View Past Member Spotlights

By Sonali Oberg

Throughout her career, my colleague Mary Umsted, director practice support- M&A and private equity at Sidley Austin LLP, has always promoted inclusive behavior when working with her team members. This fosters a happy workplace, talent retention and a collaborative work environment.

I had the opportunity to discuss with Mary her thoughts on how to build a cohesive team, highlighting the facts that communication, collaboration and adaptability are key steps to becoming a successful inclusive leader. What follows are takeaways from our conversation.

Communication

A cornerstone of inclusive leadership is communicating with your team, but more importantly fostering an environment where the team feels safe to communicate their perspectives and share their experiences is vital. Mary acknowledges that an open and respectful environment demonstrates to team members their opinions are valued, openly invites those diverse perspectives and creates an environment that appreciates different opinions, rather than viewing them as a problem.

Collaboration

Inviting more people into the conversation, engaging with them and asking for their opinions and suggestions is a great way to build rapport. When people have more context and information, it helps teams be more creative and collaborative. Mary has been successful in doing this through informal lunch and learns, reaching across departments to other business professionals within the firm.

For example, Mary hosted the pricing team for a lunch and learn. It was a great way to get to know the team members, hear about their respective roles and understand who is the best person to go to is for certain types of requests. As projects later rolled in, it made requests easier; because of these lunch and learns, she already knew the person she was calling. The meetings also helped humanize the team. They got to know more about them on a personal level — about their careers, hobbies, families and even favorite flavors of Pop-Tarts.

As marketers, we deal with many teams in order to support the needs of our lawyers. Mary builds relationships across departments to better understand the firm through different lenses. Creating space for this type of collaboration allows everyone to feel like they are working on a common goal and have buy-in for the success of the project.

Adaptability

Not only is inclusive leadership emerging as a unique and critical capability to help organizations adapt internally, but it is also important in obtaining a diverse customer base. Inclusive leaders are leaders who interact with diverse professionals around them, build trust, seek others’ points of view and adapt to the needs to their clients and team members. Internally, this can be done through mentoring, sponsorship and coaching. Sidley supports this type of development and provides a robust mentoring program where team members can select mentors. Allowing members to choose, rather than assigning, their mentor, and encouraging them to choose someone outside of their function, mentees are more engaged and invested in learning. By doing this, the mentees are empowered to choose who they would like to partner with ad learn from both professionally and personally.

As a mentor in the program myself, I was surprised at the benefit I received in learning about different positions within the firm and how I could interact with the teams in a better, more successful manner. The mentoring program is beneficial for both the mentor and mentee.

Inclusive leadership is a roadmap to creating strong, successful business teams. We find that what leaders say and do makes up to a 70% difference as to whether an individual reports feeling included. And this really matters because the more people feel included, the more they speak up, go the extra mile and collaborate — all of which ultimately lifts organizational performance.

(Originally posted June 29, 2022, in the LMA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion SIG Online Community.)

LMA Member Jacob Eidinger shares with us a little bit about himself, including advice for those in legal marketing looking to advance their career and his role as co-chair of LMA's Social & Digital Media SIG.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

As the Marketing & Communications Manager at Crumiller, I help victims of sexual abuse and employment discrimination advocate for themselves in the court of public opinion. In my career, I've had the privilege of working closely with litigators on hundreds of high-profile sexual abuse and employment discrimination cases, included litigation against Harvey Weinstein, Andrew Cuomo, Fox News, the NFL, Uber, the Recording Academy and many others. I've also been fortunate to work with activists and change agents to help advocate for policies that make workplaces around America safer, such as the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act that became federal law in March.
I also am a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community and recently got engaged to my fiancée, Hannah, who fully supports me in my identity as a bisexual man. We've happily lived in NYC for almost 10 years and plan to eventually relocate to southern California where she was raised.

How did you first get involved in legal marketing? What experiences have helped you advance your career and get you to where you are today?

Before I found my way into legal, I had roughly a dozen odd jobs working in restaurants, retail, and New York City nightlife. I also was a marketing manager at a Brooklyn-based trade school for aspiring tattoo artists. Those jobs gave me a solid foundation to eventually work in professional services because I learned skills like communication, time management, and navigating different team structures, in addition to tactical marketing knowledge.

In 2017, I was hired by Wigdor, a small plaintiff-side litigation firm, to establish its marketing department. Coincidentally, that was just a few months before #MeToo began making global headlines. The firm was already doing critical work in the sexual harassment space, but it never had a marketing professional before. It was my job to magnify the impact of the firm's work through highly effective digital marketing and PR strategies. I was very successful to that end and was proud to do meaningful work that contributed to social change on a global scale. I left that firm earlier this year to join Crumiller, a younger plaintiff-side litigation firm with a killer brand that simply needs an extra marketing boost to help get them on the map.

What advice would you give to those in legal marketing looking to advance their career?

Take the time to understand your lawyers' practice areas as much as you can. That means immersing yourself in the relevant laws, trends and issues that keep their clients up at night. Stay curious and don't be afraid to ask questions. Your attorneys will value you so much more if you show a genuine interest in their work.

I also firmly believe effective writing skills are paramount in any professional career. Good writers are in short supply and demand for them is high. Grammarly is an excellent "freemium" resource that can improve your grammar and clarity. Read different sources that target audiences across the business and political spectra to learn how to craft a message that resonates with your intended audience.

Finally: never send an email when you're angry!

Tell us a little bit about your role as the co-chair of LMA's Social & Digital Media SIG?

My SIG co-chair Jennifer Forester and I develop quarterly programming about the ways law firms are leveraging social media and digital marketing to develop new business. We also oversee the LMA Official Facebook Group, which has grown to over 600 members since it was launched last year by our former SIG Co-chairs Meghan Spradling and Katherine Rivera.

We kicked off the 2022 year with our #12DaysRewind social media campaign, a celebration of a longstanding tradition of the "12 Days of Social Media" curated by the SIG.

We also just recently launched the 21-Day Social Media Challenge, a brand-new learning course that dares LMA members to explore new ways of thinking around social media's impact on the business of law. This is something that LMA has never done before and it has been such a privilege to bring people together to learn about social media in exciting new ways.

We have some interesting programming in the works, so stay tuned!

You recently won "Member of the Year" for the LMA New York, can you tell us a little about this.

I am so grateful to LMA New York for honoring me with this award in 2021 after I spent two years as Member Engagement Chair on our Local Steering Committee. So many of us put an extraordinary amount of time and energy into making LMA a place of personal and professional growth, and the value of being an LMA member would not be possible without the hard work of more than 400 volunteers every year. It's vital that LMA continues to recognize those folks that are meaningfully elevating our association and our profession.