Don’t Rely on Your Law Firm to Market You
Law firms seek to market and brand themselves to their clients and potential clients as best in class. But lawyers also need to make efforts beyond what their firms are doing to market and develop their practice as individuals. Why? A few of the reasons:
Hiring a lawyer means trusting them individually
Thomson Reuters reported in 2019 that “[o]verall, the average [law] firm spent just shy of 2% of their revenue on marketing and business development in 2018, exclusive of salary and benefits for marketing and business development staff.” In contrast, Deloitte’s 2019 Annual CMO Survey stated that the average for-profit US company spent 7.8% of its revenues on marketing as of August 2018, with that number rising to 9.8% in August 2019. But marketing legal services requires a different approach than marketing goods and products. People and companies want to know that their attorney can provide excellent legal advice. They also want to trust their counsel, feel heard and understood, and treated as a valuable client. Firms expect that they will lay a foundation for branding the types of services they can offer, but that individual attorneys will step up as well to make their personal pitch. While firm marketing spend can help generally with business development, ultimately individual lawyers must invest their own time and efforts to secure clients.
Firm business development is often less focused on individual marketing
The ABA 2020 Legal Technology Survey Report identified that the leading channel for firm marketing that year – across all sizes of law firms -- was event sponsorship (48%). The COVID pandemic subsequently suspended many in-person events for several years but, both prior to and after that, event sponsorship remains an important marketing tool for many law firms. Sponsorships help to market the firm overall, and can be especially effective in showing community engagement; for example, sponsorship of and encouraging firm personnel to participate in a 5K race for a local charity in a community where the firm would like to raise its profile and brand itself with certain causes. But sometimes event funding may genereate fewer opportunities for individual lawyers, such as when a sponsorship is for a conference where only a couple of firm attorneys may be invited to attend or have the chance to speak. While event sponsorships can help build a firm’s brand, they may be less of an assist for individual lawyers.
Less experienced lawyers generally are not the subject of law firm marketing
Law firms allocate most marketing spend to partners, and usually the firm’s partners determine most of the priorities for marketing. Understandably, they want to direct marketing and business development spend to emphasizing the expertise, client successes and track record of the firm’s lawyers – because clients are looking for those qualities. Law firms consider instead that more junior fee earners should concentrate on learning legal issues and concepts, and seeing more senior lawyers in the firm as their “clients” until gaining more proficiency and skills. That also means that associates and other lawyers in firms with fewer years of practice generally receive less marketing support, because they aren’t viewed as having as much need for it.
So, if you’ve ever asked yourself if you could do more to market yourself outside of your law firm’s efforts, the answer is absolutely. Here are some immediate steps you can take to make yourself stand out a bit more, whether you are a seasoned professional or in the earlier years of your practice:
Update and use your LinkedIn profile
Don’t ignore your LinkedIn profile. Use your presence on that platform to post updates on what you are doing and why it’s important to you, either professionally or personally. Too many lawyers neglect leveraging LinkedIn to increase their profile, although both clients and recruiters regularly use LinkedIn more than almost any other tool to check out the people they are considering hiring, and see it was a way to learn about you beyond what your firm says. And don’t forget to add your publications, including your practice group’s newsletter or alerts featuring your contributions, to your LinkedIn page.
In addition, as John Thiel said of his activity on LinkedIn: “It turns out me being me is more popular than me being the CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management – I’m a human and I have feelings and a point of view.” Posting about your pride in running a half marathon, raising money for your child’s softball team, or celebrating the efforts of your colleagues when they succeed says a lot to others about who you are and how you approach the world. That can give clients a sense of who you are individually as a lawyer, as well as what you value and prioritize outside the law.
Seek out publishing & speaking opportunities
In particular, there are tons of digital opportunities with blogs, podcasts and other media – focused on a myriad of aspects of legal topics -- that you can pitch as to why you would be a good author, editor, host, or interviewee. Podcasting, which lawyers have been relatively slow to embrace, can be a particularly good way to introduce your point of view or expertise to audiences that you think would be good targets for your areas of practice. Either by hosting your own podcast or being a guest on someone else’s podcast, the potential for impact is huge. According to a 2021 report by Grand View Research, the US podcast market, valued at $2.9 billion in 2018, is expected to grow to $94.88 billion by 2028. But for law firms, according to the ABA 2020 Legal Technology Survey Report, podcasting was not among the top five channels for firm marketing that year – more traditional communication methods such as email (41%) and print marketing (21%) were ranked number three and number four, respectively.
If you aren’t sure what a particular medium is looking for in a writer or speaker, reach out to them to see what their guidelines, deadlines, and requirements are for submissions or engagements. Further, when you see someone that has been interviewed by or written for a particular media source, contact them to find out how they did it and see what you can learn from their approach as you prepare your own proposal. Or if you follow a reporter that covers issues in your practice area, comment on their stories or email them to follow up as a way of suggesting how you can be a resource in the future.
Develop your own marketing plan
Critical to marketing yourself is to develop a plan, with goals and action items to keep you on track. It’s easy to say that you will work to reach out to more potential clients, but what does that really mean? Establish short- and long-term personal marketing objectives, commit to them by writing them down, and check your progress on an ongoing basis. For example, you might set an objective of working to re-engage with people you have known for some time or follow-up with new contacts by reaching out and connecting with a certain number of them weekly – forwarding an article of interest, inviting them for coffee, or thanking them for something they have done for you.
An accountability partner, such as a coach, can be helpful as you seek to hold yourself responsible to your individual goals and objectives. They can also aid you in evaluating what may be working or not working, and determine when it’s time to change your approach and adjust the plan. Marketing yourself and adapting to the audience that you are aiming to engage is an ongoing process throughout a lawyer’s career. Having the right focus and support to manage that work is critical. Your firm provides some of the foundation to do that but the rest is up to you.