Mark Masson, Partner

Mark is a Partner and Head of Professional Services Practice, serving primarily AmLaw 100, Top 75 Accounting, and Major Specialty Consulting Firms. He has advised Senior Leadership Teams and Boards on critical firm issues including growth strategy, firm design, and partner compensation for over 15 years. Mark brings sophisticated data science and behavioral science to his work, delivering unique advanced insight and certainty to change efforts in the complex partnership environment.

Having a young son and twin girls have truly painted the world a different color for me. There is a thrill of discovering with them and a need to constantly prioritize and focus my time. When I get it right, I am a much better husband and father than I otherwise would be. The experience underscores for me the importance of balancing discovery and focus for the organizations and leaders with whom I work.

Experience

Prior to joining Axiom Consulting Partners, Mark spent five years at Merck & Co. where he led R&D and manufacturing plant teams on new drug discovery and manufacturing scale-up for a range of pharmaceutical classes.

Some of Mark’s experience highlights include:

• Data and Decision Analytics – led predictive analytics approach to develop client growth strategies for AmLaw 20 firm and designed implementation plan for educating key Partners and Leaders to take recommended actions leading to tens of millions in profitable growth.
• Firm and Client Growth Strategy – developed strategy and implementation plan for one of the world’s largest law firms, leveraging the firm’s core strengths, potential combinations, shifting market landscape, and technology disruption.
• Firm Design and Transformation – designed firm transformation agenda identifying the most critical operational, growth, client delivery, and people capabilities, assessing gaps against future needs and building a multi-year transformation agenda minimizing impact on leadership and partner production hours.
• Firm Design and Transformation – led Board review of firm governance for a major professional services firm, recommending critical changes in the leadership architecture and Board election process, including preparation of the Partnership for a vote to modify the Partnership Agreement.
• Partner Performance and Compensation – redesigned the partner performance and compensation system – including role and metric design, profit pool funding and distribution mechanics, and contribution assessment and income allocation decision process – for many small, medium, and large law, public accounting, and specialty consulting firms.

Mark earned his Master of Business Administration Degree from the J.L. Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University and his Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Chemical Engineer from The Pennsylvania State University.

Mark frequently writes and speaks on growth, execution, and technologies and tools that are revolutionizing firm management and leadership, with his work being published most recently in Accounting Today and The Legal Marketing Association publications. He is the author of The Lost Art of Governance, co-authored with Grant Thornton, and AI is the Future of Everything, Right? for Strategies – The Journal of Legal Marketing from the Legal Marketing Association (LMA). Additionally, Mark presented the groundbreaking work with DLA Piper – Harnessing Predictive Analytics to Drive Client Growth and Retention – at the LMA National Conference.