When Tad Decker took over as the president and CEO of Cozen O’Connor in 2007, he took over two different law firms.
There was the Cozen O’Connor that had been a full-service law firm for more than a decade, offering services in a wide variety of legal fields. Then there was the Cozen O’Connor of public perception — a litigation firm specializing in the insurance business.
“That was the biggest challenge I had upon my return,” says Decker, now in his second stint with the firm. “As an entity, the perception wasn’t meeting the reality of what the firm had become. We have been a full-service firm for at least 14 years, but people still sort of thought of us as a litigation firm within the insurance business. So the biggest challenge was to get clients, other lawyers who could be potential lateral recruits as well as the general public to understand that we are a full-service firm.”
A recent acquisition helped increase the breadth of Cozen O’Connor’s legal services, helping to drive the firm’s image as a full-service entity. But most of the task still fell on the shoulders of Decker and other high-ranking officials within the firm. He attacked the issue through communication, using an ongoing dialogue to focus the firm’s more than 1,100 employees on a uniform vision for the company, so that every employee would feel empowered to promote Cozen O’Connor’s entire package of legal services to current and potential clients and potential recruits from law schools and other firms.
“What I did was take charge of the process and make sure that we had input from everyone, that we had agreement moving forward as to the plan and as to some of the interim goals we were trying to achieve,” Decker says.