Last week I published a piece about what I think the law firm marketing department will look like in 2028. The line that generated the most reaction was buried near the end. I wrote that the CMO of 2028 will leave behind the content-factory model and operate as a Chief Revenue Officer in everything but title. Some mid-size firms may formalize the shift with the title itself.
The reaction surprised me. Two CMOs wrote to push back. A handful sent supportive notes. The most useful responses came from two practitioners who landed on the same point from different angles. One said the Revenue Officer label is right, and they would push it further. Add a Chief of Pursuits or Chief of Sales. The function today is so broad that nobody can hone in on what really drives revenue — debriefing partners on their pursuits, gathering client feedback, walking partners through the next steps in a sale. It sounds simple. In practice it has stayed out of reach. Partners who originate the work do not want to be tracked. The compensation model pays them to go it alone. The second response cut deeper. Plenty of CMOs at law firms today do not realize the title is now linked to revenue. The title floats above the work.
That feedback is worth its own article, because both responses point at the same thing. AI is finally making revenue accountability possible at law firms. The new seat will belong to whoever claims that accountability. Two AmLaw-adjacent firms have already named CROs. A handful of other firms have created Chief Growth Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, and Chief Client Officer titles. The people filling those titles are largely not coming from marketing.
This is the empathetic version of the argument. You have been doing CRO work for years. You deserve the seat. Here is the case to take to your managing partner.
The CMO role at law firms did not start as a strategic seat
It started as a brochure department.
The first full-time legal marketer in the United States was hired by Jennings, Strouss & Salmon, PLC in 1981, four years after Bates v. State Bar of Arizona made lawyer advertising legal. The Legal Marketing Association formed in 1985, when legal marketing was still a small and emerging discipline.
Through the 1990s, the function was tactical. Marketing directors produced firm brochures, ran the Martindale and Chambers submissions, organized client events, and shepherded directory rankings. The title "Chief Marketing Officer" started appearing at AmLaw firms in the late 1990s, but the seat was rarely at the management committee. The work was administrative. The partners called it support.
The 2008 financial crisis is the inflection point everybody who lived through it remembers. Demand for legal services contracted by roughly 8% in 2009. About 37,000 legal jobs disappeared between January 2008 and the end of 2010. General counsel discovered they had leverage. Alternative fee arrangements went from fringe to standard. The Big Four started rebuilding their legal arms. ALSPs took the routine work. Suddenly the partner who had always brought in business through golf and bar association events needed a marketing function that did more than print brochures.
The function matured in waves. Marketing got combined with BD. BD got combined with CI. CI got combined with the matter-pricing and LPM teams that did not exist at AmLaw firms 15 years ago. Calibrate Strategies puts the North American partner-to-marketer ratio at roughly 12 to 1, leaner than any other professional services industry, while in the UK it sits closer to 5 to 1.
By 2016, the LMA-Bloomberg survey found that 68% of lawyers and marketing professionals surveyed cited internal pressure to generate revenue as the primary catalyst for expanded marketing and BD effort. By the mid-2020s, BTI Consulting was tracking a real reallocation inside the budget itself: client development as a share of marketing and BD spend rose from roughly a third pre-pandemic to over half. The total budget held flat while the mix inside it shifted toward the activity that generates revenue.
The work has been a revenue function for the better part of a decade. The title has not changed. What did change in the last 18 months is AI. The attribution work the function could never afford to do at scale — connecting an alert to a meeting to a matter to a fee, mining the time entries lawyers already write for billing, debriefing pursuits across hundreds of partners every quarter — is finally producible in real time. The technical reason firms could not credibly hold marketing accountable for revenue has evaporated. The deeper reason is the one that remains.
The CMBDO did everything but get the title
The Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer title started showing up in earnest in the late 2010s. Ropes & Gray LLP , Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein LLP , and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Affiliates all use a combined title today. Crowell & Moring named Maura Connell Brandt as CMO with combined client development and practice management responsibility in 2019. Baker Donelson created a Chief Growth Officer role for Mark Carlson in 2024. His mandate covers lateral attorney recruiting. Skadden formalized the Chief Business Development and Marketing Officer role with Luke Ferrandino the same year.
Each of these expansions extends the marketing leader's footprint. None of them closes the distance.
The CMBDO owns the funnel, but the funnel still drops off the table when the partner closes the deal. Compensation is still tied to budget and headcount rather than revenue. The dashboard still ends at "marketing-qualified opportunities" rather than "marketing-attributed dollars." The seat at the management committee is still earned project by project rather than carried by title.
I am not the first person to make this observation. Deborah Brightman Farone, a former AmLaw CMO and one of the most widely cited writers on law firm marketing, has said the CMOs she has met are talented but their firms underuse the strategic capability those leaders bring. She is being polite. Firms have designed the CMO role to produce exactly that mismatch between work and credit.
What the Big Four figured out before the law firms did
This is the part where the comparison stops being flattering.
Deloitte has had a Global Chief Growth Officer for years. Trevear Thomas holds the seat today and sits on the Global Executive Committee. KPMG's CMO, Lauren Wagner Boyman, is publicly described as accountable for expanding brand perception, improving sales-marketing partnership, and driving growth across a $10 billion-plus B2B function. Accenture runs a Chief Strategy and Services Officer role under Manish Sharma , with strategy and service delivery in one seat. Boston Consulting Group (BCG)'s global CMO, Jessica Apotheker, wears a second hat for BCG X, the firm's tech arm. Bain & Company 's CMO, Erika Serow, came back to the firm after serving as global president and U.S. CEO of Sweaty Betty, returning as a CMO with operator credentials.
I am not arguing the Big Four have solved this. KPMG, EY, and PwC still run mostly traditional CMO structures. Even Deloitte's CGO scope leans more toward brand and growth strategy than revenue attribution. But part of what got those firms to the title first was infrastructure they had built and refined over more than a decade of investment in analytics. They had attribution dashboards and integrated data warehouses that law firms never built in-house. AI is the variable that erases that infrastructure advantage. The attribution work that took Deloitte and BCG a decade to operationalize is now a 90-day build at any AmLaw 100 firm with access to commodity AI tools. The data is on the side of the firms that move. Forrester research finds that firms with aligned revenue operations grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable than peers. McKinsey has published that when a single, integrated customer-centric executive sits in the top team, top-line growth is 2.3 times higher than when the function is fragmented.
Now look at where law firms are. As of May 2026, two named U.S. law firms have a Chief Revenue Officer title. Jackson Lewis P.C. named Giulia Mijuca to the role in November 2025, but the scope is revenue cycle operations: billing, collections, and legal project management. It is a finance-flavored CRO rather than a marketing-rooted one. Pond Lehocky Giordano Inc., a mid-size plaintiffs' firm, has the title but it sits with a practicing attorney. That is the entire AmLaw-adjacent universe.
The adjacent titles tell a more interesting story. Clark Hill Law named Linda Watson as Chief Growth Officer in January 2024. She came from co-leading the litigation practice rather than from inside the marketing department. DLA Piper hired Stephen K. O'Neil as its first Chief Strategy Officer in September 2021, recruited externally. Baker Botts named Catherine Zinn as its first Chief Client Officer, with scope across growth, strategy, sector-focused client development, marketing, and communications globally.
Every one of those roles is the natural home for a marketing leader who has spent ten years building the funnel. None of them was filled by a CMO.
That is the threat. The work is being elevated. The seat is being created. The people occupying the seat are coming from litigation, from strategy consulting, from finance. Managing partners are passing over the marketing function that has been doing the underlying work.
What the case looks like at your managing partners desk
Here is what I would do if I were the CMBDO at an AmLaw 100 or AmLaw 200 firm reading this article today.
The conversation that was premature in 2018 is the one a CMBDO can credibly walk into in 2026. The reason is AI. Every one of the four numbers below is producible now without partner cooperation, without IT migration, without a six-figure consulting engagement.
The right opener is the four numbers, in that order.
Many CMOs lead with the org chart. The partner expects that move from a marketing leader. The org chart triggers the wrong reaction. The partner hears a power grab. The partner hears "more headcount." The partner stops listening.
The first number is marketing-attributed revenue for the last 12 months. A working CRM and an AI-built attribution layer let you produce this in weeks. Pick one or two practice groups and walk the partner through the path from the alert, to the article, to the LinkedIn engagement, to the call, to the matter, to the dollars. Be transparent about what you can prove and what you cannot. Partners respect rigorous math more than they respect tidy math.
The second number is pipeline value: the dollar value of identified, qualified opportunities currently in motion across the firm. It is not the count of pitches submitted or pitches won. Few AmLaw firms calculate this. The firms that do calculate it tend to be the firms growing fastest. Building the pipeline view is your wedge.
The third number is what it costs the firm today to acquire a new client matter. Marketing budget plus business development time plus partner time plus technology spend, divided by the number of new matters opened in a year. This is a number CMOs can produce that finance usually cannot. Walk it to the partners and every conversation about marketing budget changes from then on.
The fourth number is the conversion rate of partner content into client meetings. Specifically: of the partners whose content you actively support, how many booked a meeting in the past 90 days that started with a piece of marketing? This is the number that makes a partner who has never thought about marketing pay attention, because it speaks to their personal book of business.
Now comes the ask, and the ask should be small. The first conversation is not the place to push for a CRO title. Ask for the dashboard. Request a recurring seat at the operations committee. Push for a quarterly attribution review with the practice group leaders. Get the managing partner to formally name marketing-attributed revenue as a metric in the management committee's reporting pack. Title follows the work. After a year of quarterly reports, the title becomes a footnote on a slide instead of a fight.
When the partner pushes back (and one will), be ready for three predictable objections. The first is "we do not have a sales function. Our partners are the sellers." But origination credit is the sales function. The marketing leader has been informally augmenting it for years through pursuits and the intelligence work that makes pitches credible. The second is "this is finance's job." But finance owns the realization side, which covers billing and collections. A marketing-rooted CRO owns the origination side. They are different jobs. A firm needs both. The third objection is the one that has stalled this conversation for a decade: the partners do not want to be tracked. The comp system pays them to go it alone. AI is the answer to that objection. The attribution layer no longer asks partners to log anything. The data comes from systems the firm already runs — meeting transcripts the firm chooses to capture, CRM activity already recorded, matter timelines already in practice management, calendar entries already on the network. The partners do not add to their workload. The marketing function interprets what the firm already collects. That is the change that makes 2026 different from 2016.
What I want you to take from this
For any law firm CMO or CMBDO reading this, the ask is to recognize that the title is already in motion. The data is shifting. The Big Four already have the seat. Two of your peer firms already have the title in some form. Three or four more have created adjacent versions of it and filled them with people who do not come from your function.
The work has been a revenue function for the better part of a decade. You have been doing it. The case is not "give me a title I have not earned." The case is "let me name the work I have already been doing. Let me put the numbers in front of the partners so the firm sees the value those years are creating." That is an empathetic ask. It is also a defensible one.
The reason this works in 2026 and would not have worked in 2018 is AI, the variable that compressed the timeline and made the attribution feasible at law firm scale. The shift was going to happen anyway — the Big Four already proved that. The CMOs who claim the CRO seat this year will be in it. The CMOs who wait for 2028 will watch someone from finance or strategy operate it.
Start with the four numbers. Pick the smallest one you can fully calculate this quarter. Walk it to the managing partner. The conversation about your title in 2028 begins with that meeting in 2026.