Every agency has seen it. Two law firms engage the same team, spend roughly the same amount, use the same channels and receive the same calibre of strategist, designer and media specialist. Twelve months later, one firm has more qualified matters, a clearer brand and a marketing function that runs with real momentum. The other has a folder of reports, a website refresh that took twice as long as planned, and a nagging suspicion that marketing "doesn't really work for law firms".
The difference is rarely the agency's talent, and it is almost never the channel mix. It is the conditions the firm creates around the work.
This matters more in legal services than in most categories. Law firms are partnerships with many senior voices. Buying is infrequent and high-stakes. Much of the value of marketing shows up months or years later, when someone who once noticed your name finds themselves facing a separation, an estate, a dispute or a business sale. In that environment, a firm that is unclear about what it wants, slow to decide and impatient for proof will waste a great deal of money — no matter who it hires.
What follows is our view, from inside the agency, of what the most commercially successful law firm clients do differently. None of it requires a bigger budget. Most of it requires decisions.
1. Brief the commercial problem, not the marketing task
The weakest briefs we receive are lists of activities: "We need a new website." "We want to be on LinkedIn more." "Can you run Google Ads for family law?"
Each of those may turn out to be the right answer. But they are answers. The firm has skipped the question.
The strongest briefs start somewhere else entirely:
- "Our commercial property practice has capacity for another two lawyers' worth of work, and we're not filling it."
- "Two senior partners in wills and estates retire in three years and most of their work comes through personal relationships we can't transfer."
- "We get plenty of enquiries in employment law, but most of them are from employees with low-value matters when the profitable work is on the employer side."
Those are business problems. Once we understand them, the marketing conversation changes. Sometimes the right response is the activity the firm originally asked for. Often it is something they hadn't considered — fixing an intake process that loses a third of callers, building a referral programme with accountants, or committing to sustained brand presence in a region where the firm is barely known.
This is the discipline Mark Ritson describes as diagnosis before strategy, and strategy before tactics. When a firm briefs tactics, it asks the agency to execute a strategy nobody has actually agreed on. When it briefs the problem, it allows the agency to do the thinking it was hired for.
What to do: Before your next briefing, write one paragraph on what the firm is trying to achieve commercially in the next one to three years, and which practice areas are expected to deliver it. If the partners can't agree on that paragraph, that is the first problem to solve — and it isn't a marketing problem. (Our law firm growth consulting often starts exactly here.)
2. Overshare the context
Law firms are, understandably, cautious with information. Confidentiality is part of the professional DNA. But that instinct often extends to things an agency genuinely needs to know: revenue by practice area, average matter value, conversion rates from enquiry to engagement, which partners are at capacity, which work the firm would prefer not to take, and what has been tried before.
Without that context, an agency is forced to guess. It will optimise for what it can see — usually enquiry volume — rather than what matters, which is profitable, sustainable work the firm can actually service.
The firms that get the most from us treat the first months of an engagement as an immersion. They let us sit with intake staff. They introduce us to the partners who bring in the work. They share the history, including the campaigns that failed and the rebrand that half the partnership still resents. They tell us what their best clients say about them, and also what the clients they lost said.
An outside team brings perspective you can't get from inside the firm. But that perspective is only useful if it's applied to the real situation rather than a polished, partial version of it.
What to do: Give your agency access to the numbers that describe the business, not just the numbers that describe the marketing. Where data is sensitive, share ranges or proportions. Something directional is far more useful than nothing.
3. Decide who decides
Partnerships are built for consensus. Marketing work is not.
The single most common source of wasted time we see is feedback from many voices, unconsolidated and often contradictory. The managing partner wants the homepage to feel warmer. The head of commercial wants it to feel more corporate. Another partner forwards a competitor's website with the note "something like this?" Each round of revisions resolves one opinion and creates another.
Behind this pattern there is usually a deeper issue: the firm has not reconciled its own priorities. Multiple points of contact are often a symptom of a strategy that was never settled internally.
The firms that move quickly nominate one person — a marketing manager, a practice manager, or a partner with genuine authority — to own the relationship. That person gathers internal input, resolves disagreements before they reach the agency, and gives clear, final direction. Crucially, they have the trust of the partnership to make decisions without every one being reopened.
At the other extreme, firms with no internal owner at all struggle just as much. Marketing can't be outsourced in its entirety. Someone inside the firm has to approve work, open doors, chase partners for case studies and keep marketing connected to the business.
What to do: Name one accountable owner. Agree, at partner level, what decisions they can make alone and what needs escalation. Then protect that arrangement.
4. Agree one commercial measure of success — and keep it
When everything is measured, nothing is managed. A typical marketing report can contain dozens of metrics: impressions, clicks, cost per click, sessions, bounce rate, followers, engagement. Most of them are useful to the specialists running the channels. Very few of them tell a managing partner whether marketing is working.
The best client relationships we have are anchored to one primary commercial measure that stays constant over years, not months. For a law firm, that is usually something like qualified new matters in priority practice areas, or new matter revenue from those areas. It is rarely "enquiries", because enquiry volume and commercial value can move in opposite directions. More calls from people you can't help is a cost, not a win.
Having that single north star does two things. It focuses the agency's effort on what moves the business. And it stops the relationship being derailed by noise — a week where cost-per-click rose, a post that underperformed, a ranking that dipped.
There's an important caveat, which we'll come back to: the most valuable effects of brand-building don't show up neatly in a monthly lead count. The north star should be commercial, but it should be read over the right timeframe, alongside a small number of leading indicators.
What to do: Choose one primary commercial outcome. Support it with no more than three or four diagnostic measures — for example, branded search volume, enquiry-to-consultation conversion, and share of new matters from referral versus direct. Change the north star only if the business direction fundamentally changes. Our approach to law firm performance reporting is built around exactly this.
5. Get your own data in order
You can't brief a clear commercial goal if you don't know your baseline.
Many law firms have practice management systems full of valuable information that is never used for marketing: where new matters came from, what they were worth, how long they took to convert, which referrers send the best work. Too often, the source field reads "Other", "Website" or is simply blank.
When intake data is weak, every marketing decision becomes a matter of opinion. Partners will credit or blame marketing based on the last three matters they personally remember. Channels that drive a lot of low-quality enquiries look successful. Activity that builds long-term familiarity looks like waste.
The firms that get the best results invest a small amount of time in fixing this. They capture the source of every new enquiry consistently, record whether it converted, and attach a matter value. That alone transforms the quality of the conversation with their agency.
What to do: Audit how your firm records the source and outcome of new enquiries. Simplify the categories, train intake staff, and review the data monthly. If you don't have a reliable baseline yet, say so — and agree a plan to build one rather than inventing it. We've set out how in how to track law firm marketing to file opens, not clicks.
6. Fund ideas properly, or don't fund them at all
There's an uncomfortable truth in agency life: a big idea on a small budget rarely becomes a small success. More often, it becomes a compromised piece of work that underperforms and is then used as evidence that "that sort of thing doesn't work for us".
This is particularly true in brand-building. Byron Sharp's work on how brands grow points to the importance of reaching a broad share of the buyers who might one day need you, consistently, over time. Jenni Romaniuk's research on mental availability shows that brands need to be linked in memory to the many situations that trigger a need — and that those memory links fade without reinforcement (Romaniuk, Category Entry Points in a B2B World). A campaign that runs for six weeks at low weight, in a handful of placements, before being paused to "see what happens" is unlikely to build anything durable.
That doesn't mean law firms need enormous budgets. It means they need to make choices. A focused effort — one priority practice area, a clearly defined geographic market, a small set of buying situations — run consistently with sufficient weight, will almost always outperform an underfunded attempt to be everywhere.
When budgets are tight, the smartest firms take a staged approach. First, prove that marketing can reliably deliver against the commercial measure the partnership cares about. Then use that credibility to make the case for the next investment, framed in the language the partners use: matters, revenue, capacity utilisation, succession.
What to do: Do fewer things, better. If a proposed initiative can't be resourced to give it a realistic chance, defer it rather than diluting it. See how to build a smarter law firm marketing budget.
7. Let specialists be specialists
Firms hire agencies for expertise they don't have in-house. Yet a surprising amount of agency time is spent defending technical decisions that a client is not well placed to judge — bid strategies, campaign structures, keyword match types — or rewriting a single line of copy for the sixth time.
Lawyers will recognise this dynamic. Few things frustrate a solicitor more than a client who second-guesses procedural strategy based on something they read online. Marketing specialists feel the same way.
This is not an argument for blind trust. You know your clients, your practice and your professional obligations better than any agency, and you should say so when something feels wrong. Compliance review in particular is non-negotiable: claims about specialisation, outcomes, testimonials and comparisons need to meet the rules that apply in your jurisdiction, such as the advertising rule in the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules as adopted in your state.
But there is a difference between steering and micromanaging. The firms that get the best results are clear on the destination and the boundaries, then give the agency room to make professional judgements within them. When a firm finds it genuinely can't trust its agency to do that, the honest answer is to find a different agency — not to supervise every keystroke.
What to do: Concentrate your feedback on things only you can judge: accuracy, tone, client fit and compliance. Leave technical execution to the specialists, and hold them accountable for outcomes rather than micro-decisions.
8. Ship, learn and adjust
Lawyers are trained to get things right before they go out the door. That's a virtue in legal drafting. It can be a handicap in marketing.
A great deal of digital activity is, by nature, experimental. You can't know in advance which message will resonate with a business owner considering a sale, or which landing page will convert a parent facing a custody dispute. The fastest way to find out is to launch something sensible, measure it properly and improve it.
Firms that hold work in review for weeks, polishing a headline or debating an image, lose the very thing that makes digital channels valuable: the ability to learn quickly. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost mounts.
There is an important distinction here. Fast iteration suits activation — the search ads, landing pages and conversion paths that capture people already looking for a lawyer. It does not suit your core brand identity. Your name, logo, colours, tone and other distinctive assets should change rarely and deliberately, because recognition depends on consistency over years. Test the messages; protect the brand.
What to do: Agree in advance what "good enough to launch" means for activation work. Set a review window, then let it run. Save the long deliberation for decisions that are genuinely hard to reverse.
9. Treat it as one team
The healthiest client relationships share a simple trait: when something goes wrong, the conversation is "how do we fix this?" rather than "what are you going to do about it?"
That's not sentiment. It's practical. Agencies, like law firms, are made up of people. People do their best thinking when they understand the business, feel part of its success and know their contribution is noticed. Clear, honest feedback — including acknowledgement when something has worked — keeps a team engaged. Constant blame keeps it defensive.
The best law firm clients bring their agency into the wider picture. They share news of a significant new hire, a new office, a big win or a partner retirement early enough for marketing to respond. They invite the agency to partner meetings when strategy is being discussed. Where they work with several suppliers — a PR consultant, a web developer, a media buyer — they bring everyone together periodically so roles are clear and efforts reinforce one another rather than overlap.
And wherever possible, they meet face to face. A day spent in the firm — hearing the intake team, meeting partners, seeing how clients are welcomed — produces insights no written brief ever will. Once that foundation exists, remote work becomes far more effective.
What to do: Schedule an in-person working session at least at the start of the engagement and at each major review point. Share business news as it happens. Give feedback that is specific — both when work falls short and when it succeeds.
10. Define success at each stage of the relationship
Many firms enter an agency relationship with a vague hope that "things will improve". That makes it almost impossible to judge, at three or six months, whether the relationship is on track.
The strongest relationships define success in stages:
- First month: The agency understands the business, the priority practice areas, the buyers and the constraints. Measurement is set up properly.
- First quarter: Obvious barriers to enquiry and conversion are fixed. Activation channels are running efficiently. A baseline exists.
- Six months: Qualified enquiries in priority areas are moving in the right direction. Early brand indicators — such as branded search — are being tracked.
- Twelve months and beyond: New matter revenue in priority areas is growing. The firm is becoming more familiar to the buyers and referrers who matter.
Being explicit about these stages protects both sides. It stops a firm judging long-term brand work on a three-month timetable, and it stops an agency hiding behind "brand takes time" when fundamentals aren't working.
What to do: Agree written success criteria for the first 30, 90, 180 and 365 days at the outset, and review against them.
11. Respect the data, but know its limits
This brings us back to measurement, and to perhaps the most important mindset of all.
Digital marketing has created an expectation that every dollar can be traced to a result. Some of it can. Paid search, for example, captures people already looking for help, and its short-term contribution is relatively easy to see.
But much of what makes a law firm grow cannot be tidily attributed. The divorcing couple who chose a firm because the name felt familiar from years of local presence. The business owner who called because their accountant mentioned the firm and it "rang a bell". The executor who remembered a seminar from five years earlier. None of these show up as clean conversions in a dashboard, yet they are often the most valuable matters a firm receives.
The work of Les Binet and Peter Field makes this distinction central: short-term activation and long-term brand-building do different jobs, are measured differently and, together, drive sustainable growth (Binet & Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA). Their research is drawn largely from broader categories rather than legal services specifically, so it should guide judgement rather than replace it. But the principle holds well for a category where purchase is infrequent and memory matters: if a firm only funds what it can attribute within a month, it will gradually starve the activity that fills its pipeline in future years. We unpack this further in why performance marketing fails law firms.
The most effective firms hold both views at once. They are rigorous about the numbers they can measure. They are honest about what those numbers can't tell them. And they are prepared to back a well-reasoned long-term investment even when the short-term attribution is weak — while still checking the leading signals that it is working.
What to do: Separate the measurement of activation from the measurement of brand. Judge each on the right timeframe. Treat "we can't see an immediate return" as a question to investigate, not proof that something has failed.
The real differentiator
Look back over this list and a pattern emerges. Almost none of these factors are about marketing skill. They are about clarity, decision-making and trust — the same qualities that distinguish well-run firms from struggling ones in every other part of the business.
The law firms that get the most from their agency know what they're trying to achieve commercially. They share the context needed to achieve it. They speak with one voice, measure what matters, fund their choices properly and allow experts to do their jobs. They move quickly where speed helps and stay consistent where consistency builds recognition. And they treat their agency as part of the team responsible for the firm's future.
A good agency can bring strategy, creativity and technical excellence. What it can't bring is the firm's own clarity. That has to come from inside.
If you're not sure your firm has it yet, that's where we start: not with a campaign, but with a structured conversation about where the growth will come from, who the firm needs to be remembered by, and what success will look like. Everything else follows from those decisions.
Sources
- Les Binet & Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It: 10 key principles of success, IPA / Thinkbox
- Jenni Romaniuk, Category Entry Points in a B2B World, LinkedIn B2B Institute & Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
- Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules 2015, rule 36 (Advertising)
- Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know, Oxford University Press, 2010
Dan Toombs
Lawyer & Founder, Practice Proof
Dan Toombs is a lawyer, law reformer and founder of Practice Proof. Admitted in 1997, he built his first career inside the legal profession — practising law, leading legal organisations and driving law reform — before building the marketing, technology and AI practice he has now run exclusively for law firms for 20 years.
In that time, Dan and his team have helped law firms grow from single offices into multi-office and national practices, ASX-listed brands and acquisition targets. That experience gives Practice Proof an unusually deep understanding of both sides of law firm growth: what happens inside a legal practice, and what it takes commercially to make one grow.
Thomson Reuters featured his law-firm marketing advice as early as 2014, on positioning firms to win business online, websites and social media. He is also the founder of FirmRanker, which researches how AI systems discover and recommend law firms. Dan is a Winston Churchill Fellow and Australia Leadership Award recipient, with national recognition for his work in law and human rights.
If you want to know what 20 years of growing law firms could bring to yours, talk to Dan and the Practice Proof team.