Syndia Torres, officially the Director of Reprints & Permissions at ALM Research, is looking for a more descriptive title for what her department does. Yes, reprints – as most traditionally think of them – are a significant part of the overall scheme, but the products and services of the group are much more diverse. Over the years the group has expanded to offer digital rights, plaques, and promotional items. Most recently, the group is expanding to offer promotional brochures and books based on compilations of ALM articles, news items, and features about the client. In other words, not just a reprint, but a custom-published book, which can then be used for marketing or commemorative purposes. Under Syndia’s leadership, the reprint department has grown and evolved so rather than “reprints and permissions”, she offers that “custom marketing services” may be a more accurate title and description of her department.

Keeping up with how clients market their firms through the web and e-mail is critical to the growth of the department. Most firms these days want to use reprints in electronic formats – to upload articles written by, or about, their lawyers onto their Web sites, and to post news items such as “Big Deals” and “Big Suits” items that feature their firms. Syndia offers another example: a recruiting director wanted to include, in a follow-up email to students interviewed at a law school recruiting fair, PDFs of some of those articles and news items.

In order to use these electronic methods of distributing “reprints” – web site postings, e-mailings, inclusion in an electronic newsletter -- the firm needs to secure the electronic license to do so. One of Syndia’s responsibilities involves overseeing the appropriate rights to allow clients to use all this publicity for marketing. In fact, this is one aspect of her job that calls for both creativity and a close working relationship with the ALM’s legal division. “If someone wanted to put ALM content in a custom-published book, or on their Web site, or even in a movie – or on a space shuttle and shoot it to the moon,” she says, “they would need our permission.” “We work to make sure it’s done properly, in line with ALM branding goals.” To speed routine requests along, several years ago the department implemented an on-line tool for clearing permissions.

Syndia Torres seemed destined to work in the legal industry. From an early age, she says, she wanted to be a lawyer, and majored in history and political science in college with that goal in mind. Her first job was as a paralegal – and that’s when she realized she liked the business of law more than the idea of actually practicing law herself. She began some marketing initiatives for the firm, some cross-selling between the two major practice areas. But it being a small firm, Syndia says, “They weren’t quite ready to market.” In 1998, a friend – knowing of her love for the legal industry -- referred her to a position in advertising at New York Law Journal, and within months she was “selling into the title” and enjoying her early success.

Her next position within ALM Media was with the newly-formed diversity publishing group, which Syndia saw as an “opportunity to build something from nothing.” Her background was entirely appropriate for this new division. As a child, Syndia had spoken Spanish at home, and she and her father learned English together. In her first job, the firm she worked for was a “small Latino firm,” and some of her work involved translating documents and letters submitted to the government of Puerto Rico.

But it was within the new diversity publishing group that Syndia got her first real taste of business development: “It was like electricity being discovered, by accident! And once they discovered electricity, it was just a matter of figuring out how to use it.”

This was 1999. Syndia had received many requests by firms wanting to obtain reprints from articles appearing in one of the diversity publications, to include it in their advertising, marketing, or recruitment materials – just as they had done with other publications. “Electricity” hit, and she realized that ALM needed to be doing exactly that. “And once we discovered this electricity, we discovered we needed to power all the ALM titles with it,” she says. “The first step was establishing a reprint policy to determine how we were going to let people use our reprints.”

In 2000, Syndia became head of the new Reprints division. Another responsibility that became hers through a process of electricity was overseeing the production of individual firm reports, based on their results in the annual Associate Surveys conducted by The American Lawyer. The results – based on a survey of about 75 questions – can’t all be published each year, and serve mainly as the basis of reporting about the state of associates’ lives at the firms. But firms wanted more. “They wanted to know what their strengths and weaknesses were and have someone analyze it all. They said it would be helpful to have someone from the outside looking in.” And so a new product was devised to respond to this demand.

Since the inception of the associate surveys law firm report product in 2000, sales of the reports have grown considerably, with “repeat business” growing each year. These are not “marketing” products in the same way as reprints. They contain information that helps law firm recruiting departments make assessments and decisions. “We only reach out to recruitment directors themselves, who understand what kinds of information can be presented in the report, and how the survey is conducted. The finished report now includes, in addition to a narrative report and the firm’s results for each question and results for each participating office, the related charts and stories that appear in the magazine, a copy of the blank questionnaire and the methodology, and the firm’s summarized results as they appear online.” (For a sample, you can email Syndia at storres@alm.com.)

A new, related effort is an expanded report covering a firm’s past performance in the survey. The idea originated in the realization that some firms were developing systems to archive their own Associate Survey data from year-to-year, in order to be able to understand the trends. The prototype “Benchmarking Report” received very positive feedback at this year’s NALP conference.

In the midst of all these initiatives, Syndia went back to school, starting an MBA program at Pace University in New York City in January 2004, and finishing it in December 2005. “It was what I needed at the right time,” Syndia says. “I had big shoes to fill. My background was in sales, and I could sell and market. But school helped me understand the processes behind it all – the logistics, the ROI, the forecasting. School helped me understand the bigger picture. Sales have increased, and not because we have been selling more, but because we are more carefully assessing the marketplace, and investing in the projects that best serve our clients.”

Asked what she liked most about her job, Syndia immediately responded, “There’s never a dull moment!” “Really,” she added, “there are always new opportunities. The company keeps producing new content – and these are award-winning publications, the pulse of the marketplace.” She also “truly enjoys working an eclectic group of talented professionals from different disciplines.”

You can catch up with this busy woman at one of the many conferences she attends on behalf of ALM each year, and where she “has the chance to meet the clients we’ve worked with over the phone. We’re fortunate to have that one-on-one contact, because it’s not like that in every industry,” she says. Syndia attends the annual NALP conference, the LMA conference (she is on the board), Legal Tech, the Folio show, and several of the ALM Events seminars and conferences. If you see her there, be sure to tell her you read about her here. She will be very pleased to hear it.