GMT welcomes special guest David Kaufman, Director of Global Strategies at Nixon Peabody LLP - Part I of II

GMT welcomes our very special guest David Kaufman, Director of Global Strategies at Nixon Peabody LLP, for a wide-ranging discussion of all things business development, marketing, and global reach. We very quickly steered clear of higher math and had what can only be described as an epic chat with one of the sector's leading thinkers and doers. The conversation was so engaging we made it a two-part series.  Episode one drops now, and we will drop episode two in the next few weeks.  Make sure to subscribe so you do not miss a minute of David, Rob and Murray mixing it up. We are hitting our stride!

Contact Rob and Murray:
Robert C. Bata, Founder and Principal, WarwickPlace Legal
Email: rbata@warwickplace.com

Murray M. Coffey, Founder and Principal, M Coffey
Email: murray@mcoffey.net

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Robert, welcome to GMT, the podcast for globally minded law firm leaders with your host. Robert Bata, principal of Warwick place legal and Murray Coffey, principal of M Coffey, between them, Rob and Murray have about three quarters of a century's experience working with some of the most notable law firms on the planet. This podcast is designed to help those law firm leaders tasked with growth make great decisions about whether and how to implement cross border expansion for their firms and what it takes to succeed. And now. Rob Bata,

Rob Bata: 0:42

hello, everybody. This is our GMT podcast. We're delighted to see you again. This is our is this? Did I put up 3/3 Well, it's going to be three and four, because it's going to be a two parter. We're very, very privileged to

Unknown: 0:59

have a we're going to have a matt primer at the end of this as

Rob Bata: 1:04

well. We're gonna do a little calculus. And David, you're gonna be helping. We are, in fact, very privileged to have David Kaufman, who is, I think, known to probably more people in the legal world than just about anyone else? David is the Director of Global strategies, and has been for about 16 years at Nixon Peabody, and he has a long and distinguished career in business development, but also as a businessman, we'll ask you a little bit about that, about your about how you got to all of this. David, he's also a member of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and is very active with lots of good deeds and good doings for San Francisco, both in terms of trade and in terms of charitable activity. He's also a an Iron Man and triathlete and and an indefatigable racer, and we're just delighted to welcome you here. David, it's

Unknown: 2:12

great to be here. Thank you for the opportunity. It's a

Rob Bata: 2:15

pleasure. Absolutely you know this. This podcast is really intended to give a sense of the interplay between the non lawyer executive function and law firms, and what that means for marketing, for business development and for strategy. And the reason that Murray and I do this podcast really is to show that there's a real need, not just for the the in house executive, but at appropriate times, for the outside consultant to collaborate on strategy, to collaborate on getting the right message out. And so it seemed to us that you do so much of what I've just described in in your activities and in your role, that you would be the perfect guest for us, and you are our first guest on this podcast. So welcome David. Thank you.

Unknown: 3:19

I mean, I think I would agree with that. I mean, I think the notion that I think I love, I love, I love my firm, I love what I do, I love working with lawyers. Because I think lawyers are just super smart, really amazing folks, but they're, they're focused on solving problems for their clients and dealing with, you know, the amazing challenges that the clients have, or looking at the opportunities. Oftentimes it's difficult to step back as a and view their their practices as businesses. And then when you do agglomerate multiple practices together, and you're now in a law firm with hundreds of lawyers, hundreds of partners, so then say to them, Well, now you have to think about the strategy, not just for your own practice, but for all these other businesses. I think it's, I think it's very challenging, and I think that's that law firms are, you know, been smart to to hire executives that have business backgrounds, but also to hire consultants to assist them as they're kind of examining, you know what? What makes sense? What doesn't make sense. It's interesting.

Rob Bata: 4:23

In the case of both Mary and myself, um, we both, of course, have legal backgrounds. So Murray practiced in Chicago. I have about 33 years of practice behind me, and I think that that helps too, although I also feel that so much more of the world opens up when you when, when you're not a lawyer, but are able to think through things for a strictly business and opportunistic perspective. David, how did you, how did you come to this position? You've, you've done a lot of things in your life. Just give us a very short little bio. Well,

Unknown: 4:58

I grew. Been a small town Altoona, Pennsylvania, did not have a very international kind of exposure. Growing up, we were, I was born the same, same year that the Pennsylvania Railroad went bankrupt, and we were left with in my town was built by the railroad, and the home of the famous

Rob Bata: 5:18

Horseshoe Bend, isn't it? Horseshoe curve, the horseshoe curve.

Unknown: 5:22

And so we had no, my dad I grew up, we had no, no four lane highway, interstate highway connection. Our airport was even 20 miles out of town in this little, tiny airport. So, you know, I like to say I had a pretty idyllic childhood, but certainly it wasn't very, very cosmopolitan. Pittsburgh was the big city, but you know, I love my I love my hometown, I love the people I grew up with, and I think, I think it laid the foundation for what I do today, but it did in a kind of an interesting way that I'll get into later. But I went to the University of Pennsylvania Wharton school, got my undergraduate and MBA degree. Were involved in a couple other businesses, mostly in the apparel and the Bata business. Part of those businesses took me to China, which was kind of opened my ID eyes to, you know, the world beyond Altoona, beyond America. And then I got to see the rest of Asia. And at some point in time, you know, my wife and I decided to move to San Francisco, and I was kind of, you know, floundering to find a new career, because I didn't want to go back into the apparel and the fashion business, because that, you know, I tell people, if you want to lose a lot of money and make a lot of money, get into that business. So I was tired of someone take so many chips off the table there. And I found the legal business, and I found that, you know, my kind of, my what I did, which was, you know, essentially selling could be translated into the legal world. And the legal world was just kind of opening up for that. So I did consulting for a while, and then, and just, you know, as I was, you know, kind of struggling to figure out what my next chapter. After consulting with smalls and solos, where I had a successful practice, business development, started coming to four, and I can still remember having a conversation before I had my first got a real big law job, and, you know, talking to a friend of mine who suggested that I apply for this job at Deckard, the Decker law firm. And I said, Well, you know, big law firms don't have people like me working for them. And he said, Oh, it's changing. It's changing now we're having this thing called business development, and they're looking for people just like you. I'm not sure if anybody looked for people exactly like me, but that was what he said. And so I started there and found out that in reality, that was true, that you know, a lot of what I was doing in my practice, you know, my consulting for small firms and solos, it's all the same thing. Lawyers all the same challenges, have the same issues. Went from Decker to a melbourney, and then my boss at melbourney came from the next Peabody, and I've been here for it for since that time. And, you know, I tell people I kind of untraditional, current traditional role. I look a little bit untraditional, or quite a bit untraditional, but I actually had fairly traditional trajectory in terms of, you know, I started off at the firm and in my firms, running Regional Marketing. And so I think I pretty much have done, been responsible for the San Francisco region, the California region. I ran all the regional marketing for the firm. CO led our business development function. But over that time, I pretty much I've done traditional marketing for every practice group at the firm, and that's kind of led to what I do today, because about five or six years ago, the firm, you know, asked me if I would consider, you know, I'd always been very involved in an international practice. I helped set up our China, our China practice, if I would spend all of my time focused on international and kind of move to a more individual contributor role and spend more time, take the time that I would have spent, kind of internally, you know, focus on externally, and work with clients more directly. So at this point, I would describe my role as I spend most of my time working with clients that are looking at based in the US. They're looking to do business somewhere else in the world, and clients all over the world looking to do business here in the US. Part of that comes with me supporting our our attorneys that have relationships, or just have relationships, but also I do have my own relationships, and people will work directly to me, and I'll find the folks here that to work with them, but it's a it's an exciting place that we've seen a big uptick in activity, even through the pandemic, in terms of people looking to do international business. I think that you know the the quantity of deals that we see now, that you know when you know it's very infrequently that you now have a company that says, oh my, you know, we're going to buy a. Company in the US, and a UK company or by a company of the US. And that's it, you know, now, almost every deal has, okay, we're buying a company in the US. We also have a company, you know, they also have a Syrian Ireland and Italy and, you know, Singapore. So the complexity of deals have become much more profound, and that's that's benefited me, because that's kind of where, where I can come in to help, you know, shop, you know, work through some of those issues. I've had 100, like, 140 different countries I work in and have experience working with a lot of different different companies, a lot of different industries. I'm industry agnostic. Obviously, practice agnostic, and it's, you know, exciting, exciting spot in the legal ecosystem. For me,

Rob Bata: 10:48

it's, it's fantastic. It's you really, you have a unique role, you know, people, people talk about business development. I think yours is really on on a whole other level. So I'd like to see if we can kind of position what you do against the marketing function and and I think Murray's going to be able to address this very well, because your your function, just from a simplistic point of view, is you're bringing this stuff in marketing messages out and messages also internally, because there's a great deal of selling that you have to do within a firm in order to get people interested or excited about an opportunity and so forth. I think you do some of that, but I think it's also part of marketing messaging. So do you do you see, kind of the same way that your work is sort of inbound and marketing is sort of outbound.

Unknown: 11:50

I wouldn't describe it that way. I think they're more intertwined in terms of the, you know, I think you need to have the underpinnings of, you know, of of the, you know, the structure to sell something, you know. I mean, I couldn't do my job without, you know, having, you know, a great marketing function, which we have, you know, so, like, if I'm, you know, if there's a conference, and, you know, there's the the IBA M and A conferences in New York in June, and I'm going to have a breakfast, and, you know, I'm going to reach out to my contacts, things like that. But unless we had, you know, the capacity to organize the breakfast and put the, you know, put the invitation together, and I have confidence that it's going to be a great experience for people, and we have really sophisticated event planners and things like that, then, you know, pretty much it would be a it'd be a disaster. Because, you know, as much as I could do, I'd show up and we'd have, you know, cold Danish and cold Coffey and, you know, the dreaded, the dreaded continental breakfast, right? Exactly. So, I mean, I think that's a simplistic version. There's so much more they do. I mean, marketing, I'd say, as all of us have done this for a long time. Today's marketing is very different. You know, I can remember back in the day, like when we would do an alert. I know this is gonna be shocking for some people. We would actually print the alert out, and we would have to stuff it into envelopes, and we'd have tools the clients and hope they were opened and read it. You know, nowadays it's amazing. You know. The other thing is the pitches and proposals. I when I tried to talk to our our younger colleagues, our more junior colleagues, about the idea that, you know, I had to, like, you know, stay overnight when I was working on a big pitch, because, you know, it wasn't, there was no PDFs. Weren't the thing. Like, we had to actually print them out, and you had to go through, and I'm spiral bound, and you had to sit there at the printer, and, oh, yeah. And you look at everything, and some colleagues said to me, like, well, well, why did you say? Because, what if they, what if the printer had screwed up and didn't put the right page, put a page in for some other other, you know, law firm, you know, that would be pretty bad. And so, you know, so I think things have changed a lot, much more sophisticated, you know, the capacity, you know, social media has changed the ball game. The website is such a, such a more important tool, you know, sophisticated research, and using the research function. So I think, you know, I think it's, really has changed. It's the whole ball game. It's not just marketing, it's marketing. It's more traditional business development, it's communications, it's library and information, all that has to work together in a much more complicated process than, you know, I could even dreamed at when I started this business 20 years ago. Sure, when I talked to my, you know, to my colleagues, the folks that I'm working with on either managing in the team or with partners or people like yourself who are who are out trying to sell. I think about, I try to say, hey, look, there's a basket of capabilities and services that we have, and not everything is going to be useful or relevant to what it is. You're doing at that moment. The skill is knowing where to kind of reach into that basket. And I think that, you know, what I've the development that I've seen is a greater sophistication. And you know, people like yourself, David, Bring it. Bring this, really, bring this to the table to say, yeah, there's a, there's a there's a number of different tools that I have available to me, and I need those to do my job. So it's kind of, I like to think of business development and marketing as as an alloy, not an allied but an alloy, you know, coming together, forming something that's stronger than either one can do. Can be separate and and so it's, and it's, it's fantastic when the marketing team can integrate what they're doing with what the partners and people like yourself are doing in terms of business development. You know, the earned media is a great example. Earned Media is a feeder, right? That is a that's something that that is used to can be used to help raise sort of a profile or raise an issue out in the world, but you have to know what you're doing with it to turn it into a business development asset. And so you know, the more that my folks on my side of the fence are, are able to sit and talk through and understand what's going on in terms of the BD side and what, what the firm is trying to strategically sell, if you will. I mean sales. We can talk sales. It's sales. It is what it is and and it makes us better at what we do, and I think that there's some shading that we can bring to what you all are doing on your side. And I don't think of it asides. It's just we're all part of a part of an enterprise. And I never really saw separations between myself and BD and recruiting and even attorney development. That's all part of, that's all part of moving the enterprise forward, or the Empire forward, to

Rob Bata: 17:06

reference your shirt. So it's like David says, It's very intertwined. But I love that. I love that formulation that you used Murray alloy, not ally. That's a that's a great one. I've never heard that one before, and I think just made it up. Excellent. Well, you're obviously a born marketer,

Unknown: 17:30

but David, I guess I would have a question for you, and that is as you think about and this is in no way seeking out a criticism of any marketing teams that you've ever worked with. That said, Where are the, where are the most high value touch points with the marketing team that you have? And you know, obviously, yes, the events team has to get the breakfast put together, but on a more, I think, on a more strategic and maybe more tactical basis, what are the touch points for, for the BD teams, where the where the marketing teams can be more valuable, and we can flip that around as well, if you want. But I'm very interested in hearing where I think it's, I think the area where we're seeing a lot of activity. And I'm not a tech guy, even though I work with companies, I don't understand a lot of the marketing technology, but the ability to capture experience is critically important, as you know, I guess I don't want to sound so much like a dinosaur, but I can remember when I was, you know, part of what I did was to keep track of deals on Excel spreadsheets, right? Or, you know, things like that. You know, that has to go away. I mean, they, we have, we gotta, you know, pick a button. Say, Okay, how many deals have we done in Latin America involving, you know, $3 billion that's the kind of information you that you have to have. Those are table stakes. And you have to have that information. And, you know, you know, putting, putting proposal materials together. I think that's less I think some of that stuff is, is become less important over the years. I think that the expectation that you need to have, you know, fancy decks, I think, is less critical than I'd say 20 years ago, even. But you do have to, have to be able to, you know, show calls in the right way. So I think, you know, I do think that that, you know, showing quals and and doing traditional marketing in terms of proposals and things like that, is, is just as critical. Now, it's just different. And it's different, yeah, much more granular, yeah. And people don't want to read, you know, huge you know, things and effects about your firm is they want to know, what have you done in this space? What do you know, who you work with, things like that, and you know that's the stuff you need to have, and you need to have it done immediately, because you know that they're not going to wait for it. So I think that's that's the one area where I think it's important. I'd say the other area that you know requires additional skills and experience is social media. I think that the. The capacity to think about social media in a professional way. Because, you know, things I got my joke is, if it doesn't, if you don't post it on social media, it never happened. You know, you know, I felt like, like my wife uses a fitness tracker, like, I remember we went walking one day, and she's like, Oh my god, it's so terrible. You still walk like, you know, right? But it's, but it doesn't show up on her. Garmin, yeah. But same thing, like, if you you know, you know, lawyers, you know need to be, you know, don't have the time to be influencers, but they really need to be to some extent. So I think the idea is, how do you, how do you help them position themselves and use, you know, the media to amplify everything you just like when you said, if there's an article like, you know, who's going to read that article? Well, you know, how can you shine the spotlight on that article? How can you, you know, you know, move attention to it? So I think, I think those are the two areas where I think traditional, traditional marketing is critically important and will continue to play a major role going forward. To your point, I

Rob Bata: 21:09

thought when I first started seeing people, you know, law firms and their marketing departments say, you know, we're on Twitter, or here's our LinkedIn, I thought, Well, gee, who's who's going to who's going to go on Twitter, or who's going to go on LinkedIn? To look at that, that seems like a waste of time. And now that I look back on that, of course, that seems ridiculous, because so much just, just look at the idea of business cards. Of course, we still carry business cards from time to time. Some of them are more sophisticated than others. They have QR codes and so forth. But the first thing you do when you meet somebody, or right after you meet them, if you have any interest, is look them up on LinkedIn and and then try to make a connection and and so forth. So it's become really ingrained in the system. And although lawyers, as you know, both of you are slow adopters. That is now really all part of the ecosystem of the legal market. And

Unknown: 22:09

I think Rob the the you know, to David, to your point about, about using social media and earned media, etc, where I see firms not I think the net sort of the next frontier, if you will, for social media, and I want to talk about the quals in a minute, but the next, the next, the next phase, I think, for social media, for law firms, for the larger firms, the smaller firms, are actually doing a better, better job in many ways on this is not used, not just looking at LinkedIn as kind of the firm's virtual billboard. Okay, this is what happened. This is, this is who went to this event, who this is who got this award, etc, to start to use it as a, as a, as a, as a, as a tool for, for staking out some, you know, some intellectual space within the within the within our sector. A great example I'll give you is a wonderful firm out of out of New York, a boutique friend of mine is, is the managing partner there, and she identified, and they're small. There may be 30 partners there, but she identified that that the net, she felt like the next big question phase, etc, in Financial Litigation would would be around the LIBOR transition, which seems really in the kind of weeds stuff, but she's she went on LinkedIn every week on Thursdays and posted something every Thursday afternoon about LIBOR, whether it was, you know, the eight sentences that she picked out of a Financial Times article, or her own thoughts on what what she just heard about LIBOR. And guess what happened? They started getting all the calls from Bloomberg and from from Financial Times in the Wall Street Journal about libraries, probably from clients, probably from clients too well. And then from clients, yeah, then from clients, sure. Now the client started that. Now the clients, oh, okay, well, Anne and her firm are the LIBOR experts, and they weren't LIBOR experts before Anne said, We're LIBOR exports. Now they were experts in LIBOR, but the world didn't know that they were LIBOR experts. So that's like, that's I had the same a couple years ago. I had a so called social media expert tell me that he thought that I would that I he not like my social my LinkedIn feed. He did not like it. I thought it's cup of tea. I said, why? He said, Well, it's, it seems very contrived. I was like, oh, okay, why? Why do I say? Why do you say that? He says, Well, I can so, why? So what? You know, it seems like you really are, like, focusing people's interest in trying to understand who you are. Like, okay, well, who do you think? And he said, I think you're really interested in international work with the heavy emphasis on. China, you're really involved in anything evolving, like San Francisco, with kind of economic development kind of made, and you're like, you're this crazy athlete, dude, that's pretty much, that's pretty much it. I guess I do my job, David, for the win. I agree with you. It is contrived. I'm glad you figured it out. And if I posted a lot of random shit, you know, that probably would be bad. Would be worse, yeah, before we hop off this topic, I know we're, you know, we're getting a little little gear on time here, I did want to circle back to this idea, David of the of the quals, of being able to, you know, being able to quickly and with a level of granularity, be able to say what we do, who we do it, for, how often we've done it, who are the people in our firm who are experts in it? That's kind of the holy grail of of where the marketing and BD functions are kind of intersecting, in my view, and that to facilitate that, and to have that information, and not only have it but have it be accurate, have it be instant. You know, it should be instantaneously available. Is time consuming. Is relatively expensive in terms of in terms of what law firms are spending on, on Mark marketing technology today, but I do think it's it's absolutely essential, and there's a number of products out there. But the point I want to make is, I think that where I've been successful in implementing these kinds of programs is by getting the business developers at the firms that I was at to say, we need this, this, this is, this is what we need. It's not just Murray saying we should have this. It's David and Murray coming together and saying to the firm, we need this. We're this. We're we this will give us a competitive advantage for a little while. That window will close and it'll be table stakes. And if we get behind and we don't have this as table Steven, as table stakes as an offering, we're going to be in we're going to be in trouble as a firm and and I think that those are the kinds of discussions that the business development team, the marketing team, outside consultants who can say, this is what your clients are looking at, this is what they're this is what They need to know. And, I mean, you know, Rob, when you think about, you know, sort of your your your bread and butter, which is, which is the, which is bringing firms and practices and all together, being able to have that answer, being able to have that information at your fingertips, makes your job. It makes your job, I wouldn't say easier, but it certainly helps you. It certainly helps you move things forward. If you can say, Yeah, I know what this firm does. Good example, so on, I guess Monday or Tuesday, I got an inquiry from a dear firm, a good colleague in another firm in the UK, and they were interested in K through 12 education in the US, and they said, Do you know, do you do that? And, you know, I mean, because I I've been at this firm for a long time, I know everybody at the firm, like I have, like, if I could download my brain and do it, and so I was able to respond within like, you know, 45 seconds, the fact that other person on email is like, how did you know that? Like, at the top of your head, you know, not only who the person was, you know, what she did, what Her background was, everything else. And you know, it was able to go back immediately and say, Yes, we have the expert. You know, Tina scanning is awesome. She used to work for, you know, the US Department of Justice and the New York State and everything else. And she's just awesome. And, you know, I think, and I tell people, there's a way to make a referral, and there's a way to make a referral, and so you can make a referral quickly and with specificity about, you know, why this person is really the rock star, you know, I think that that, in my, my experience that has, that has made a big, a big difference, you know. I think the idea is that, you know, there's, there's a line, like, once you start, you know, kind of pitching, you've lost already. So, like, if you could get beyond the pitch, and it's like, oh, this is the person you have to use. Of course, this is the first you have to use. And, you know, so that, that's what I strive for. But if you could take, you know, what's in my, my little cop here, and turn it into, you know, some way someone else could type in and say, Okay, who do we know? Does you know K through 12, right? Education? And this is what we have, you know, if you can, you know, you might be replicate my, you know, my little synapses, but you probably could good, you know, you'll, you'll do a pretty good job. Yeah, I can be done.

Rob Bata: 29:42

That's a really important skill. And I have to say that your point about if you're still pitching you've lost it, is really crucial. And frankly, I find that true in my business, too. And.

Unknown: 30:00

That concludes part one of our discussion with David Kaufman, the Director of Global strategies at Nixon Peabody, please stay tuned for part two, which will air shortly, and subscribe so that you can get notice of all of GMTs podcasts you