On Marketing and the Professional Identity of Lawyers

The word "marketing," in the context of a law firm, still produces a subtle discomfort in a significant proportion of the practitioners I know. The discomfort is rarely explicit - lawyers are too articulate for the naked admission - but it is present in the slight stiffening that accompanies a discussion of personal branding, in the reluctance to promote individual achievements, in the attitude that clients should come because the work is good rather than because the lawyer has made themselves visible.

This discomfort has a long history in the professional identity of lawyers. The ethical constraints on advertising that governed the profession for most of the twentieth century did not simply disappear when the regulations were liberalised; they left their residue in professional culture, in the instinct that self-promotion is inconsistent with the dignity of the law. The brilliant barrister who would rather lose work than be seen to be seeking it - this is a recognisable figure, and not an entirely unsympathetic one.

But the discomfort, in its current form, is producing demonstrably worse outcomes. And I want to suggest that the problem is not marketing per se but a specific and rather limited conception of what marketing means.

What the discomfort actually reflects

The most articulate version of the anti-marketing sentiment in the legal profession is not about self-promotion in the abstract. It is about a specific kind of self-promotion - the kind that makes claims about expertise that are not accurate, that constructs a personal brand that does not correspond to genuine capability, that optimises for visibility rather than for substance. That version of marketing is genuinely inconsistent with professional values, and the instinct against it is correct.

What the discomfort often conflates with that version is everything else - the reasonable communication of genuine expertise to people who might benefit from it, the maintenance of relationships that allow potential clients to understand what you do and how you do it, and the deliberate cultivation of a professional reputation that accurately reflects your actual capability and approach.

The second set of activities is not ethically suspect. It is, in a competitive market for legal services, the basic infrastructure of a practice. And the lawyers who treat it with disdain are not thereby preserving some purer version of the profession; they are simply allocating the benefit of good marketing to the colleagues who have made their peace with it.

What effective legal business development actually looks like

The most effective business development practice I have observed in the legal profession has almost nothing in common with the aggressive self-promotion that the anti-marketing instinct is reacting against. It is, instead, grounded in three activities that most lawyers can engage in without significant dissonance.

The first is genuine intellectual contribution — the article that actually illuminates a difficult issue, the seminar that gives clients something they did not know, the commentary on a legal development that is specific, accurate, and useful. This kind of contribution builds a reputation for expertise that is far more durable than any amount of promotional activity, precisely because it is substantiated by the content itself.

The second is consistent relationship maintenance - the habit of staying in contact with current and former clients, referral sources, and professional contacts in ways that are genuine rather than transactional. The lawyer who calls a former client when they see something in the news that is relevant to them, not because they are looking for instructions but because they genuinely thought the client would find it useful, is building something valuable and doing nothing that conflicts with professional dignity.

The third is clarity about what you do and for whom you do it best. The most effective legal marketing is not broad; it is specific. The lawyer who can say, precisely, what kind of client they serve and what kind of problem they solve best is far more legible to potential clients than the one who presents a comprehensive capability across every conceivable legal issue.

The firm dimension

Law firms have a specific responsibility for the marketing dysfunction I am describing, because firm culture shapes the behaviour of individual practitioners in ways that are not always acknowledged. A firm that treats marketing as a peripheral support function rather than as an integral part of its practice development will produce practitioners who regard it the same way. A firm whose leadership models a sophisticated and dignified engagement with business development will produce practitioners who do likewise.

The marketing function in most major Australian law firms is populated with talented people who do not always have the access to partners and practice groups that would allow them to do their best work. The relationship between the legal marketing function and the legal practice is, in some firms, excellent; in others, it is characterised by mutual underappreciation that benefits neither side. The firms that are competing most effectively in the current market have addressed that relationship and invested in it. The ones that have not are visible in the gap between the quality of their work and the quality of their client communications.