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Ross Fishman

For the eponymous "Family Guy" character, see "Stuck Together, Torn Apart".

Ross Fishman, President of Chicago-based Fishman Marketing, is a pioneer and leading authority who “specializes in working with law firms on strategic marketing planning, branding and differentiation, practice group marketing, and the development of collateral materials including web sites and advertising."(1) Fishman Marketing, the company he founded in 1997 as Ross Fishman Marketing, Inc., is an award-winning professional-services marketing firm with a particular specialization in serving the legal profession.(2)

Called "one of the country's leading experts on law firm marketing" by Lawyers Weekly USA, Fishman has an international reputation as one of the most innovative strategists in the professional services marketing field. He has received dozens of professional-services marketing honors, including: — Selection as a Fellow in the College of Law Practice Management (CoLPM), which was formed in 1994 to honor and recognize distinguished law practice management professionals, to set standards of achievement for others in the profession. — One of four marketers inducted into the inaugural 2007 Hall of Fame class (3) of the 3,500-member Legal Marketing Association (LMA), the premier organization dedicated to serving the needs and maintaining the professional standards of the men and women involved in marketing within the legal profession. — Presentation in 1998 with the LMA’s first peer-selected “Premier Marketing Award,” its lifetime-achievement honor.(4) — Recognition in business media as "the creative mind behind a host of law firm campaigns that have redefined the field" (San Jose Business Journal).(5)

The marketing of legal services was not considered ethically acceptable until the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1977 ruling in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona.(6) It was not until the mid-1980s that a very limited number of large law firms had hired in-house legal marketers and the Legal Marketing Association (then the National Association of Law Firm Marketing Administrators, or NALFMA was formed.

It was shortly thereafter that Ross Fishman entered the legal marketing field and, as described in his 2005 "Personal History of Legal Marketing" for the Law Practice Management Section of the American Bar Association (an article for which he won the LPM’s 2006 "Silver Edge Award"), began working to help the marketing of lawyers and law firms "evolve from primitive to professional."(7) Today he is "well-known for the entertaining and informative presentations, training seminars, and retreats he’s conducted worldwide."(8) He has also sat on the editorial board of five national magazines, and been quoted hundreds of times from the New Zealand Lawyer to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" (the latter in a discussion on the trend of law firms to brand themselves using briefer names).(9)

Early Career

Fishman (10) received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Speech Communications cum laude from the University of Illinois – Urbana in 1982. He decided to enter law school at Emory University (where he was a writer and editorial cartoonist with Lynn Hajek in the Emory Law Journal), and Chief Justice of the school’s Honor Court, receiving his J.D. degree in 1985.

Having externed during law school with both the Offices of the Public Defender and State's Attorney in Cook County, Fishman entered practice as a litigator with mid-sized Chicago firm Pedersen & Houpt (1985-1988), where he was admitted into the federal trial bar for the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois in 1988. He moved his practice to mid-sized Schwartz & Freeman (later merged into Michael Best & Friedrich) (1988-1990). From 1987 – 1989, he was the legal columnist for Commerce, the magazine of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry (now the Chicago Chamber of Commerce), alongside columnists including Mayor Richard J. Daley. However, as he stated in a 2004 interview with the JD Bliss blog, "After five years as a lawyer I discovered that my skills and interests were better suited to a more creative field like marketing."

Pursuing this interest, in 1990 Fishman moved to the 500-attorney Chicago-based firm of Winston & Strawn. He was recruited by Loren A. Wittner, Esq. (then the first-ever full-time marketing partner at any law firm) to become Public Relations Manager. The legal marketing profession was then in its earliest years and only a handful of law firms had internal marketing groups at this time. During the next four years Fishman worked with Wittner on a variety of innovative legal marketing and advertising efforts, including the legal profession’s first Total Quality Management (TQM) program.

In 1994 the Marketing Committee of Chicago law firm Coffield, Ungaretti & Harris (now Ungaretti & Harris) recruited Fishman to develop and lead an aggressive marketing effort. He accepted the position of Client Service and Marketing Partner [See Crain’s Chicago Business “Helping Keep Customers Satisfied,” 8/29/94], making him only the second person, after Wittner, to take such a legal marketing partnership role.

Client-Service Guarantee

In 1995 Fishman launched a precedent-setting marketing initiative at the firm that centered on offering the legal profession’s first written service guarantee.(11) The guarantee did not cover outcomes, but instead stated that clients would receive cost-effective legal services in a timely manner and that if clients were not satisfied with the service they received the firm would resolve the issue even if a reduction in fees charged was necessary.

The guarantee received widespread media coverage from such highly regarded general media outlets as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, in much of which Fishman served as a spokesperson for the firm. "The idea of a service guarantee is not a new idea. It's the application to a law firm that's unprecedented," he stated in the ABA Journal.(12) In The American Lawyer Fishman answered questions about the guarantee’s offer of reduced fees by saying, "We think that the write-downs in bills will be reduced overall because we're finding out what the client wants us to know."(13) The guarantee program received numerous awards including the ABA's Dignity in Advertising award for the nation's best legal ad campaign, as well as the Legal Marketing Association's 1996 grand prize (optional Best of Show award) for the nation's best legal marketing campaign, and one of ten Inc. Magazine 1997 national Marketing Master Awards.(14)

Fishman Marketing

In 1997, after three years at Coffield, Ungaretti & Harris, Fishman decided to leverage his success and personal visibility with the written service guarantee into an independent career as a legal marketing consultant focusing on strategy and branding efforts that would help law firms position themselves in the legal services marketplace.

Implementing this philosophy for law firms nationwide has brought Ross Fishman and Fishman Marketing numerous high-profile successes in peer-review award competitions, including the Legal Marketing Association’s grand prize, the optional Best of Show award, half of the ten times it has ever been presented.(15) The Best of Show honor itself was created as a direct result of his work, which was slated to win national LMA Your Honor Awards in so many different individual categories that the LMA leaders decided to create a 'Best of Show' award encompassing one grand prize.(16)

Representative examples of Fishman’s award-winning law firm marketing campaigns during the past decade include:

— 2009: Novack and Macy and Fishman Marketing's "Small But Mighty" branding strategy took the first place Multimedia Award at the LMA Your Honor Awards.(17)

— 2006: Noland Hamerly Etienne & Hoss and Fishman Marketing's "Lettuce Lawyers" branding campaign won the "Nation’s Best Marketing" recognition from American Lawyer Media’s Small Firm Business.(18)

— 2005: Laner Muchin LLP and Fishman Marketing's "Two-Hour Response" campaign and the supporting direct-mail hourglass took Best in Show at the LMA Your Honor Awards.(19)

— 2004: Garvey Schubert Barer and Fishman Marketing won the "Best Identity Launch" award the LMA Your Honor Awards.(20)

— 2003: MacLean Family Law Group and Fishman Marketing received a Niche Marketing Best of Show special award at the LMA Your Honor Awards, for the unique "wedding cake" ad symbolizing divorce law counseling.(21)

— 2002: Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe and Fishman Marketing won the Recruiting Program Award Award (which included the legal profession's first computer game) at the LMA Your Honor Awards.(22)

— 2000: Crosslin, Slaten & O'Connor and Fishman Marketing won the Best of Show Award for "The Bug Lawyers" pest control industry branding program at the LMA Your Honor Awards.(23)

Professional Activities

An active Legal Marketing Association member since 1990, Fishman was the organization’s 1998 Vice President, and he has been a member of the Strategic Planning and Best Practice Task Forces, Education Committee member, and chairman and moderator of seven consecutive national day-long Quick Start/Boot Camp programs. For the organization’s 2010 National Conference, LMA's leadership asked Fishman to create and host LMA’s first full-day, attorney-only program, "Just JDs".(24)

Fishman also continues to be engaged in a wide range of professional legal activities. For example, he keynoted a series of marketing programs at a five-day Asian Productivity Organization (APO) conference in Bangkok for a group of 27 United Nations Asian government ministers and business leaders. In 2006, he was hired by an international law firm as their expert witness in a highly publicized branding-related lawsuit.(25) In addition to upward of 100 creative law firm marketing programs, he is also known for developing innovative and widely circulated educational materials like "Associates Marketing Checklist by Year of Practice".

Fishman has contributed over 250 bylined articles, including five monthly columns, to a variety of legal and marketing publications.(26) For example, in addition to several feature articles and sidebars for the American Bar Association’s Law Practice Management Section publication Law Practice, he wrote two separate monthly columns, the marketing trend-themed "Clips", and the case study-based "Frontlines: What REALLY Works" in the Law Practice magazine.