At Pryor Cashman, a full-service award-winning legal practice with approximately 200 attorneys in NYC, Miami, and LA, Mike Mellor serves as the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer. He enjoys making connections between those with the potential to help them and those that want to be exceptional.
Mike has more than 20 years of experience in professional services marketing, the last 12 of which he spent in a legal company. He began his career in the marketing of financial services, then transitioned to Big Four consultative marketing at KPMG before moving into the legal field. Before joining Pryor Cashman, where he has worked as CMBDO for the past seven years, he practiced law at two other law firms.
Below are highlights of the interview conducted between World’s Leaders and Mike Mellor:
Describe who you are as a person, inside and outside of the workplace.
I am committed, passionate, and genuine in all facets of my life, and I like to attack life with enthusiasm, humor, and joy. Inside the workplace, I am focused on building a business development culture that is collaborative and uses technology to automate as many mundane tasks as possible; like most law firms, we continue to find it challenging to create and deploy a single version of the truth. Outside of the workplace, I love live music, watching football, traveling, and exploring different cultures. I love making people smile.
Tell us about the inception of the company. How did it all start?
The firm started in 1963 as a powerhouse music/media/IP/litigation boutique, and we have grown to be a true full-service midsize firm with over 200 attorneys in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. In fact, one of our founding fathers, Gideon Cashman, still comes into the office regularly, walking about a mile each way. Serving as the firm’s General Counsel, Gideon is brilliant and serves as an inspiration to all of us (especially the litigators, who seek his wisdom to help with thorny issues). We continue to evolve alongside our clients to stay ahead of the curve with both transactional and litigation matters, and our firm size enables us to adapt quickly to changing market conditions. This was a key to our success during COVID.
What has made you successful? What do you value?
Personally, I think my drive is what has made me the most successful—I am wholly committed to driving revenue in any way possible to improve the firm’s financial position—and this can take many forms! It starts with being passionate enough to constantly be a student of the firm, the practices, and the industries. It’s a lot to drink in, but I find myself constantly Googling acronyms, industry developments, and reading other firms’ client alerts a few hours a day. Being informed is the only way to continuously add value in such a wide-ranging and dynamic field.
Which are the major services of the company and how do the company to get ahead in the competition? What value-added services does the company provide?
It really is a full-service firm—we protect our clients’ interests in everything from forming, funding, and buying or divesting assets on the corporate side to partnership, royalty and other litigation issues. Of course, we augment these pillars with services related to labor, immigration, intellectual property, real estate, tax, trusts and estates, family and matrimonial issues, and insurance reviews. We work in a number of industries and work with everyone from entrepreneurs to high net worth celebrities and athletes to Fortune 500 behemoths and small startups. Every day is something new and exciting because of our midsize advantage, because the platform the firm is built on allows us to deploy our abilities in a lot of contexts.
What are the most important aspects of a company’s culture? What principles do you believe in and how do you build this culture?
It sounds simple, but in many companies and firms it isn’t so easy: Don’t be a jerk. That mantra has served Pryor Cashman very well over the past 60 years! While we want our attorneys to vigorously protect our clients’ interests in the boardroom and in the courtroom, being a good lawyer isn’t mutually exclusive from being a good person to be around. Because of our size, it’s a place where everyone knows each other quite well, and the message from the top has consistently been: Be nice to others, be collaborative, and punch above our weight to out-go toe to toe with larger firms. Bigger is not always better, especially in law firms!
What is the significance of innovative ideas in the company?
At Pryor Cashman, we create and demonstrate innovation in many ways, but most notably around the metaphorical water cooler and within informal subject-matter pods and settings. Our client bases share common interests, and it’s not uncommon to see lawyers from our fashion, music, and art groups come together around the latest market innovations. From unique strategic branding partnerships and royalty agreements to collaborations that can thrive in the new age of the metaverse and NFTs, we are constantly sifting through our best ideas to contextualize them in ways that serve a specific client’s needs. It’s all about creating those communication frameworks and letting our attorneys geek out together.
Give us your opinion on; do organizations rely heavily on individual heroics or team processes?
While the easy answer is collaboration, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the folks in our leadership who are driving the firm forward on a daily basis. It takes leaders to propel the agendas and the strategy, giving the group the motive, means, and opportunity to develop the execution for the clients. Positioning, thought leadership, and smart tactics to take market share from our competition are best developed in smaller rooms, with everyone pitching in to bring the project to a successful outcome. I feel that we balance the concepts of entrepreneurialism and collaboration very well at Pryor Cashman.
What are your responsibilities as the CMBDO of the company? What is the happiest part of your daily routine?
The things I enjoy most are helping people achieve their business goals. Whether that’s long-range planning, brainstorming new ways to reach their ideal clients, or helping to hold them accountable to task, I enjoy watching the firm’s attorneys grow, spread the word about our offering, and become power users of our marketing and BD resources. As they say in legal, the best compliment you can get is more work. The happiest part of my routine is getting awesome emails about my marketing colleagues who have helped to drive business, gain market or mind share, or do things to spread our message and elevate our brand. I keep them all in a folder to cheer me up on rainy days!
What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time?
Read everything you can, try to be a servant-leader, and encourage your teams to challenge you. Just because I’m the head of the group doesn’t mean I know everything; in fact, I try to empower my teammates who are in the daily grind to constantly improve our processes and procedures. We write our processes in pencil, and the joy of working together is knowing there’s always an interesting new problem to solve.
