Recognizing the Phenomenal

When CLM Magazine’s editorial team sat down in early 2022 to discuss a new recognition program for our young professionals under 40, we began by defining the questions we wanted answered in order to attract quality submissions: What kinds of accomplishments have they achieved? How have they separated themselves from others in their firms or companies? What kinds of innovations have they been responsible for? In other words, we weren’t just looking for professionals who were good at their jobs, a baseline we assumed would come through for all of our nominees. What we wanted was to ensure each winner properly captured the definition of a phenom: a person who is outstandingly talented or admired, especially an up-and-comer.

While we were certain those folks were within our ranks, what we didn’t expect was the full-throated efforts by our membership to deliver nominations. We heard anecdotally how firms and companies convened panels of senior leaders to conduct their own internal vetting processes to select a nominee they felt was most deserving. It resulted in nearly 100 quality submissions, all of which made convincing and compelling cases for recognizing their nominees.

We were impressed, humbled, and, frankly, daunted by the process of narrowing down the list to just 10 professionals. An initial pass by our editorial team took the nominations down to 36, which was then distilled further to 17 finalists. From there, CLM’s senior leadership team debated and deliberated in order to select our top 10.

Click here to view the 2022 Phenoms Under 40.