Thriving on Variation

Kristie Scott is the rare inside counsel who stuck with the enterprise through multiple mergers and acquisitions. But rounding up legal talent in their now global company came naturally to her.

By Russ Klettke

ONCE UPON A TIME, DAILY NEWSPAPERS WERE delivered to our doorsteps, television had a news hour, and phones were just for making phone calls. The rapid convergence of all these media—their content indistinctly presented onto a wide range of digital devices—has happened over barely a generation. Along with uncountable conveniences to media consumers have come commensurate disruptions to the businesses that create it.

The public relations and marketing industries are among those businesses, having become blended, differently monetized, neatly seamless, and increasingly accountable. One person who has intimate knowledge of that is Kristie Scott. An attorney who began her career in technology, Scott is the rare leader who has largely stuck with one media services company as it rode this wave of change—even as it went public, was acquired by a private company, then went public again, and has been on a significant program of mergers and acquisitions ever since.

“The companies in PR and marketing feed off each other,” she says, referring to the evolution and convergence of “earned media” (some call it publicity), public relations, corporate communications, and marketing. Cision, the company where Scott serves as general counsel, is a leading global provider of earned media

Kristie Scott General Counsel Cision

software and services to public relations and marketing communications professionals. Cision’s software allows users to identify key influencers, craft and distribute strategic content, and measure meaningful impact. In the company’s portfolio of services are its PR Newswire division (press release distribution), media monitoring, database management, and analytics that assess value and provide strategic insights.

Cision operates on a global scale with more than 4,500 employees in 22 countries. Founded in Sweden, the company is now headquartered in Chicago. But Scott works from a company office in Beltsville, Maryland—somewhat an indicator of how this company has evolved over time as well as the global and virtual nature of what it does. The graduate of the University of Baltimore School of Law has always been based here, although her current staff of eight attorneys, plus paralegals and contracts administrators, is distributed around the globe.

That said, it is important to note that originally, Scott was working with a company as a computer programmer/analyst with a computer science and engineering degree from Bucknell University. “I went to law school at night,” she explains. “It took four years. I always had the support of the company general counsel, who mentored me along the way.” She adds that with her law degree, she became part of that company’s legal team. By the mid2000s, she was named associate general counsel for Vocus, which was subsequently acquired by a private equity firm and merged with Vocus’s competitor, Cision, in 2014, at which time she was promoted to the GC position.

In case that sounds like a lot of change, well, it was—and still is.