In a legal market where most firms offer remarkably similar services, positioning is the invisible hand that guides prospective clients toward one practice over another. It’s not about being the best lawyer in town—it’s about occupying a distinct space in your ideal client’s mind before they even need you.
Strategic positioning determines whether your firm commands premium fees or competes on price. It shapes whether referral sources remember you when the right opportunity arises. And in an age where AI-powered search increasingly decides which firms appear in answers to legal queries, positioning has become more critical than ever.
This guide will show you how to develop a positioning strategy that genuinely differentiates your practice, resonates with your target clients, and drives sustainable growth—without falling into the common traps that leave most law firms indistinguishable from their competitors.
What Is Strategic Positioning (And Why Most Law Firms Get It Wrong)
Strategic positioning is the deliberate process of establishing how your law firm is perceived relative to competitors in the minds of your target clients. It’s not your tagline, your logo, or even your list of practice areas. It’s the mental shortcut clients use when deciding which firm to call.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most law firms are 98% the same. They offer similar services, employ qualified lawyers, and promise excellent client service. The positioning challenge is identifying and amplifying that crucial 2% difference.
According to research from Harvard Business School, brand positioning describes how businesses establish competitive advantages in consumers’ minds in the marketplace. For law firms, this means moving beyond generic claims of “experienced” or “results-driven” toward something clients can actually remember and differentiate.
The mistake many practices make is confusing positioning with differentiation alone. As we’ve explored in our analysis of why differentiation for law firms has never worked, being different isn’t enough. You need to be meaningfully different in ways that matter to your target clients, while also being distinctive enough that they remember you.
The Meaningful Different Salient Framework: Evidence-Based Positioning
Kantar’s research across 40,000 brands provides compelling evidence for what actually drives positioning success. Their Meaningful Different Salient (MDS) framework offers law firms a research-backed approach to building brand equity.
Meaningful: Does your firm meet the emotional and functional needs of your clients? This goes beyond technical legal competence to address the underlying anxieties and aspirations that drive legal service purchases.
Different: Do you stand out from competitors in ways that matter? Kantar’s analysis found a strong relationship between perceived uniqueness and willingness to pay premium fees. Brands with strong differentiation can charge significantly more—with brand-driven consumers willing to pay an average of 37% more for brands they perceive as meaningfully different.
Salient: Do you come readily to mind when clients need legal services? Mental availability—being thought of at the crucial moment of decision—is where positioning meets practical business outcomes.
The research shows that brands with strong initial difference scores were twice as likely to grow as those with weaker difference. But here’s the nuance: difference alone only gets you so far. The firms that achieved sustained growth combined differentiation with meaningful relevance to client needs.
This aligns with the principles outlined by Jenni Romaniuk and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute—building mental availability through consistent, distinctive brand assets while ensuring your positioning addresses genuine client needs.
The Five Pillars of Law Firm Positioning
Successful positioning strategies typically leverage one or more of these core pillars:
1. Depth of Expertise
Clients increasingly seek what industry observers call “hyper-differentiation”—lawyers with proven experience in increasingly specific niches. Rather than positioning as a general commercial law firm, you might focus on technology startups in the health sector, or construction disputes involving residential developers.
This approach requires genuine investment. You cannot merely claim expertise; you must build and demonstrate it through published thought leadership, speaking engagements, and measurable track records.
2. Client Experience Differentiation
In markets where legal services appear homogenous, the client experience becomes a powerful differentiator. This encompasses everything from initial consultation processes to communication frequency and technology integration.
Firms that have invested in AI-driven client experiences or streamlined onboarding processes can position themselves as modern, client-centric alternatives to traditional practices.
3. Service Delivery Innovation
Some firms differentiate through how they deliver legal services—alternative fee arrangements, technology-enabled efficiency, or innovative staffing models. This service delivery positioning can appeal to cost-conscious clients while maintaining healthy margins through process improvement.
4. Values and Purpose Alignment
Increasingly, clients—particularly younger demographics and corporate counsel—seek law firms whose values align with their own. Positioning around sustainability commitments, pro bono programs, or diversity initiatives can resonate strongly with aligned audiences.
5. Market Segment Focus
Positioning as the firm that understands a particular industry or client type can be highly effective. A firm positioned as specialists in serving medical practitioners will be more memorable to that audience than a generalist claiming to serve “businesses of all sizes.”
Creating Your Positioning Statement
A positioning statement distils your strategy into a concise internal guide. It’s not client-facing marketing copy, but rather the foundation that ensures consistency across all touchpoints.
The Harvard Business School framework suggests this structure:
For [target market], our firm is the only one among [competitive set] that [unique value claim] because [reasons to believe].
For example: “For growing technology companies in Melbourne, our firm is the only one among commercial law practices that combines deep startup expertise with fixed-fee transparency, because our founders built three technology companies before becoming lawyers.”
The effectiveness of your positioning statement depends entirely on the quality of work that precedes it. You cannot simply fill in blanks without conducting proper competitive analysis and client research.
Before developing your positioning, you need to understand your current perception in the market. This typically requires confidential interviews with clients, prospective clients, and referral sources—ideally conducted by a neutral third party who can elicit honest feedback.
Our guide to competitive analysis for law firms provides a framework for understanding where competitors are positioned and where opportunities exist.
The Positioning Map: Finding Your Space
Positioning maps (also called perceptual maps) plot competitors along two axes representing values important to your target audience. Common axes include quality versus price, specialist versus generalist, or traditional versus innovative.
By mapping competitors, you can identify positioning gaps—combinations of attributes that no firm currently owns in clients’ minds. The goal is finding an exploitable position that aligns with your genuine capabilities and addresses unmet client needs.
Consider this example for family law firms:
| High Empathy Focus | High Efficiency Focus | |
|---|---|---|
| Premium Price | Boutique counselling approach | Corporate-style family law |
| Value Price | Community legal centre model | Volume-based operations |
Each quadrant represents a distinct positioning opportunity with different target clients and business models.
Positioning for the AI Search Era
The emergence of AI-powered search—including Google’s AI Overviews and conversational AI platforms—adds new dimensions to positioning strategy. As we’ve detailed in our analysis of SEO versus GEO for law firms, the way information is retrieved and presented is fundamentally changing.
AI systems increasingly synthesise information to answer user queries directly. Firms with clear, well-documented positioning are more likely to be cited in these AI-generated responses. This requires ensuring your positioning is:
- Consistently articulated across your website, LinkedIn profiles, directory listings, and content
- Substantiated with evidence—AI systems favour authoritative sources with verifiable credentials
- Structured for comprehension—clear headings, logical organisation, and explicit statements of expertise
The firms that will thrive are those combining traditional positioning principles with strategic optimisation for generative AI.
Implementing Your Positioning: From Strategy to Execution
A positioning strategy only creates value when implemented consistently across every client touchpoint. This includes:
Website and Digital Presence: Your website is the primary expression of your positioning. Every element—from visual design to content hierarchy to calls-to-action—should reinforce your intended position. If you’re positioned as innovative and tech-forward, your website cannot look like it was built in 2015.
Content Marketing: The topics you address, the perspective you bring, and the depth of your content should all align with your positioning. A firm positioned around deep expertise must produce genuinely expert content, not surface-level summaries. Our content strategy guide explores this in detail.
Staff Communication: Everyone in your firm—from partners to reception staff—should be able to articulate your positioning consistently. This requires internal education and ongoing reinforcement.
Visual and Verbal Identity: Distinctive assets help clients recognise and remember you. Slater & Gordon’s approach to distinctiveness demonstrates how consistent visual branding supports positioning over time.
Client Service Delivery: Perhaps most importantly, your actual client experience must validate your positioning claims. Positioning as client-centric means nothing if clients experience otherwise.
The StoryBrand Framework: Positioning Through Narrative
Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework offers a complementary approach to positioning by structuring your firm’s message as a story where the client is the hero.
Rather than positioning your firm as the star, you position as the guide who helps clients overcome challenges and achieve their goals. This subtle shift—from “we’re the best lawyers” to “we help you navigate this difficult situation”—can dramatically improve how your positioning resonates.
The framework ensures your positioning addresses what clients actually care about: their problems, their aspirations, and the transformation they seek. Combined with the Meaningful Different Salient approach, it creates positioning that is both distinctive and deeply relevant.
Measuring Positioning Effectiveness
How do you know if your positioning is working? Key indicators include:
- Unprompted recall: When prospective clients describe the type of firm they’re looking for, do they describe you?
- Referral quality: Are you receiving referrals for the work you want, or being sent whatever comes along?
- Fee realisation: Are you able to command intended fees, or facing constant pressure to discount?
- Win rates: When you pitch against competitors, are you winning the matters that align with your positioning?
Tracking these metrics over time reveals whether your positioning is gaining traction in the market. As explored in measuring marketing ROI for legal practices, connecting marketing activities to business outcomes requires systematic measurement.
The Long Game: Consistency Over Time
Perhaps the most important positioning principle is also the most difficult: consistency over time.
Research from Binet and Field demonstrates that brand-building effects compound over years, not months. The firms that achieve dominant positions typically maintain consistent positioning for extended periods while competitors chase trends and frequently rebrand.
This doesn’t mean positioning can never evolve. Markets change, and your firm’s capabilities grow. But evolution should be deliberate and gradual, building on established foundations rather than abandoning them for the next shiny approach.
The temptation to frequently change positioning—or to have no clear positioning at all—is one of the most common reasons law firm marketing fails. Resisting this temptation requires conviction and patience, but the long-term rewards are substantial.
Taking Action: Your Next Steps
Strategic positioning isn’t a one-time project—it’s an ongoing commitment to clarity about who you serve, what makes you valuable, and how you want to be perceived.
Begin by honestly assessing your current position. How do clients actually perceive you today? Where do you sit relative to competitors? What opportunities exist in the market?
Then develop your intended positioning, ensuring it’s genuinely differentiated, meaningful to your target clients, and sustainable given your capabilities.
Finally, implement with relentless consistency—across every touchpoint, every piece of content, every client interaction. The firms that succeed aren’t necessarily those with the cleverest positioning, but those that execute consistently over time.
For law firms serious about growth, positioning isn’t optional—it’s foundational. Get it right, and every other marketing investment works harder. Get it wrong—or ignore it entirely—and even substantial marketing spend will yield disappointing results.
