Cover Stories

Marketers Wanna Market. Let ’Em.

Roy Sexton came to legal marketing at nearly forty, after more than a decade in healthcare and a stint at Deloitte Consulting, and he came with a theory. The theory was that helping doctors and helping lawyers would be roughly the same work. Accomplished professionals, strategic growth infrastructure, individual brands inside a collective enterprise, technical differentiation translated into something a human being outside the building would actually read.

Some of that held. One thing did not, and it reorganized how he has practiced ever since.

“Doctors are trained to embrace risk, to a degree,” he says, “informed by the scientific method, the work of their peers, and experience treating patients. They are data driven and value more data than less. The practice of law is by its very nature designed to avoid, reduce, mitigate risk.”

In marketing terms, the difference shows up as a question of appetite. Physicians pushed him toward new and novel ways of reaching the market. Attorneys approached marketing by precedent. What has worked before. What are other firms doing.

Sexton is careful about the verdict. “Neither is right nor wrong,” he says, “but unique to training and industry culture.” What surprised him was that once he understood the shift, he found he liked the legal side better, and that he was more like his attorneys than he had assumed.

“I also found that I myself lean more toward risk aversion, in a good way, making sure that time as a resource is used wisely and effectively and protecting the needs and reputation of the firm.”

Fifteen of his thirty-plus working years have been in legal. In that time he served as international president of the Legal Marketing Association, and he has arrived at a position he states plainly and repeats often: legal marketing is a career, not an accident.

“You have to know that the teams you are now working with pre-existed you, survived without you, even thrived without you.”

Act I

What has to be true for that to mean anything

The sentence is easy to agree with and hard to deliver on, so the useful question is what a firm has to look like for it to be more than a nice sentiment. Sexton’s answer is not about budget or headcount or a seat at a committee table. It is about how a marketer enters a room.

“I see too many marketers land in an organization with a clutch of big ideas,” he says, “thinking they will gain traction through disruption.”

He does not dismiss disruption. He dismisses disruption for its own sake, and his reasoning is a kind of institutional humility that is rarer than it should be. “You have to know that the teams you are now working with pre-existed you, survived without you, even thrived without you. So find those ways to complement and enhance and create lasting change.”

Trust, in his telling, is built by honoring what came before, learning what actually drives the people already there, bringing forward opportunities that fit them, and then following through on what you said you would do.

And the obligation runs both ways. If a marketer does all of that and still hits a wall, Sexton’s advice is not to grind harder. “If you find you follow that path and continue to face resistance to your evolving the marketing and business development function, you won’t be able to see this as a career, but rather a series of disconnected tasks that aren’t bringing holistic value to the firm nor fulfillment to yourself.”

That is the hinge of the whole argument. A career is not a title. It is whether the work compounds.

Act II

Twenty-one people and a deadline

When Sexton arrived at Vedder he inherited a twenty-one person department already in the middle of two large projects: a rebrand and a new website.

He describes that timing as a gift, and he is right, though not for the obvious reason. A rebrand and a site launch are the kind of work that forces a new leader into every corner of a firm at speed, on a deadline, with a visible outcome.

“We had a pretty singular focus as a team in my first year, to get those across the line on time and through consistent, firmwide engagement,” he says. “It was a great way for me to learn the team and the firm in rapid fashion. And we were successful in our quest.”

What it bought him was standing. The team he joined was already strong, high performers with exacting standards for the work, and he is explicit that he did not arrive to fix them. Delivering with them earned him the right to coach afterward.

The coaching itself is a technique, and a small one. When someone on his team comes to him with a problem, he does not solve it.

“I avail myself of each one of those opportunities, always asking first ‘what do you think you should/could do here?’ versus dictating a solution or tasks,” he says. “That’s how you engender greater autonomy and stronger results ultimately.”

The second move is structural, and it runs against one of the profession’s more durable bad habits. Law firms treat an occupied calendar as evidence of value. Sexton has been on the receiving end of it. At his second firm, a boss told him, in what was meant kindly, “We’re working to keep your day full.”

He understands the impulse. He is also unconvinced.

“I get that, and trust me I can fill up my day like no other,” he says. “But if there isn’t time to breathe, mistakes are made, anxiety sets in, and teams never bring lasting, meaningful change.”

So the outside help he brings in is not there to absorb the work. It is there to teach his team to do the work differently and free up what he calls think time. The current project is the pitch and proposal process, restructured so the team can ask why as often as it asks what, use technology to sharpen analysis and delivery, spot opportunities before they are handed over, and pull in the operational parts of the firm that usually sit outside a pitch.

Sexton has a precise test for whether a marketing team has actually crossed from service desk to advisory function, and it arrives by phone.

“You know you’ve arrived when an attorney calls, not with a specific task, although we are always happy to get those, but with this: I trust you and your perspective, and I wanted to pick your brain on XYZ. That is pure magic.”

He says it happens faster than people expect, if the groundwork is there. He also says the marketer can lose it in a single sentence.

“It is on the marketer to take that moment and run with it. If you fall back on, well, what do you want me to do, you lose them.”

The correct response, in his view, is to ask for a little room. Let me think about this and do some research and come back to you with ideas. “Immediacy is not effectiveness,” he says, then immediately closes the loophole: “But make darn sure you DO get back to them with your best thinking in a collaborative fashion.”

He has a practical bias about where these conversations should happen. In person or on the phone, not email. Email turns a brainstorm into a task list, and a half-formed idea into what reads like direction.

And when a member of his team steps out and proposes something unprompted to an attorney, he makes sure the room hears about it. “That public reinforcement, say, at a team meeting, goes a long way toward demonstrating as a leader that you value proactivity from your team.”

Act IV

Writing like a journalist, with the willing

One of the things Sexton pushes attorneys toward is a journalist’s discipline. Most important thing first. Netted out. None of the fog that legal writing produces by default.

He is realistic about how you get a partner to do that, and the answer is not persuasion at scale.

“You work with the willing,” he says. “I think it’s a mistake when marketers and business developers in this industry take a command and control approach. Attorneys are too autonomous and accomplished to accept a one size fits all response.”

What he does not do is abandon the expertise. Marketers know what lands with an outside audience. The job is to hold that knowledge confidently and deliver it as teaching rather than instruction, through lunch and learns, dashboards, internal newsletters, the ordinary machinery of showing people why something works.

Then you find the early adopters. In 2026 they announce themselves: the attorney who has noticed their content appearing or not appearing in AI search results and wants to know why. Pilot the new structure with that person, measure it, take the results back to them, and celebrate the win in public.

“That will inspire others to want what they’re having,” he says.

It is a strategy built on the same premise as everything else he does, which is that you cannot mandate a culture change in a partnership. You can only make the new way visibly better and let people choose it.

Running the Legal Marketing Association put roughly four thousand members, an international board, regional structures, city steering committees, cross-cutting functional committees and an association management staff on top of a full-time job.

“It’s a full time job on top of a full time job,” he says. “One could collapse under the pressure.”

What he saw from that vantage point was not primarily operational. It was what members were carrying.

“You find that your fellow members project a lot of hopes and dreams on you to help them be more seen, more appreciated, more understood.”

He also saw the limit of best practice as a genre. The same patterns repeat across firms, and yet each firm has a particular mix of personalities and history that can make the advice from an annual conference impossible to implement on Monday.

“It’s easy to say, we ALL should be doing XYZ,” he says, “but that’s not always practical nor fair to the human beings actually doing the work.” So a large part of the role became telling members they had grace to do the best they could inside the employer they actually had.

His summary of the experience is unsentimental. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life, and I’m very grateful for the empathy and resilience it taught me.”

Act VI

What the profession got right

Ask Sexton what has genuinely changed and he pushes back on the premise of the question, which is that not much has.

“I don’t think we give this industry nearly enough credit for how quickly it has evolved.”

In fifteen years he has watched firms move from direct mail and heavy print, from sponsorships bought for the sake of having sponsored something, and from relationship cultivation built on gifts, football tickets and golf, to content strategy, digital and social channels, education that carries actual value, and data used to identify and pursue prospects on purpose. Attorneys, generationally, now treat business development as part of the job rather than something to get to later.

What has stubbornly not changed is a translation problem, and his read on it is generous in a way that is worth sitting with. Attorneys often think they are being helpful by handing marketers a task. Marketing vocabulary is foreign to everyone who is not in marketing. So the marketer hears an order and quietly resents it, when what happened is that the attorney reached out in the only register available to them.

“It’s on us to pivot and ask the question behind the question and become truly trusted advisors,” he says, then lands the joke that is also the diagnosis. “Marketers are notoriously bad at marketing themselves.”

Voices in this story

The people who know him

Five colleagues contributed to this story. What is striking is how little they talk about campaigns.

“What sets him apart has never been the title, though the titles are impressive. It's the way he shows up. Smart enough to rebuild a firm's brand. Sassy enough to make you laugh while he does it. Kind in a way that leaves everyone in the room feeling a little more seen than when they walked in.”

Her closing line is the one that will follow him around: “To know Roy is to leave a little braver, a little funnier, and a lot more yourself.”

Iris Jones

Chief Marketing and Client Development Officer, Akerman

LMA Hall of Fame

LinkedIn

“He shines his light on the people around him, and opens doors for those not yet in the room. He has built an incredible platform, and is not afraid to use it to amplify the voices of others.”

She names his opening ceremony at the LMA conference in Florida as the proof, a leader using a stage to lift up voices that do not usually get one.

Diana Lauritson Story coming

Associate Director of Business Development, Baker McKenzie

Served with him on the LMA board

LinkedIn

“He raises the bar for our industry consistently and his leadership style is infectious. His teams and colleagues would follow him into fire because he makes everyone around him feel heard and seen.”

Jenna Schiappacasse Story coming

Managing Director, Business Development and Marketing, Winston Taylor

Co-chair, 2026 LMA Annual Conference

LinkedIn

“Roy brings his whole self to leadership. He brings an incredible amount of energy, personality, expertise and intelligence to any role, while never losing sight of the people he is there to serve. He listens deeply and has the ability to make LMA members and our leaders feel valued and connected. That combination of being exceptionally smart and capable while also being so human is what makes Roy such a memorable and impactful leader.”

Ashley Stenger

Chief Executive Officer, Legal Marketing Association

Worked closely with Roy during his LMA presidency

LinkedIn

“Roy is a force for good. He’s the type of champion everyone should be so lucky to have in their corner. He elevates and empowers with authenticity and an uncanny ability to see strength in others that they may not see in themselves.”

Justin Portaz

Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer, Saul Ewing

Named by Roy as a dear friend

LinkedIn

Nobody mentions a rebrand. That is the tell.

Act VIII

The advice, and the ask

For the person ten years into legal marketing who has started to wonder whether this is a career or a holding pattern, Sexton has a diagnostic and a prescription.

The diagnostic is simple. “If you are no longer learning and growing, assess the role and see what you can do to expand your reach.”

The prescription is community, with a caveat about how to use it. He is emphatic that he does not measure himself against the person next to him. “I’m NEVER one to look to the left, look to the right, and gauge my success by what others are doing. I’m pretty ornery that way.” What a community of people at different career stages gave him was not a benchmark. It was a mirror for figuring out what he needed at a given moment to stay engaged.

Then the concrete instruction: “Put together your personal board of directors. People you admire and trust, people you can lean on in those tough moments, people who see your potential and can help nudge you along.”

And for the firm leader reading this, the ask is direct, and it is the only place in the conversation where he gets sharp.

“We are here to bring growth. Revenue, market share, talent acquisition, attorney skills, culture change. That’s what motivates nearly every marketer I know. If you are treating marketing like your internal Kinko’s, sorry to be flippant, you are not getting the return on your investment.”

He grants the difficulty. Understanding what drives the people on a marketing and business development team is more work upfront than saying please go make this look pretty. He says he gets it. He really does.

“But if you take that approach, you are limiting all of the potential for engagement and expansion that drives a true performance culture.”

Then the shortest sentence he offers all conversation, which is also the whole argument compressed:

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