Profile: Joseph Calve

The road to success

In a career spanning two decades JOSEPH CALVE, a former practising lawyer, has worked as a legal reporter, editor, publisher and business executive at American Lawyer Media (ALM), and as global head of business development (BD) at international firm White & Case. But it is in his current capacity, as chief marketing officer at US firm Proskauer Rose, that he has won industry-wide acclaim for developing a marketing and BD department which now ranks number one in the industry according to 2007’s MLF 50 list. Here he reveals the secrets to his success. Interview by Lucy McNulty

Before entering the legal marketing and BD arena you spent 15 years working your way up the ranks in legal media. What prompted the change in career?
As someone who had worked for a length of time in legal publishing I was used to law firms trying to lure me over but it wasn’t until firms became more deeply immersed in marketing and BD that I really became tempted. I had been at the company a long time and in that time the environment for selling advertising and doing all the things publishers have to do was becoming increasingly difficult. I had also run a BD function at ALM for a while and found it to be a hugely interesting area, so with law firms becoming more involved in this area the prospect of changing careers started to become much more interesting to me. And to be frank about it the money offered was a pretty big incentive too.

You worked at White & Case for three years from 2003. What made you decide to move to Proskauer Rose?
From the moment I first changed careers my goal was to progress to a CMO role or equivalent as quickly as possible. Moving to Proskauer gave me that opportunity. But aside from that working here was appealing because it was made clear to me from the outset that the firm wanted to commit substantial resources to building a sophisticated BD and marketing function. In fact, by the time I joined a number of people had already been hired to help steer Proskauer through this change. In particular, the executive director Art Gurwitz, and new chairman Allen Fagin, showed themselves to be very committed to developing marketing and BD. The knowledge that I would be helping the firm through great adjustments and would be terrifically supported through that was a very attractive package to me.

How have your previous jobs helped you in your new role?
As you know I was a practising lawyer for about five minutes, but that was never really my goal. I went to law school to get into journalism, strangely and it worked. But aside from the legal knowledge acquired through law school I found that the skill set I obtained through my publishing career, generally translated over very easily because I had communications skills and I understood the whole environment well. I had also been working with law firms steadily while at ALM so I was very aware of the industry generally and especially big firms. In fact, I had spent most of my career up until then writing about big firms so being cognizant of the industry and the environment helped me a lot, I think. Also, thanks to my experience at ALM I was also able to me to gain credibility quite quickly in the marketing and BD arena because most firms are very respectful of the company.

The marketing department at Proskauer Rose was recently ranked number one in the industry according to the 2007 MLF 50 list. How have you accomplished this?
In my first 18 months here I invested a great deal of time and energy into finding and hiring good people [Calve almost doubled the size of Proskauer’s marketing and BD staff in this time]. It is vital when faced with the task I was, to bring in good people and then very quickly get some visible successes under their belts. I also set about obliterating the line between the marketing and BD functions altogether as opposed to blending the two areas as other firms have done. It was my aim to make everybody in the department fully invested in BD and for everything we worked on to point towards it and in particular towards developing client relationships (with both existing and prospective clients). I felt we needed to amalgamate the two as seamlessly as possible if we were to have a fighting chance at success, because if the two functions are in warring camps then it could not have worked out very well. I was also keen to put the systems and processes in place that would enable us to ensure the reactive side of things were handled well and therefore enough time was left to be proactive. For this reason, a number of systems were developed (such as a relational KM database, which handles all the firm’s basic resources from office descriptions to matter lists) and a chief information officer hired [Philip Wisoff joined Proskauer from Skadden in 2006] to help to build up the various technologies (such as a CRM system) that would provide the necessary support to firm staff, including the BD staff in my department. In my experience there are many areas that they must deal with, that can become very time consuming and really stall your chances of being strategic if not handled correctly. Pitching is one of those areas. If you’re scrambling to do pitches all the time and can’t do them efficiently that’s really going to damage your productivity in the long run. This is why I was careful to install various processes quite quickly that made it possible to work on pitches quickly and professionally, and therefore give my staff the breathing room they needed to be proactive. After all, a BD professional at a major law firm is generally wearing a lot of hats, as they are commonly attached to a practice, a department, or an office with multiple practices and within these areas they are the chief point of contact for virtually everything from media relations and events to pitches and research. Instigating processes that free up time to enable them to get on with the essential elements of their role is vital. However, in all honesty I don’t think we would have had any shot at success if we hadn’t had positive leadership and huge support from both the administrative side of the firm and the firm’s executive committee and chairman. For, with sufficient support in place you are able to invest time into showing that this kind of activity is worth investing in and building up demand for BD activities at your firm, which is always a good thing. However, we are still just scratching the surface to some extent. There is so much that could be still be done because we had a lot of basics to get in place first.

What challenges did you meet along the way?
Normally when instigating a great deal of change you can encounter a degree of resistance from staff who have not bought into the developments. However staff at Proskauer have been very receptive and open to any new ideas. In fact the firm as a whole does a lot in the BD and marketing arena - the lawyers here are very smart, they have plenty of good ideas where BD is concerned and are very willing to work together with my staff to develop programmes and initiatives.

What advice would you give to CMOs in similar positions?

Make sure that you have good relationship with the senior firm leadership and those that you need the support of – for example your IT, KM and finance departments;
Take the time to communicate. Make sure that you are very clear with everybody in the firm about what you are doing, why you are doing it and why you’ve chosen that alternative as opposed to the zillion other things you could be doing. As you do that steadily try to build up buy-in for what you are trying to do;
Find ways to show some quick successes and don’t be hesitant to showcase any successes you have, so others in the firm can keep abreast of what is going on and perhaps be encouraged to get more involved themselves.

What other changes would you predict are likely to take place in the legal marketing arena in the near future?
I think people are going to focus more attention on what the return is on their investment. It’s not an easy area but just because it’s hard to measure doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and not try. Firms are spending a lot money and time on marketing and BD and they should know what they are getting in return for their investment so that when they look forward they understand what they should be doing and where they should be heading. Knowledge management is another area in which I believe we can expect to see huge developments in. At Proskauer we are preparing for this by working with our IT staff to redesign and redevelop our internal and external online presence and develop a firm-wide relational database that underpins our intranet and internet sites and can also tie into our CRM and financial systems, for example. We are building what is essentially a data warehouse that is simple to search and makes it much easier to locate knowledge from across the firm.

How do you think the US legal marketing industry differs from that which operates in the UK?
In my experience I have found that for many years the UK legal marketing and BD professionals were a step ahead of us in the US. Many US firms have marketing or BD ‘departments’ of sorts in place for some time but we are still in the early generations of this really. What’s more, many resources seem to have been made available to UK professionals much sooner and there are several training programmes in place in the UK that were, and still are, harder to come by in the US. That said I think that because everything, including the legal sector, has become more global there is less of a gap between the two markets now.

In the past, law firm marketers have complained that it was difficult to make marketing really work in the law firm environment. Do you think that is still a commonly held opinion in the industry?
I think that is now an increasingly less widespread opinion because people understand legal marketing better but earlier on in the evolution of the industry there was resistance to it, yes. Now, however, you just don’t encounter it as much. In fact, I think that today, lawyers really want to participate in BD efforts. They understand that they work in a really competitive environment and marketing and BD is therefore now a necessity, and indeed a factor in their personal success. Indeed, this realisation, coupled with the increasing sophistication of those working in the industry, has helped the ‘difficulty’ of working in law firm marketing melt away. Nonetheless, I do believe lawyers often saw the value in legal marketing – maybe not as many as today, but there were undoubtedly always pockets of lawyers who committed resources to it early on. I suspect that the industry just wasn’t grown up enough then to fully commit to the marketing arena. That said, there are plenty of individual cases of really sophisticated activities that have been taking place for quite a number of years now. But I suppose when you look at the industry as a global entity it has clearly made some great strides in the past three years or so.

What are your plans for the future?
In the past ten years I have changed my focus within the industry a number of times. But the common denominator for every role I have found myself working in has been large law firms. Indeed, I have always worked in the legal industry as that is what interests me and I am very much a creature of large law firms. I have worked in these firms as a lawyer and in the BD arena and I have worked in huge legal journalism company which focused on big firms. Throughout it all I have become increasingly aware of the fact that it is the business of law that I find most interesting. I grew up under the founder of American lawyers, Stephen Brill, whose mantra to us who were with him early on in the development of ALM was ‘focus on the business of law: that is what we are here for, we are not here to be crime reporters’. And it’s true, there is so much to be gained from following the processes of major law firms on the business side; how they get clients, how they run their businesses, and so on. It is an area which has only got more transparent and more interesting as far as I am concerned and that’s why I see myself working in the ‘Big Law’ industry in some shape or form years from now, just like I am today. Whether that’s in legal marketing, in legal journalism or in something that has yet to be discovered, I just don’t know. Although I can pretty much guarantee it won’t be as a practising lawyer.

Joseph Calve is chief marketing officer at the 700-lawyer US firm Proskauer Rose LLP. He can be contacted at jcalve@proskauer.com