B-to-B Dream Team 2025: Meet Nefra MacDonald -

Event Marketer’s 2025 B-to-B Dream has been unveiled. Each month, we’re sitting down with one of our all-stars to talk trends, best practices and all things uniquely b-to-b.

Nefra MacDonald, Director-Strategic Engagement, Clio

The road to a career in events is rarely without its twists and turns, and Nefra MacDonald’s path was certainly rerouted a few times before she arrived in the industry—look no further than her law degree.

After studying broadcast journalism and political science as an undergrad, MacDonald went on to specialize in legal technology, rather than becoming a traditional lawyer, in grad school. But it wasn’t until taking on a role at her first legal-tech firm that she was officially bitten by the event bug. Following her participation in a company webinar, MacDonald was asked to start overseeing virtual events, followed by in-person trade shows and conferences. The event industry had emerged as a sweet spot that allowed her to incorporate all of the skills and training she had acquired over the years into a single position.

“Even law school prepared me for the world of events, because you have to be able to think on your feet, you have to wipe your brain of any preconceived notions,” MacDonald says. “Usually when you’re a lawyer, you prepare as best as you can for what you’re about to walk into, but you may get surprised. So you’re preparing to just have the room to be able to deal with the surprises—you have Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. And I think that really helped me a lot in getting into events.”

Now, as director of strategic engagement at legal software company Clio, MacDonald is part of a team that executes or exhibits at more than 80 annual events spanning trade shows, roadshows, customer events, virtual summits, hybrid experiences and a flagship user conference, ClioCon, that draws 5,000-plus in-person and virtual attendees. None of the events, however, is your garden variety legal affair. MacDonald and her team pride themselves on bucking the norms of traditional legal conferences and crafting compelling experiences that don’t feel like opening a dusty textbook.

Take ClioCon. From recruiting keynoters like Mel Robbins, to incorporating local flavor based on the event location, the team delivers a strong experiential twist on the standard legal forum. “It’s hands-down unlike any other, and this is coming from someone who has been to a ton of legal conferences over the last decade and still sponsors trade shows on behalf of our company,” she says.

MacDonald is just as passionate about differentiating Clio’s virtual event strategy. To recruit attendees whose time is literally money, she says, it’s imperative to communicate the value they’ll get out of the event ahead of time, and then to deliver on those objectives with a high-quality digital experience.

“We’re always talking about tangible takeaways,” she says. “You’re going to be able to walk away learning something new, implementing something with a new idea, a new approach on how to solve your law firm’s problems for law firm support staff, how they become better administrators, and how they get access to new training, new people, new resources to elevate themselves and their teams. So we’re constantly talking about value, value, value—if you spend time with us, here’s what you get.”

Fun Fact: At an internal meeting earlier this year, the event team was recognized by the larger Clio marketing department, which said the “experience piece is what makes us so unique.”

And one way to continue to provide that value to attendees is a willingness to experiment. MacDonald points to a 2024 virtual law summit hosted by Clio that had been struggling with attendance numbers because it was targeted to partners, the busiest members of a law firm. When marketers sat down to brainstorm solutions, it became apparent that partners weren’t actually the people utilizing legal software in most cases; it was law firm administrators.

So the event team shifted gears, teaming up with The Association for Legal Administrators to run a targeted, co-branded track at the virtual summit that was specifically designed for admins. The new approach led to more than double the event’s year-over-year registrations and earned Clio the highest satisfaction ratings of any webinar it had ever produced.

With plenty of event expertise now under her belt, MacDonald has developed her own client-facing playbook, but internal engagement is just as important to her as event marketers continue to be plagued by burnout.

“I’m doing skills-sharing when it comes to how to manage yourself and your energy, and to spot when you’re heading into burnout, or spot when you may be reacting to something in a non-helpful way. That if you’d have thought about it a little bit differently, it might actually lighten that emotional and energetic load,” she says. “Those are the things that I’m trying to cope the team through, so that they can play the long game. Because what makes good event marketers even greater is when they are operating from a place of clarity and not completely depleted and exhausted.”

Looking to the future, MacDonald hopes to see the kinds of immersive experiences that are typical of b-to-c entertainment events infiltrate the conference and trade show sector, and continue to break the boundaries between consumer and business event tactics.

“We’re dealing with such an interesting persona, and typically when you think of lawyers, you think of them as very buttoned-up, suit-and-tie kind of people. But we’re able to push that envelope a lot at ClioCon and have so much more fun with them, the things that we do, our afterparties and things like that,” MacDonald says. “And next year, this is something I’m determined to play with… an immersive experience for lawyers where they’re getting to experience our product, or their legal world, in a new way that draws some attention, gets them interested and makes something memorable, so that our brand sticks in their brain.”

Case closed.