The survey, conducted last in 2018, reveals some serious concerns about gender bias, budgets and compensation for those charged with enabling firms to get new clients.
The Revenue Enabler Compensation Study, last conducted in 2018 and which looks at the compensation and financial data related to marketing, business development and communication professionals in law firms, shows the pay gap between males and females widening, marketing budgets stagnating and that more than 75% of those surveyed felt they didn’t have a clear promotional path within their roles.
But it also shows that more than three-fourths of respondents are content in their current role.
The survey, a collaboration between ALM Intelligence and legal consulting and recruitment firm Calibrate, is a web-based survey that took place over an 11-week period between late March and mid-June of this year and features responses from over 400 marketing and business development professionals from the C-suite down to more entry-level positions.
The bulk of the respondents worked in marketing and business development at law firms (43.5%) or only business development (20.9%). It also included responses from those in communications, PR, RFP generation and competitive intelligence.
Kathryn Whitaker, director of recruitment and strategy consulting at Calibrate and one of the primary authors of the study, said that one of the things that surprised her most from the results was the static nature of marketing budgets between 2018 and 2020.
“I am a little concerned about how much hasn’t changed between 2018 and now,” Whitaker said in an interview. “The percentage of revenue relative to the marketing budget is still about 2%. An ideal percentage is between 3% and 5%.”
