Has Your Law Firm Got Too Many J-Curves?

Your law firm isn’t short of marketing ideas. A new website redesign. SEO “finally done properly,” and the emergence now of AEO. Google Ads to generate immediate leads. Content marketing and blogging. LinkedIn presence. Video marketing. Email campaigns. A rebrand. Client portals. Podcasting. AI chatbots. Social media consistency. And on it goes.

Yet many Australian law firms experience a frustrating pattern: lots of activity, minimal results. You’re investing in marketing, attending the pitches, approving the budgets, launching the initiatives—but nothing seems to gain real traction. The enquiry numbers don’t shift meaningfully. The brand doesn’t break through. Partners remain skeptical.

The reason is rarely that the marketing ideas themselves are bad. The problem is simpler and more insidious: your firm is running too many marketing initiatives at once, each with its own J-curve—the predictable dip in performance that occurs before any marketing change produces benefits.

In isolation, a J-curve is survivable, even healthy. But when law firms stack multiple marketing J-curves on top of each other, the organisation gets trapped in the “down” part of every curve—permanently busy, permanently mid-launch, and permanently disappointed with marketing ROI.

At Practice Proof, whilst we don’t see it frequently, approximately 3 out of 10 law firms we work with are kids in the candy shop. In this this article I’ll explain how “too many marketing ideas” becomes “nothing works,” why law firms are uniquely vulnerable to initiative overload, and what practical steps help ensure your marketing investments actually deliver results.

The Marketing J-Curve Isn’t a Metaphor—It’s Reality

A J-curve describes a pattern where results decline initially after a change, then recover and improve once new systems are embedded and optimised. The concept is widely used in organisational change management, but it applies perfectly to marketing: learning curves, initial inefficiencies, audience confusion, and workflow friction create a temporary performance trough before benefits appear. (GetNave)

In marketing specifically, every new initiative creates its own J-curve dip:

SEO takes at minimum 6-18 months to show results (AEO anyones guess). Initially, your investment produces nothing visible while technical fixes are implemented, content is created, and Google’s algorithm gradually recognises your improved relevance. Enquiry numbers don’t rise immediately—they may even plateau as you redirect time away from other activities.

Google Ads require testing and optimisation. Your first campaigns will waste budget on poor-performing keywords, weak ad copy, and unconverted clicks. Performance improves only after you’ve gathered data, refined targeting, and learned what messaging resonates with your ideal clients.

Content marketing demands consistency before impact. Publishing three blog posts won’t move the needle. You need months of regular, high-quality content before search engines reward you with visibility and prospects begin to recognise your expertise and you now need to augment that content with podcasts, video and coded integrations.

Video marketing has production learning curves. Your first videos will be awkward, your messaging unclear, your production values amateur. Quality and confidence improve with repetition—but that takes time and persistence through the discomfort.

Brand repositioning confuses before it clarifies. When you change your messaging or visual identity, existing clients may be confused, prospects may not immediately “get it,” and internal teams struggle with new language. The payoff arrives only after sustained, consistent application of the new brand across all touchpoints.

None of this proves these initiatives are wrong. It proves you’re in the dip. The J-curve is not a sign of failure—it’s the natural trajectory of meaningful change. (David J. Anderson School of Management)

Why “Too Many Marketing Initiatives” Becomes “Nothing Sticks”

When law firms stack multiple marketing initiatives, each with its own J-curve, the dips interact and compound:

• Training and capacity compete. Your marketing coordinator trying to superficially learn SEO best practices to keep the agency on-target, get across the constant changes deployed by Google Ads, write compelling blog content, produce video scripts for your talent, and maintain social media all at once. Each initiative demands attention and skill development, fragmenting focus and reducing quality across the board.
• Budget gets thinly spread. Instead of fully funding three initiatives to success, you partially fund seven—none receiving sufficient investment to break through the initial dip and reach sustainable results.
• Partners lose confidence during the trough. When they see investment with no immediate return across multiple channels, skepticism compounds. “We’re spending money on marketing and nothing’s working” becomes the narrative—even though you’re simply experiencing the predictable early-stage dips. Not to mention, no idea of what marketing channel is actually driving file opens. So, you just keep on keeping on blowing cash.
• Initiatives get abandoned before results. Because everything seems to plateau simultaneously, the firm loses faith and pivots to the next “solution” before any single approach reaches the upward swing of its J-curve. This pattern of starting-then-abandoning is remarkably common in law firm marketing.

Research on organisational change shows that employees are experiencing 10-13 organisation-wide changes per year compared to just two in 2016, and their willingness to support change has dropped from 74% to 38%. (AllWork.Space) This “change fatigue” isn’t just about employee frustration—it directly impacts adoption, productivity, and ROI.

The same dynamic applies to law firm marketing teams. When you overload them with simultaneous initiatives, even well-designed strategies fail because organisational capacity—not budget or strategy—becomes the constraint.

Your firm ends up here:

• Plenty of marketing tools and platforms
• Plenty of agency dashboards
• Plenty of monthly reports
• Very little actual traction
• Very few compounding results

Marketing becomes a carousel of half-finished work. This is precisely why most law firm marketing strategies fail—not because the strategy is wrong, but because execution is fragmented across too many fronts.

Law Firms Are Structurally Prone to Stacked J-Curves

Most businesses dislike disruption. Law firms—particularly in Australia’s competitive legal market—have specific vulnerabilities that make initiative overload especially damaging:

Billable hour culture penalises the dip. During the J-curve trough, marketing activities take longer to produce results. Partners see investment without return, and pressure mounts to “prove ROI” before initiatives have matured. This creates premature abandonment—right before results would have appeared.

Partnership governance creates parallel priorities. Different practice groups experience different business development pains, so they pursue different marketing fixes. Without portfolio discipline, the firm unintentionally runs multiple campaigns at once—family law wants video, commercial wants LinkedIn, property wants Google Ads. Each worthy in isolation, collectively overwhelming.

Risk aversion amplifies early discomfort. Lawyers are trained to identify risk and exceptions. Early-stage marketing rollouts are full of imperfections—rough videos, imperfect blog posts, ads that don’t immediately convert. This discomfort triggers skepticism precisely when persistence is required. Consistency, not perfection, drives marketing results—but law firms often struggle with this truth.

Small teams, big expectations. Many law firms have lean marketing teams—often just one or two people—yet expect results across SEO, content, paid advertising, social media, email, events, and more. This structural mismatch between capacity and expectations guarantees initiative overload.

Geographic market dynamics. Australian legal markets are competitive and geographically concentrated. Firms in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and in fast-growth regional locations face intense competition for visibility, making the early J-curve dip particularly painful when competitors appear more visible. The temptation is to add more tactics rather than persist with current initiatives.

These factors combine to create an environment where law firms are perfectly positioned to experience every downside of the J-curve—and few of the upsides. This is why law firms fail at consistent marketing execution: they lack the discipline to see initiatives through their natural performance curves.

The “Innovation Illusion” in Law Firm Marketing: The Plant Problem

If initiative overload is so painful, why do firms keep doing it?

Part of the answer lies in team dynamics—specifically, the composition of your firm’s leadership. Many managing partners and senior leaders naturally gravitate toward idea generation. In Belbin Team Role terminology, they’re “Plants”: creative thinkers who excel at generating innovative solutions to complex problems but struggle with implementation and follow-through.

Belbin Team Roles identify nine distinct behavioural tendencies that contribute to team effectiveness. The Plant role is characterised by creativity, imagination, and unorthodox thinking—valuable traits for strategy and vision. But Plants also tend to be poor communicators of implementation details, easily distracted by the next big idea, and more interested in solving new problems than finishing existing projects.

In law firm marketing, the Plant dynamic manifests as:

A managing partner attends a legal conference and returns energised: “We need to be doing video content like that Melbourne firm!” Three months later, after two awkward videos that nobody watched, enthusiasm wanes. The same partner attends another conference: “Forget video—everyone’s using AI chatbots now. We need that!”

Meanwhile, your marketing coordinator is still trying to finish the website redesign from six months ago, maintain the SEO strategy from last year, and keep the Google Ads campaign running—all while being told video is now the priority, except actually it’s chatbots, but don’t forget LinkedIn posting is still important.

This isn’t malicious. Plant-type leaders genuinely believe each new idea will solve the firm’s marketing challenges. But without complementary team roles—Implementers who create practical solutions, Completer Finishers who push projects across the line, and Coordinators who maintain focus on objectives—ideas accumulate faster than execution capacity.

How Belbin Team Roles can help law firms get unstuck is by creating awareness of these dynamics and building deliberate counterbalances. The solution isn’t to stop generating ideas—it’s to pair idea generation with execution discipline.

Other common patterns that perpetuate the cycle:

1. Starting feels productive. Launching a new website is exciting and visible. Optimising it over 12 months is boring and incremental. Kickoff meetings feel like progress; measurement reviews do not.

2. Benefits are delayed and hard to attribute. Marketing results are lagged and indirect. A prospect might read your blog post in March, attend your webinar in May, and enquire in July—but the firm only “sees” the July enquiry. The earlier touchpoints that created trust remain invisible, making it hard to defend ongoing investment in content or SEO.

3. Firms confuse “launch” with “results.” Installing a new website isn’t the same as converting traffic. Starting a LinkedIn presence isn’t the same as generating enquiries. The J-curve reminds us that a dip is expected and needs active management—not abandonment. (Michael Papanek)

4. Political economy favours additions over subtraction. It’s easier for a partner to approve a new marketing initiative than to stop someone else’s initiative. Yet overload is exactly what causes under-delivery. Your firm needs fewer, better-resourced initiatives—not more under-funded experiments.

5. Agency switching becomes the escape valve. When nothing seems to work, firms blame the agency and switch providers. Switching marketing agencies can sometimes be necessary—but if you don’t change how many initiatives you’re running simultaneously, you’ll experience the same disappointing results with the new agency.

What Stacked Marketing J-Curves Look Like in Practice

In Australian law firms, initiative overload manifests as:

• Multiple pilots with no path to scale. You’ve “tried” SEO, video, LinkedIn, email campaigns—but none reached full implementation because attention shifted to the next idea.
• Marketing coordinator burnout. Your marketing team is stretched impossibly thin, managing too many platforms, reporting to too many partners, producing mediocre output across all channels because there’s no capacity for excellence anywhere.
• Partners defaulting to referrals. When marketing produces no visible results, partners revert to what they know: personal referrals and traditional networks. Marketing budgets get questioned, not expanded.
• “We tried that already” cynicism. Even when you re-approach a previously attempted initiative (like blogging or video), internal skepticism kills it before launch because the firm never truly finished it the first time.
• Initiative goals drifting. Original objectives (e.g., “generate 20 family law leads per month via Google Ads”) quietly become vague (“just maintain visibility”) as results disappoint.
• The “shiny object” cycle. Leadership continuously gravitates toward whatever marketing trend is currently being discussed at conferences or in legal publications, abandoning perfectly viable strategies mid-execution.

Research shows that 48% of employees experiencing change fatigue report feeling more tired and stressed at work, with basic operational performance suffering as attention fragments across too many priorities. (The Change Compass)

The tragic reality is that firms conclude “marketing doesn’t work for law firms,” when the real conclusion should be: portfolio discipline was missing. This is one of the most common reasons law firm marketing fails: too many simultaneous efforts, none properly resourced.

The Fix: Treat Marketing Like a Portfolio, Not a Wish List

If the problem is stacked J-curves, the solution isn’t “stop marketing.” It’s sequence, resource, and finish.

Here are the moves that reliably reduce initiative overload in Australian law firms:

1. Establish a Hard Limit on Active Marketing Initiatives

Borrow from operations management: implement Work In Progress (WIP) limits. Your firm should cap how many “active marketing initiatives” can run simultaneously—typically 3-5 maximum for small-to-mid-sized firms.

Everything else sits in a backlog.

Example: A 15-lawyer suburban Sydney firm might commit to:

• SEO and content marketing (foundational, ongoing)
• Google Ads for conveyancing (immediate lead generation)
• Video series on estate planning (brand building, specific practice area)

That’s it. LinkedIn posting, email campaigns, podcast production, website redesign—all worthy, all backlogged until one of the active initiatives completes or transitions to “business as usual.”

This aligns with research showing that initiative overload slows execution and obscures priorities. Focusing on fewer projects improves throughput. (Center for Creative Leadership)

Rule of thumb: If you can’t name what your firm is not doing this quarter, you don’t have a marketing strategy—you have an overwhelming to-do list.

2. “One In, One Out” Governance

Before approving a new marketing initiative, require one of the following:

• An existing initiative is completed and transitioned to operations
• An existing initiative is paused or killed
• The new initiative is legally required (e.g., compliance-related website updates) and displaces something else

This is politically difficult—especially in partnership structures where different partners champion different ideas. But the alternative is a firm permanently stuck in the dip, achieving nothing.

For Plant-type leaders: Channel your creative energy into the backlog, not active projects. Document every brilliant idea—but resist the urge to immediately launch it. Your role is to generate possibilities; execution discipline requires different skills. Build a balanced leadership team that includes strong Implementers and Completer Finishers who can say “not yet” to good ideas when capacity doesn’t exist.

3. Define “Done” as Results, Not Activity

For marketing initiatives, don’t celebrate the launch. Celebrate measurable outcomes:

• SEO: First-page Google rankings for 10 target keywords + 50% increase in organic enquiries
• Google Ads: Cost-per-acquisition below $X for qualified leads in target practice area
• Content marketing: 20 published articles + 200% increase in blog-sourced enquiries
• Video: 12-video series completed + 10,000 views + 15 enquiries attributed to video content
• LinkedIn: 500 new followers + 50 direct messages from prospects + 5 new client engagements

If an initiative isn’t producing measurable results, either resource it properly or kill it. Don’t let it linger in perpetual “we’re working on it” status.

Better marketing ROI comes from finishing fewer things well, not starting everything poorly.

4. Build a Sequencing Map: Foundations Before Flourish

Many marketing initiatives depend on others. Launching advanced Google Ads campaigns without a converting website is wasteful. Starting video production without clarity on your brand message creates inconsistent content.

A useful mental model is maturity staging:

Stage 1: Foundations

• Professional website (mobile-optimised, fast, clear messaging)
• Google My Business optimised
• Basic tracking (Google Analytics, call tracking)

Stage 2: Lead Generation

• SEO/AEO for core practice areas
• Google Ads for high-intent keywords
• Lead nurturing email sequences

Stage 3: Authority Building

• Regular content marketing (blogs, guides, resources)
• Video content demonstrating expertise
• Speaking engagements, webinars, thought leadership

Stage 4: Advanced Optimisation

• CRM integration and marketing automation
• Retargeting campaigns
• Client experience technology (chatbots, client portals)

Trying to execute Stage 4 initiatives without Stage 1 foundations guarantees frustration. Sequence properly, and each completed stage makes the next stage easier. Your marketing strategy should explicitly acknowledge these dependencies.

5. Protect Marketing Capacity

Marketing isn’t just budget—it’s time, attention, and creative energy. Respect these as finite resources.

Practical steps:

• Protect your marketing team’s time. If you have one marketing coordinator, they cannot execute SEO, Google Ads, content creation, social media, video production, and event coordination. Choose what matters most and resource accordingly—or accept mediocrity everywhere.
• Partner role-modeling matters. When senior partners consistently blog, appear in videos, and share content on LinkedIn, it signals priority. When they don’t, marketing becomes “someone else’s job.”
• Create local champions. Assign one partner per practice group to be the marketing liaison. This person champions initiatives, provides content input, and removes barriers. Without this, marketing operates in a vacuum.
• Build short feedback loops. Don’t wait quarterly to review results. Monthly check-ins on progress, roadblocks, and quick wins keep momentum without overwhelming teams.
• Balance your leadership team. If your managing partner is a Plant (idea generator), ensure your operations partner or marketing manager is an Implementer or Completer Finisher. Create explicit roles: one person generates possibilities, another guards capacity and ensures completion.

Research shows that effective change management requires managing how employees experience change, not just implementing new processes. (Gartner) In law firms, this means explicitly managing partner expectations, protecting marketing team capacity, and building sustainable workflows.

6. Create Kill Criteria (and Use Them)

Not every marketing initiative should survive. Establish explicit kill criteria:

• No partner engagement or content contribution for 60 days
• No measurable results after 6 months of proper execution
• Budget redirected due to strategic priority shift
• Initiative duplicates another channel with better results

Example: You’ve been running Google Ads for family law for 9 months. Cost-per-lead is triple your target, conversion rates are 1%, and no new clients have resulted. Kill it. Redirect budget to brand awareness, Meta ads, SEO/AEO and content, where engagement metrics are strong but results haven’t yet materialised due to insufficient investment.

Paradoxically, killing initiatives increases trust in marketing. People stop feeling like every new launch is just another doomed experiment. Having a clear marketing plan includes knowing when to stop as much as knowing when to start.

What Success Looks Like: Compounding Instead of Restarting

When law firms reduce initiative overload, outcomes are visible:

• Fewer launches, higher completion rates. You finish what you start, seeing initiatives through their full J-curve to sustainable results.
• Improved marketing team morale. Your marketing people can focus on doing excellent work in three channels instead of mediocre work across ten.
• Partner confidence increases. When initiatives reliably produce results, partners stop questioning marketing budgets and start asking “what else should we do?”
• Balanced leadership dynamics. Plant-type leaders generate fresh ideas into the backlog, while execution-focused team members maintain discipline on active projects. Both roles are valued, neither dominates inappropriately.
• Compounding results. SEO-driven blog traffic leads to email subscribers, who become webinar attendees, who become clients. Each completed initiative makes the next initiative easier because foundational work is done.
• Real competitive advantage. While competitors chase every new trend and platform, your firm builds sustained visibility in core channels. Your 2026 law firm marketing strategy should emphasize depth over breadth.

This is the point: marketing becomes compounding. Each completed initiative makes the next change easier because your firm is no longer living in constant disruption. Authority builds. Trust accumulates. Results appear.

Practical Next Steps for Law Firms

If your firm is drowning in marketing initiatives, here’s how to reset:

1. Audit your current marketing activities. List everything currently “in progress”—website updates, SEO, Google Ads, content, social media, video, email, events. Be honest about what’s actually being executed versus what’s just sitting on a task list.

2. Assess each initiative’s maturity. For each item, determine:

• How long has it been active?
• What results has it produced?
• What resources (time, budget, partner input) has it received?
• Is it in the J-curve dip or genuinely failing?

3. Assess your leadership team dynamics. Do you have too many Plants (idea generators) and not enough Implementers or Completer Finishers? Consider whether team composition is contributing to initiative proliferation without corresponding execution capacity.

4. Choose your top 3-5 priorities. Based on business objectives, market opportunity, and available capacity, select the initiatives most likely to drive results. Be ruthless. If it doesn’t make the top 5, it gets paused.

5. Define completion criteria for each priority. What specific results must each initiative achieve before you consider it “finished” and ready to transition to business-as-usual operations?

6. Resource those priorities properly. Allocate sufficient budget, time, and partner attention. If you can’t properly resource an initiative, don’t start it.

7. Review monthly, not quarterly. Track progress, remove roadblocks, and make tactical adjustments. But don’t abandon initiatives during the predictable dip.

8. Celebrate completions. When an initiative reaches its success criteria, acknowledge it. Then move the next backlog item into active status.

Conclusion: Stop Starting, Start Finishing

Australian law firms don’t fail to market because they lack ideas or budget. They fail because they run too many simultaneous initiatives, exhausting the very people who must execute them and never allowing any single approach to mature through its natural performance curve.

The J-curve is real. Every meaningful marketing initiative requires passing through a dip before results appear. When firms stack multiple J-curves without adequate resources or patience, they trap themselves in permanent disappointment—wondering why nothing works when the real problem is they’re trying to do everything at once.

This pattern is often amplified by leadership team dynamics. Plant-type leaders—creative, strategic, idea-rich—are valuable for vision but dangerous without execution-focused counterbalances. The solution isn’t to stop generating ideas; it’s to separate idea generation from implementation decisions and ensure the latter is controlled by team members with complementary skills.

The management challenge is to treat marketing as a portfolio with constraints, not an endless menu of options. Limit work in progress. Sequence dependencies. Define success as results, not activity. Protect capacity. Kill initiatives that don’t earn their keep. Balance your team composition.

Do this, and your firm finally reaches the part of the J-curve that everyone wants: the upward swing—where SEO generates consistent enquiries, content builds authority, Google Ads produce qualified leads, and marketing stops being a source of frustration and starts becoming your firm’s competitive advantage.

Ready to build a focused, sustainable marketing strategy that actually produces results? Practice Proof helps Australian law firms escape initiative overload and build marketing programs that compound over time. Let’s talk about what “fewer, better” could look like for your firm.