TL;DR

Research tracking more than 80,000 hours of law firm marketing time found that 5 percent of attorneys account for 44 percent of marketing department time. The remaining 95 percent of the firm is functionally disconnected from the resource they are paying for. This is not a staffing problem. It is a leadership infrastructure problem. And managing partners are the only people in a position to fix it.

At some point in the last several years, most law firm managing partners made an investment in marketing infrastructure. They hired a director or built out a team. They approved a budget. They told their attorneys the resource was available. And then they stepped back and assumed something would happen.

Something did happen. A small group of attorneys, usually the ones who were already engaged in business development before the department existed, learned how to use the resource and got disproportionate value from it. Everyone else did not change much. The marketing department got busy serving the few, became increasingly difficult for the many to access, and the gap that existed before the investment quietly widened.

This is not a story about bad hires or misaligned personalities. It is a story about what happens when a leadership investment is made without the infrastructure to deploy it. The managing partner who assumes that hiring a strong marketing team is sufficient has made the same error as the managing partner who assumes that approving a rainmaking training budget is sufficient. The resource exists. Without a system connecting it to attorney behavior and measurable outcomes, the resource does not produce what it was purchased to produce.

This article is about what that system looks like, why it does not exist at most firms, and what managing partners can do to build it without replacing their current team.

The data behind the gap

The statistic that frames this problem most clearly comes from research tracking more than 80,000 hours of law firm marketing department time across firms of different sizes and practice profiles. The finding: 5 percent of attorneys account for 44 percent of all marketing department time and attention. (Calibrate Legal, 2026)

That figure is worth sitting with. A firm with forty attorneys has, on average, two attorneys who have learned how to use the marketing department and thirty-eight who have not. The department is not underperforming. It is performing well for the attorneys who know how to engage it. The problem is structural access, not individual capability.

The remaining 95 percent of the attorney population falls into a predictable pattern. Some do not engage the marketing department at all, either because they tried once and the result was not useful, or because they never learned what to ask for. Some engage the department only for low-value administrative tasks: updating a bio, ordering business cards, submitting a directory listing. A smaller group wants to engage more substantively but does not know how to brief a project in a way that produces something they can actually use. In each case, the attorney defaults to managing their own business development independently, without the infrastructure the firm is paying for, and usually with worse results.

The Legal Marketing Association’s annual compensation and staffing survey found that law firm marketing departments are on average staffed at one professional per fifteen to twenty attorneys at well-resourced firms, but that average is misleading. (LMA, 2025) The effective ratio is closer to one to three or one to four, because only a fraction of the attorney population is drawing on the resource at any given time. The department is nominally serving the whole firm while operationally serving a small subset. And nobody in firm leadership has defined what it would mean for the ratio to change.

Why attorneys do not use the marketing department

Managing partners who try to address this problem often start by asking the marketing team why attorneys are not engaging. The marketing team’s answer is usually some version of: attorneys do not know what we do, they do not know how to ask, and when they do ask, we often do not have the context to produce what they actually need. That answer is accurate. It is also incomplete.

The fuller answer requires looking at the structure the managing partner built, or did not build, around the department.

The most common structural failures are not dramatic. They are quiet defaults. The firm never defined what attorney engagement with the marketing department should look like. There is no documented expectation that attorneys will engage the department at specific intervals, around specific activities, for specific purposes. There is no training that teaches attorneys how to brief a marketing project so it produces something useful. There is no feedback loop that tells an attorney whether what the department produced for them was effective.

Without those structural elements, the attorney’s decision about whether to engage the marketing department is effectively a cold start every time. They have to figure out how to ask, figure out what to ask for, figure out how to evaluate the output, and figure out how to use it. Most attorneys, under billing pressure and with client work competing for every available hour, make the rational choice: they handle it themselves or they skip it.

Research tracking attorney behavior following business development training found that when attorneys return from workshops with intent to engage the marketing department, the most common failure point is the first interaction: the attorney does not know how to brief the request, the marketing team does not have enough context to execute it well, and the result is something the attorney cannot use. After one or two experiences like that, most attorneys stop trying. (Calibrate Legal, 2024)

The marketing department is not failing. The briefing system that should sit between attorney intent and marketing execution was never built. That is a leadership gap, not a staffing gap.

What the marketing director is actually telling you

Most law firm marketing directors are not in a position to tell the managing partner that the system around them is broken. They are junior to most of the attorneys they serve, they have no budget authority for their own professional development, and their job security is directly tied to the managing partner’s perception of their performance. The incentive structure pushes them toward making the current situation work rather than naming what is not working.

Research on law firm marketing department burnout found that 58 percent of marketing directors report feeling professionally isolated within their firms, and 47 percent say they do not receive regular feedback from firm leadership on whether their work is producing the outcomes the firm values. (LMA, 2025) Those numbers describe a workforce operating without clear direction, without a feedback loop, and without a meaningful connection between their daily work and the firm’s stated business development priorities.

The managing partner reads those symptoms as a motivation problem or a capability problem. In most cases, they are neither. They are a management problem. The director does not know what success looks like in the managing partner’s terms because the managing partner has never defined it in terms the director can act on. Saying “we need more business” is not a direction. Defining which practice groups, which attorney segments, and which client types represent the firm’s highest-priority growth opportunities, and building the department’s work plan around that, is a direction. Most marketing directors have never received that conversation.

When a managing partner says the marketing department is not producing results, the honest diagnostic question is: what results did you define, for which attorneys, with what timeline, and what did you build to connect the department’s output to those results? In the vast majority of cases, the answer to every element of that question is: none, we did not.

The measurement problem that makes everything else worse

There is a second-order effect to the structural gap that makes it self-reinforcing: when the system connecting attorney behavior to marketing output to business outcomes is absent, the firm cannot measure whether any of it is working. And when the firm cannot measure whether it is working, it cannot make informed decisions about where to invest next.

Research from Thomson Reuters Institute and Forrester Consulting found that over 80 percent of law firm leaders identify measuring the business outcomes of marketing and professional development investments as a major unmet challenge. (Thomson Reuters / Forrester, 2026) The firms are not failing to measure because the data is inaccessible. They are failing to measure because they never defined what the measurement should connect.

Consider what would be required to answer the question: did our marketing investment last year produce revenue? You would need to know which marketing activities were executed, which attorneys were involved, what attorney behavior those activities were designed to support, whether that behavior happened, and whether it advanced specific client relationships. Most firms have partial data on the first item. They have almost nothing on the rest.

This is not an analytics problem that a new piece of software can solve. It is a workflow design problem. The workflow from marketing output to attorney action to client engagement to matter origination was never built as a connected system. It was built, if it was built at all, as a series of disconnected activities that everyone hoped would somehow add up to revenue.

The consequence is a firm that keeps investing in the same activities because it cannot prove they are not working. Nobody can say the sponsorship was a bad idea because nobody tracked whether it produced a meaningful conversation. Nobody can say the thought leadership article underperformed because nobody defined what performance looked like before it was published. The investment continues, the measurement gap continues, and the managing partner’s confidence in the marketing function continues to erode without a clear target for what would actually improve it.

What a functional system actually looks like

Firms that have closed this gap share a common structural feature: they built a defined workflow connecting attorney business development activity to marketing department support to outcome tracking. The specific tools and processes vary. The structure is consistent.

The first element is a defined engagement model. The firm has articulated, in writing, what attorney engagement with the marketing department should look like for different types of activities. An attorney who wants to pursue a specific client knows the first step: they meet with the marketing director, they provide a one-page briefing on the target, and the director produces a research summary and a proposed outreach strategy within two weeks. That is not aspirational. It is a defined process with defined inputs and a defined output. The attorney knows what to do. The director knows what to produce. There is no cold start.

The second element is attorney-level training on how to work with the department. This training is not about why business development matters or how to be a better networker. It is practical: how to brief a thought leadership article, how to prepare for a client event and what you need from marketing before and after, how to ask for a proposal that positions your work effectively without wasting three rounds of revision. Attorneys who receive this training engage the marketing department at significantly higher rates and report higher satisfaction with the output. The training removes the cold start problem for the attorney and the context problem for the department simultaneously.

The third element is a measurement framework built before the activities begin. The managing partner, the marketing director, and the practice group leaders agree on what the department is trying to produce in a given period, which attorney segments are the priority, and what behavioral indicators would show that the work is translating to engagement. This is not a complex data infrastructure project. For a smaller firm, it can be a simple quarterly review: here are the three practice groups we prioritized, here are the attorney activities we were supporting, here is whether those activities happened and what the early relationship signals look like. That review does not require a CRM. It requires a discipline around connecting output to behavior to outcome that most firms have never applied.

The fourth element is an accountability structure that sits above the managing partner’s periodic check-in. This is the piece most firms skip because it is the most uncomfortable to build. It means that specific attorneys have made specific behavioral commitments around their business development activity, those commitments are tracked, and there is a structured conversation at regular intervals about whether they are being met. For most law firms, that level of accountability around non-billable behavior is culturally unfamiliar. Partners are accustomed to managing client work with rigor and business development planning with almost none. The accountability structure does not have to be punitive. It has to be real.

The role of the managing partner in building this system

None of the elements described above can be built by the marketing director alone. The director does not have the authority to hold attorneys accountable. They do not set firm-wide expectations around attorney behavior. They cannot require that partners attend training or engage a defined intake process for marketing support. All of those things require managing partner sponsorship, and in most cases, managing partner initiative.

This is the piece that most of the literature on law firm marketing gets wrong. It frames the marketing director’s job as relationship management: build rapport with attorneys, be responsive, prove your value over time, and gradually earn more engagement. That framing puts the burden on the director and removes it from firm leadership. It treats as a sales problem what is actually a management problem.

The managing partner who built the firm’s associate development program did not tell the professional development director to build rapport with associates and earn their engagement over time. They defined what development milestones every associate should reach, built a curriculum around those milestones, assigned supervisory accountability for whether the milestones were being hit, and reviewed the data at defined intervals. Law firms are rigorous about the development of attorney legal skills because legal skill development is connected, in a clear and measurable way, to client work and firm reputation. Business development skills receive none of that rigor because the connection to revenue is less direct and harder to trace.

That is not an argument for tolerating the gap. It is an explanation for why the gap persists at firms with strong leadership in every other area. The managing partner has not been asked to apply the same operational rigor to business development infrastructure that they apply to client service infrastructure. Nobody has built the equivalent of a matter management system for the work that produces new matters.

Building it does not require a large investment. The firms that have done it most effectively started with two or three practice groups, defined a simple engagement model with the marketing director, trained the attorneys in those groups on how to use it, and ran the measurement cycle for one quarter. The early results gave them the data to make a case for expanding the system to the rest of the firm. The initial investment was a commitment of leadership time, not budget.

What to do first

If you are a managing partner who has read this far and recognized the pattern in your own firm, the question is where to start. The answer is not to redesign the department or replace the director. It is to answer three questions honestly, and then build from the answers.

The first question: can you articulate what your marketing department is responsible for producing, in terms specific enough that you could tell a new director on their first day exactly what success looks like in twelve months? Not “generate more business development activity.” Something closer to: “support the corporate practice group in moving three target clients from periodic contact to active relationship within eighteen months, with defined outreach touchpoints, a quarterly thought leadership piece, and a sponsorship strategy built around the two conferences those clients attend.” If you cannot answer the question at that level of specificity, neither can your marketing director. They are operating on an approximation of what you want. The gap between what you actually want and what they are working toward is where most of the inefficiency lives.

The second question: if your marketing director left tomorrow, could you describe to a replacement candidate what the attorney-facing engagement model looks like? How does an attorney initiate a project with the department? What is the process for briefing a thought leadership piece? What does the intake conversation for a new client pursuit look like? If the answers to those questions live only in the current director’s head, you do not have a system. You have a person filling the gap where a system should be. When that person leaves, the gap returns.

The third question: what was the last marketing investment your firm made that you can connect directly to a specific piece of new business or a measurable advance in a client relationship? If you cannot answer that question, it is not because the answer does not exist. It is because the measurement system that would surface it was never built. That system is the first thing worth building.

None of those questions has a simple answer. But asking them out loud, and being willing to sit with the honest version of the responses, is the beginning of building the infrastructure that turns a marketing department into a revenue-aligned function rather than a cost center with unclear accountability.

The cost of leaving the gap in place

There is a temptation to treat the marketing department gap as a chronic condition rather than an acute problem, on the grounds that the firm is doing reasonably well without fixing it. That temptation is worth examining.

The Clio Legal Trends Report found that law firms with fewer than ten attorneys spend an average of 1.8 percent of revenue on marketing, while larger regional firms typically spend between 2 and 3.5 percent. (Clio, 2025) For a firm with $5 million in annual revenue, that is between $90,000 and $175,000 per year. Research from the BTI Consulting Group found that firms with structured marketing and business development programs, defined as those with clear attorney behavioral expectations, a functional department-attorney collaboration model, and outcome tracking, consistently outperform peer firms on client retention and matter expansion rates. (BTI Consulting, 2024) The performance difference is not marginal. Across a five-year period, the compounding effect on revenue from better client retention and higher matter expansion rates at existing clients substantially exceeds the cost of building the system.

There is also the talent cost to consider. Law firm marketing directors turn over at high rates. The average tenure in the role is less than three years, and research from the LMA suggests that the leading predictor of early departure is the director’s sense that they do not have the leadership support to do the job well. (LMA, 2025) Every time a marketing director leaves, the firm absorbs recruitment costs, a transition period during which the department is effectively at reduced capacity, and the loss of institutional knowledge about which attorneys were most engaged and how. When the successor arrives and finds the same structural gap the predecessor did, the cycle restarts.

The firms that have the most stable marketing departments, and the highest attorney engagement rates, are not the ones that hired the best directors. They are the ones that gave those directors a clear mandate, a functional engagement model, and leadership accountability that made the role viable. The director’s capability matters. The system they operate within matters more.

The marketing department gap is a solvable problem. It does not require a large budget, a new software platform, or a replacement of current staff. It requires a managing partner who is willing to apply to business development infrastructure the same level of operational discipline they apply to every other part of the firm they have built successfully. The resource is already in place. The system that connects it to results is not. That system starts with a conversation between the managing partner and the marketing director, grounded in three questions that most firms have never asked out loud.

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