Marketing for law firms: the problem is usually attribution, not marketing

If you look after marketing at a law firm, somebody has asked you whether it is working. You probably gave an answer with more confidence in it than evidence behind it.

That is not a failure of nerve. It is structural. Legal work arrives by routes that are almost impossible to see from the marketing side, and nobody has built the thing that would make them visible.

How firms actually get instructed

Put the marketing plan down for a minute and look at the routes work genuinely comes in by. Most firms are running some combination of these:

• Referral from a past client. Often the biggest single source, and almost always the one nobody owns.
• Professional introducers. Accountants, financial advisers, brokers, agents, and other firms conflicting out or passing on work outside their competence.
• Panels and frameworks. Insurer panels, lender panels, corporate legal panels, public sector frameworks. Won through procurement, not through campaigns.
• Directories and rankings. Chambers and the Legal 500 for commercial buyers. Google, review platforms and comparison sites for consumers.
• Search at the moment of need. Somebody who has just been dismissed, just lost a parent, just agreed a sale.
• The existing client base. Repeat commercial instructions, and the cross-referral between departments that every firm talks about and very few count.

One thing should jump out. Barely any of that looks like advertising, and nearly all of it is influenced by things the marketing budget pays for. That gap between what buys the work and what looks like it buys the work is where the trouble starts.

Private client and commercial are not one market

They get one plan anyway, and that alone wastes a good share of the money.

Consumer work is bought at the moment of need, usually by somebody who has never instructed a solicitor before and has no firm in mind. They search. They read reviews written by people like them. They compare on clarity and price because those are the only two things they can assess. Being findable and being legible are most of the job.

Commercial work is bought by people who buy legal services repeatedly and mostly on reputation, sector credibility and who is already known to them. They are not searching. They are asking their finance director, their broker, or the partner they worked with at their last company. Directory rankings and named individuals matter here in a way they never will for a probate matter.

Same firm, same brand, two different buying processes. When a firm reports one blended cost per enquiry across both, the number is arithmetic rather than information.

The rules constrain what you say, not what you can know

There is a comfortable story in legal marketing that the regulator is the reason nothing works. It is worth being precise about this, because the story is doing a lot of hiding.

The Code of Conduct stops you misleading people, and it restricts unsolicited approaches to members of the public. The Transparency Rules require published price and service information for certain consumer work. Referral fees are banned in personal injury matters. Claims about outcomes have to be defensible, which rules out most of the language other sectors reach for by default.

All of that constrains what you may claim. None of it stops you knowing where your instructions came from. Nothing in the rules prevents a firm from recording a source field properly.

The actual problem

Here is what we would expect to find in most firms, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the marketing.

The measurement system is a "how did you hear about us" box on a web form and a receptionist's best guess on a phone note. The practice management system has a source field. It is optional, it is free text, and a good proportion of it says "referral" or nothing at all. Nobody reconciles it against spend. Nobody ties it to matter value.

Which produces a specific and expensive failure: the firm can add marketing but it can never subtract any.

Think about what it takes to stop something. You have to show it is not working. In an unmeasured system, that means proving a negative, and nobody can. So the directory entry renews. The sponsorship renews, because a partner likes it and nobody can demonstrate that it does nothing. The agency retainer rolls on. The budget only ever ratchets upward, and every new idea is funded on top of everything that came before rather than instead of it.

That is not a marketing problem. Marketing might well be fine. It is an attribution problem, and it has been quietly setting the budget for years.

Where the credit goes wrong

Even firms that do measure usually measure the last thing that happened, which in legal services is nearly always the wrong thing.

A client's accountant recommends you. Two days later the client types your firm's name into Google, clicks the ad sitting above your own listing, and fills in the form. In most analytics setups, that instruction now belongs to paid search. It belongs to the accountant. The ad charged you for a click on a decision that had already been made.

Multiply that across a year and you get a report in which the channel that captures existing intent looks like the channel that creates demand. Firms then fund more of it, and wonder why growth does not follow the spend.

There is a second distortion sitting next to it. Almost everything gets counted in enquiries, and instructions are wildly unequal. A single will and a corporate disposal are one enquiry each. Anything ranked by volume will put consumer work at the top of the table and quietly argue for defunding the work that pays for the building.

Five things that would change the picture

None of this is a campaign. It is a week or two of unglamorous work, and it changes what every subsequent decision is based on.

1. Ask the fee earner, not the client. At matter opening, in the practice management system, as a mandatory field with a fixed list. The person who has just spoken to the client knows more than the enquiry form does.
2. Separate source from route. Source is who caused the instruction. Route is how it arrived. Most firms record the route, call it the source, and end up with a report full of phone calls.
3. Attach value, not just count. Report by matter value and by department. If your reporting cannot tell a will from a disposal, it will keep recommending you buy more wills.
4. Split brand search out. People typing your name were sent by something. Report them as their own line so they stop taking credit from referral and reputation.
5. Give referral an owner. If professional introducers produce most of your commercial work, that is a channel with a named owner, a cadence and a number attached, not a collection of friendships that happen to pay.

One thing we have seen ourselves, in a very different trade

We have not done this work in a law firm, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But the mechanism is not sector specific, and we have watched it play out in our own venue.

At The Anchor, our own venue, people who wanted to come had to phone during service. Nobody was counting how many tried and gave up, so the drop-off simply did not exist as a fact anybody could act on. Once the journey between interest and confirmation was visible, the fix stopped being a matter of opinion: table bookings grew 403% and no-shows fell 89%.

The transferable part is not the pub. It is the sequence. Nothing improved while the gap was invisible, and the moment it was measured the right decision was obvious to everybody in the room. A law firm's version of that gap is the distance between somebody deciding they need a solicitor and a matter being opened, and it is commonly unlit from end to end.

The short version

Most law firms do not need more marketing. They need to be able to answer one question honestly: where did the last hundred instructions come from, and what were they worth?

Until that question has an answer, every marketing decision is a matter of taste, seniority and habit. After it has one, the decisions get boring, which is exactly what you want them to be.

It is cheaper work than any campaign you are currently weighing up, and it usually takes a conversation rather than a project.