The Biggest Opportunity for Firm CX, Marketing, and BD Leaders

For years, legal marketing and business development professionals have worked to earn a seat at the leadership table. But at Wicker Park Group’s recent Client Relationship Symposium, one speaker suggested that while CMOs and CBDOs should be an integral part of firm leadership, that’s just one piece of the puzzle. Once there, it’s essential to be asking the question: “Who inside the firm owns the client experience?”

Hewlett-Packard’s Gregg Melinson, a longtime in-house counsel and former firm chief marketing partner, challenged attendees to consider that while firms spend enormous amounts of time talking about what they do, they will succeed based on how they do it.

WPG’s research supports his views. Technical excellence is no longer a differentiator. It will get you invited to compete but won’t necessarily help you win. As Gregg observed, clients remember responsiveness, commercial awareness, teamwork, empathy, consistency, and whether the team made their lives easier. That’s the difference between the what and the how.

Gregg’s co-speaker at the roundtable, Johnson & Johnson MedTech GC Ashley Watson, echoed these comments. She does not necessarily want more client alerts or broader capability statements but outside counsel who understand her business well enough to anticipate challenges before she asks. She emphasized that firms become trusted advisors when they demonstrate they are continually thinking about her business and care about her success as much as the legal matter sitting on their desk.

Those aren’t legal skills. They’re client experience skills.

Gregg challenged attendees to make client experience the north star of firm management. That includes the client journey, strategic positioning, differentiation, and the choices firms make about where to compete.

This is where client listening becomes indispensable. We’ve long seen that client interviews are valuable not simply because they uncover issues but because they translate client expectations into actionable change. Lawyers and firms must translate client feedback into a practical roadmap for improving not only what firms deliver but how they deliver it.

The biggest takeaway from the symposium wasn’t about AI, pricing, or cross-selling. It was about leadership. The firms that will distinguish themselves over the next decade will succeed because they intentionally design a better client experience.