Our client is recruiting for a Senior Specialist, Marketing and Communications to join their Montreal office. This is a hybrid communications and marketing role with two distinct areas of responsibility: legal focus and practice area marketing and communications strategy and firm-wide market intelligence.
As a legal focus and practice area marketing and communications strategist, this role builds genuine relationships with practice and focus group leaders, lawyers and Business Development (BD) team members. By developing a deep understanding of the firm's legal services, clients, markets and strategic priorities, the role develops and delivers tailored communications and marketing strategies and content across all channels for assigned groups.
As the firm's subject matter expert in market intelligence, this role maximizes the reach, visibility and commercial return of the firm’s legal thought leadership across external intelligence and syndication networks (including Lexology and Mondaq). The role monitors the competitive legal landscape to identify market opportunities, optimizes content for AI-driven search engines (GEO/AEO) and turns reader engagement data into actionable intelligence that empowers BD teams to pursue warm client leads.
Additionally, this role serves as the team's bilingual lead for select Montreal-based marketing and communications initiatives, liaising with lawyers and internal clients in French and leading French-first content and event campaigns in alignment with the firm’s official linguistic standards.
This is a role for someone who builds real relationships, understands the business of law and brings both communications discipline and marketing rigour to every initiative, not because they're asked to, but because that's how they work. Success is measured through lead generation, brand awareness, thought leadership reach, competitive insights adoption and through the relationships built with lawyers and BD partners. You are proactive, detail-oriented and accountable. You bring energy and thrive in a dynamic, transparent environment where great work is recognized and ownership is real.
Summary of Key Responsibilities:
Practice and Focus Group: Strategy
Serve as the dedicated marketing and communications strategist to assigned practice and focus groups:
- Build and maintain deep working knowledge of assigned legal services, markets, client segments, competitive landscape and strategic priorities through active engagement with lawyers and BD team members
- Develop strong working relationships with lawyers and practice leaders, attending meetings, understanding business strategy and providing proactive communications and marketing counsel and identifying opportunities rather than waiting for requests
- Collaborate with aligned BD team members to receive business priorities, provide audience intelligence and channel performance data that informs targeting and positioning decisions, and align all marketing and communications activities with BD strategy
- Serve as a trusted advisor on integrated communications and marketing strategy – proactively identifying opportunities for campaigns, thought leadership and visibility for assigned groups
- Serve as the dedicated bilingual marketing contact for select Montreal-originating initiatives, consulting directly with Francophone lawyers and practice leaders in French to understand local market context and business objectives
- Apply competitive intelligence, AI tools and data-driven thinking to strengthen communications and marketing effectiveness for assigned groups.
Market Intelligence and Platform Strategy
For assigned practice and focus groups:
- Develop and execute thought leadership syndication strategies that amplify the visibility of assigned practice areas across external legal intelligence networks.
- Mine readership and company engagement data from syndication platforms to identify warm prospective clients, in-house counsel interest and cross-selling opportunities for assigned groups, handing these insights directly to BD partners.
- Monitor competitor positioning, publishing trends and active campaigns across assigned legal sectors to identify content "white space" and advise lawyers on proactive topic selection.
- Coordinate the intake, review and timely syndication of bilingual legal insights through established platform workflows.
Firm-wide channel leadership:
- Own and champion the firm’s firm-wide thought leadership syndication strategy, governing the distribution architecture and maximizing the commercial return on platforms such as Lexology and Mondaq.
- Develop, document and train the Marketing and Communications team on syndication best practices, tagging taxonomies and headline/abstract framing that maximizes readership and AI search visibility (GEO/AEO).
- Establish a systematic competitive intelligence routine: track Tier 1 and Tier 2 competitor publishing volume, themes and emerging focus areas; share actionable quarterly intelligence briefings with Senior Specialists and BD leads.
- Serve as the strategic bridge between external syndication platforms and internal BD teams, establishing regular processes to extract reader analytics, company domain visits and subscriber trends to support targeted business development outreach.
- Provide French-language editorial and syndication guidance to ensure Quebec legal insights are strategically targeted to French-language corporate and in-house counsel networks.
- Monitor emerging AI search engine behaviours (Generative Engine Optimization / Answer Engine Optimization), ensuring the firm’s syndicated articles and insights are structured to win authoritative citations in generative AI search environments (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot)
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Practice and Focus Group: Communications, Content Strategy and Campaign Development
- Design and execute integrated communications and marketing campaigns for assigned groups, covering strategy, messaging, channel selection, budget allocation and success metrics
- Lead the planning and execution of select French-first marketing and communications deliverables for the Montreal office, including French-language insight articles, client alerts and French-delivered webinars or regional events
- Draft, edit and review high-quality French- and English-language marketing copy across digital channels, news releases, thought leadership and web pages, ensuring all French materials adhere strictly to the firm’s French linguistic standards and style guidelines in coordination with the Linguistics team
- Manage event and webinar communications and promotion for assigned groups across national and regional markets
Practice and Focus Group & Market Intelligence Strategy: Performance Intelligence, Measurement and Collaboration
Analyze and apply campaign performance data to continuously improve strategy:
- Partner with Clients and Markets team to analyze campaign performance; provide BD team members with audience intelligence and campaign insights that inform business development strategy and targeting decisions
- Apply performance data to continuously improve strategy, audience targeting and campaign investment decisions; contribute to firm-wide analytics initiatives
- Document processes, track what works and share learnings with the team, contributing to a culture of continuous improvement and data-driven decision making
- Collaborate with Creative Services, Digital Marketing, Events, Internal Communications, Rankings and Awards and Linguistics teams to execute coordinated campaigns.
Key Competencies:
- Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Communications, Business, Analytics, Data Science or a related field
- 5+ years of progressive experience in corporate communications, legal marketing, or content syndication/distribution; demonstrated experience analyzing audience engagement data to identify commercial opportunities.
- Experience in professional services (legal, accounting, consulting) or a B2B corporate environment and experience working directly with practice group leaders and Business Development partners is preferred
- Demonstrated proficiency with digital publishing or content distribution platforms.
- Deep understanding of B2B thought leadership distribution and how legal content drives commercial engagement.
- Proven ability to extract and interpret audience readership data from syndication platforms and translate findings into clear BD leads.
- Familiarity with competitive intelligence methodologies (tracking market trends, monitoring competitor output, identifying content gaps).
- Understanding of SEO and emerging Generative Engine Optimization (GEO/AEO) principles for written insights.
- Superior writing, editing, and content packaging skills (headlines, executive summaries, metadata).
- Strong relationship-building skills with partners, lawyers, and cross-functional teams.
- Excellent project management skills and ability to manage recurring publishing workflows.
- Sound understanding of Canadian Press (CP) style and professional standards.
- Full professional bilingualism (English and French, written and spoken) required to liaise with French-speaking lawyers and draft/review French-first content.
- Proven ability to author polished business and legal copy in French that meets linguistic and editorial standards.
Preferred Job Specific Skills:
- Additional training or certifications in Competitive Intelligence (CI), SEO/GEO, or digital platform management.
- SEMRush or SEO certification; Google Analytics 4 certification; Generative AI / GEO search tool training.
- Hands-on experience managing enterprise accounts on Lexology and Mondaq.
- Familiarity with Quebec corporate/commercial legal sectors and regional business media.
- Hands-on experience collaborating with in-house translation or linguistics departments.
- Experience using CRM systems (Dynamics 365) and relationship intelligence tools (Introhive) to map syndicated readership to client accounts.
- Knowledge of AI discovery tools (Peek.AI, Perplexity, Copilot).
- Knowledge of Canadian legal industry practice areas, corporate structures, and competitive tiering.
