna say 2017, 2018. So the first hire was the chief people officer, then a chief financial officer, and I was the third leg of that stool as the lawyers would tell the story. And so we call ourselves the Three Musketeers, and we work very closely together, we talk every day, multiple times a day and we're kind of hitting on all levels and pulling all levers across the firm. So, we are day-to-day decision-makers for the firm so that the lawyers can still maintain their practices and there are a lot of projects where, you know, we'll call each other. In fact, the CPO and the CFO are not from legal, so one is from manufacturing and the other is from another B2C industry. And so, they would call me early on and say, “Would you happen to know where I could find data on X?". Or, “Do you have this information?" Absolutely. And so only because of my legal marketing community and organizations like LMA and, ALA and LASSO, we get access to this fantastic data. And a lot of times it's not necessarily marketing data, right? It could be hiring data or financial and so we built that relationship very early on. 

We work together in the recruiting process and also across comp and bonus when it comes to our associate attorneys. So we're sharing information consistently so that we can provide the firm the most value, and I consider myself to sort of be the dot connector. And so, if I'm hearing about or learning something in one of my coaching meetings that, of course I keep information confidential, but if there's something concrete that I know there's a gap or an opportunity for learning or information or for putting people together, I'm consistently talking "Hey, you know, it might be an opportunity for a little bit of training on the time and billing dashboard for this particular attorney because they're starting to bring in their own clients," or, This individual is having a hard time working with a certain supervising attorney because that attorney is very busy.". And so I've coached them a little bit on communications preferences and how to approach this concept or this discussion point, and so we're constantly working together on all of those aspects to bring the most value we can to the firm and just help people grow.

Alistair: It's so interesting. I mean, I would love to delve deeper into the use of data. I mean, as we all know, data is king, and there is so much that you can draw from it. I mean, you mentioned there early indications of, because somebody started to bill more, they're gonna need to be able to do more business development, or the fact that a partner's very busy, so you're using data to kind of see that. And I'd love to delve into that in a second. But one thing I did wanna pick up on that you mentioned there, Jen, was you're talking about, these three heads of business coming in, you obviously initially came in as CMO. At what point did the managing partner, we haven't even touched upon it, when did the managing partner suddenly turn around and go, " You know what? It's no more a CMO role that you're really fulfilling, you're fulfilling this Chief Growth and Development Officer role". I mean, the past probably five, ten minutes, we really have been talking about that growth at the firm. I’d love to hear about that. 

Jennifer: Sure, sure. This was about, I would say, two and a half years ago we were at a retreat, in fact, and we were sharing information. One of the things that I did early on and I felt very strongly about was being able to report out as much data as I could and/or results and ROI, of course, to the group when I had a captive audience because sending out those emails, not everybody gets a chance to open them and read them from the marketer, right? And so it was a few years in, and I had a cross-section of data, you know, across how our content was performing. It was mostly MarCom related, but the piece that stood out was the hours spent on coaching and the types of coaching and training programs that I had, and who was participating and how often, and how many hours we were spending on RFPs and pitches. And then the Managing Partner walked past my table afterwards and slipped me a note and said, "Let's think about a different title for you and your group. You're doing so much more than what is traditionally known as marketing. It's so much more than that". And so we brainstormed on it, and, you know, I came up with this title that everybody agreed with. 

But something like that doesn't come easily and as simply as changing my title on my email signature or my business card. And so, it did take, a communications and marketing campaign internally to bring everyone along and have them understand what that meant and what the impact was and how we were serving the firm because a lot of us have worked at multiple firms across our careers, from staff to business people to attorneys, and there is a perception of what marketing means. And here, it was so much broader than the traditional sense and so it took a minute, Ali, for me to continually have these conversations and five-minute conversations across the firm if I happened to be in the elevator with a partner or, somebody stopped by my office and they would ask, “What does that mean exactly?", And so it took some time, and now we're doing, of course, annual growth and development department reports. But it's taken four years to get to this point, to be able to have the data to share, but it is impressive. It is impressive.

Alistair: It's amazing. So I definitely wanna delve into that data, but one of the things to pick up on there is I do think there's a real lesson, and you said, it's not just a question of changing your title and that being on your business card and the bottom of your email signature and it just being there, the lesson for me at least is that there's a lot of work and action that goes into getting there and then actually fulfilling that title. And I think there's a lot of people in various roles, it doesn't matter whether it's legal or other industries, who want that promotion, want that new title. But I think so many of us just see it as a title and don't realize actually to be able to get there, there's a lot of hard work that goes into it, and I think that you sum that up really nicely there. So, thanks for sharing that. I really appreciate that. 

Jennifer: Thank you.

Alistair: Mentioned it twice, the data. 

Jennifer: Yes. 

Alistair: Obviously something that is important to you. So ahead of the episode we were talking a bit around this, and you mentioned the importance of being able to share results, and you touched upon it briefly there in terms of even getting to having that title of Chief Growth Officer. So do you have an example of how to demonstrate the impact of what you're doing? It would be really nice to have, you know, one or two concrete examples of how you demonstrate that. 

Jennifer: I do. I do. I'll go back to the coaching example, which I think is the best. You know, I said I was doing that on my own outside of an organized program for two years trying to gain awareness and to build a brand for myself, and that this was a service that I had experience in that I could share and help the firm with. I was able to work with our CFO and get some data from three lateral superstars that were doing very, very well. They were partners that were on a success track. And so we looked at those individuals, a three-year look back, and then we looked at some up-and-comers that I had started working with, and we laid the data on top of each other. So it was of course, are they meeting with me? Are they engaging clients? What are the results? Let's see what the revenue looks like. And it was a dramatic difference. The influence of having a dedicated coaching and mentorship program in place that was consistent, it was a marked difference in their success. And I use that example in one of my future ROI reports that I talked about. And yes, it was only three people, but it's what I had. 

Alistair: No, that's good. 

Jennifer: It's what I had, and it was dramatic, and it was impactful. And so I think that was the point where I was able to show it in black and white, the impact of what I had been doing. Of course, anecdotally is wonderful, and the stories were wonderful, and the feedback was great, but being able to show it in black and white on paper was the point that I think people started taking it more seriously and realized the value that it was bringing to the firm.

Alistair: Well, I mean, fascinating and amazing to be able to demonstrate that in black and white. And since then, I'm assuming being able to put that data in front of people, you've had even more individuals come on board wanting to be a part of the coaching and just see the success themselves then. 

Jennifer: Definitely. Definitely. And I have more members suggesting that the younger attorneys that they supervise meet with me. Now it's an organized program, of course. We've got programming for associates just so that they understand the vernacular of marketing and business development so that they're prepared when it's partner time, and they're ready to start engaging their own clients. So I start early. In fact, I'm going to be on the schedule for the summer associate class that's starting next week, and then when the new attorneys join in the fall. So across the board we now have programs for every level and every attorney that's interested in growing their practice.

Alistair: I love that, and I'm sure you have many other examples of how you utilize data, but I think that is a really great one because, yeah, the money speaks for itself, I suppose, when you overlay that data there. And for anybody who is a regular listener will know that, we sort of often finish the conversation with two things. One, we have the quick fire round, which we're still to come onto, but we're actually crazily at the final question here. and often we ask around a sort of similar theme and, and for you, Jennifer, what's your one piece of advice for those looking to shape their career in a more impactful and fulfilling way? 

Jennifer: This is twofold. So, I would say if there's something that you want to accomplish or you have a vision, don't keep it to yourself. Vocalize it. Make sure that everybody knows. If you don't necessarily have a champion or an advocate, say you're new to the firm and you're just learning and building those relationships, look to your community, your professional services community. You know, the organizations that I mentioned earlier, they were integral in me being successful as a legal marketer early on, and still have so many good friends. So I stole this from someone else, but your personal board of directors to rely on if you don't have somebody in the firm to help you realize that vision, how are you going to do it? That's so important, just to make sure that it's known and it might not happen right away. In fact, it usually doesn't happen right away. But I have found in all of my experiences in law firms that I kept saying it and finding new ways to say it and to show how it would impact the firm. Say it out loud. 

Alistair: Indeed. I love that. I love that. Well, before I say thank you for what a fantastic conversation this really has been, just brilliant and very, very interesting, we have our quick fire round, which is a little chance to get to know you that bit better, Jennifer. So if you have time, we'd love to just rattle through five questions. 

Jennifer: Okay. 

Alistair: Amazing. So, first off, what are you currently listening to? This could be music, podcast, audiobook, any of the above. 

Jennifer: Okay, so I'll throw out a couple. Podcast, Mel Robbins. And current music, my go-to for a little nostalgia and relax is definitely Fleetwood Mac, but currently I'm loving the new Noah Kahan and Ella Langley albums. 

Alistair: Love it. Love it. It speaks to me being down here in Nashville. Question number two, what's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Jennifer: Your experience is still your experience, and I'll put some context around that. All of us have been in situations where it did not work out, or it wasn't what you thought, or the culture wasn't a fit, or the project pitch was turned down three times. Not allowing that to hit you personally and understanding that no one can take away the fact that you still earned and gained the experience. 

Alistair: Amazing. I love that. That's a wonderful piece of advice. Thirdly, what's a book or resource you recommend to anyone in your field? 

Jennifer: Atomic Habits by James Clear, I actually started giving that to our new associates. Helps you figure out patterns of behavior and how to be more efficient, and lots of great recommendations in that book. 

Alistair: Absolutely love it. Fourthly, what's your favorite way to unwind after a busy day? 

Jennifer: I would say picking my 16-year-old's brain about what he actually did during the school day, that's always a very entertaining conversation. But a stress reliever, I'm a recovering runner, so I now walk. I walk a lot, and checking out what my garden is doing. 

Alistair: Amazing. And the fifth question is, where is your favorite place to visit and why? 

Jennifer: Outer Banks, multiple locations, but as secluded as we can get, and love a rainy day drive down to Hatteras. That's probably my favorite place to be. 

Alistair: Sounds dreamy. Sounds absolutely dreamy. Well, look, Jennifer, it's been a pleasure getting to know you a little bit better there, but honestly it's been such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for walking us through essentially your career and how you've managed to develop, sort of, almost beyond the recognition of what traditional marketing might have looked like and become this Chief Growth Officer. And I just think it's been fascinating. There've been so many great takeaways, and I say that lesson around essentially earning a title and walking the walk was something that I'm definitely gonna take away from myself. So I absolutely love that, and thank you very much for your time. 

Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. This was fun. 

Alistair: That's what we like to hear. Amazing. Take care. 

Jennifer: Thank you.  

Charlie: You can follow the Passle CMO Series Podcast on your preferred podcast platform. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.