I've written a book about law firm marketing. Here's why.

I've written a book about law firm marketing. Here's why.

Most law firms are not short on marketing. They have a website, a LinkedIn feed, local sponsorships, a newsletter, directory listings, some SEO, the odd advertising campaign, and a calendar of networking events. Plenty is happening.

What many firms can't tell you is whether any of it is actually working. Which of those activities brought in last year's best clients? Which department is growing because of marketing, and which is growing despite it? If the budget were cut by a third tomorrow, what would you keep?

Those are awkward questions, and in my experience they rarely get asked. Activity is easy to count. Knowing whether it's the right activity is much harder. When firms do look properly, the answer is usually that some of it works, but not always the parts they expected.

That gap is what my new book, Marketing Your Law Firm: What Actually Works, is about.

Where the book comes from

I've spent more than 30 years in marketing, including 14 years as Marketing Director at a Sussex firm that more than doubled in size whilst I was there, with marketing playing its part. Since then, I've worked at board level with smaller and mid-sized organisations as a fractional marketing director.

Writing the book forced me to decide what mattered. Much of what I'd picked up over the years turned out to be detail. A handful of principles did most of the work, and the book is built around those.

Marketing starts with the business

The biggest principle is that marketing can't sit apart from the firm's commercial plan. Growing a department, winning higher-value work, opening in a new town or relying less on one referrer are business decisions. Marketing's job is to serve them.

Get that order right and a lot becomes simpler. You know where to spend, what to measure and what to stop. Get it wrong and spending drifts towards whatever was done last year, regardless of whether it still earns its place.

Stopping things is usually the hardest part. Every activity has a supporter somewhere in the partnership, and most of them made sense when they started. But a budget spread thinly across fifteen things rarely achieves as much as the same money spent properly on five. Part of the book is about making those calls on evidence rather than habit, and having the conversation with partners without it turning into a debate about whose idea it was.

Look at it from the client’s side

The book also gives firms a straightforward way to test their marketing from the client's side. Can people find you when they need you? Do they like what they see? Do they trust you enough to get in touch? And when they compare you with two other firms, is there a clear reason to pick you?

Most firms are strong on one or two of those and weak on the rest. Spending more rarely fixes the weak ones. Spending differently usually does.

The whole system in one place

Most of what's written about law firm marketing deals with one channel at a time. There's plenty of useful material on SEO, on LinkedIn, on business development and on client care. What's much harder to find is anything that shows how those pieces fit together.

The book brings those elements together: strategy, positioning, brand, website, content, SEO and AI search, paid media, referrals and business development, client experience and measurement. Each part is written with law firms in mind, addressing the realities of partnership decisions, professional rules and the limits on fee earners' time.

That matters because the parts depend on each other. A new website won't do much if the positioning is vague. More enquiries won't help if they're handled slowly. And none of it can be judged without a sensible way of measuring what comes back. Seeing the whole system is what lets a firm decide where the next pound is best spent, and what to stop spending on.

Who it's for

I wrote it for managing partners who want to ask sharper questions of their marketing, marketing managers who want a clearer framework for their thinking, ambitious solicitors who want to understand how firms win clients, and law students who want a more commercial understanding of how firms grow. It is also for firms without an in-house senior marketer that still need to make good decisions about where to focus their time and budget. It avoids jargon and the kind of complicated models that look good on a slide and are hard to use.

It’s the book I’d have wanted when I started.

Available now

Marketing Your Law Firm: What Actually Works is out now on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardback.

If it stops you from spending money on one pointless marketing initiative, it will have paid for itself.