The Practice Group Marketing Plan That Never Gets Used

Every regional law firm I have worked with has a practice group marketing plan. Most of those plans were produced by the marketing department, reviewed briefly by the practice group leader, presented at an annual planning meeting, and then filed.

By February, the plan is a document. By June, nobody is looking at it. By the next planning cycle, the marketing department is building a new one that looks a great deal like the old one.

The instinct is to blame the plan. The plan was too ambitious. The targets were wrong. The tactics were out of date. In my experience, the plan is rarely the problem. The problem is that the plan describes what the marketing department will produce, not what the attorneys will do.

A production schedule wearing a strategy document

A typical practice group marketing plan has sections for target markets, content strategy, events, digital presence, and budget. It specifies what will be written, what conferences the group will attend, and what campaigns the marketing department will run.

What it almost never specifies is which attorneys are responsible for which targets, what they have committed to doing in the next ninety days, how often they will brief the marketing department, and how the group will measure whether relationship advancement is actually happening.

Without those elements, the plan is a production schedule. It tells the marketing department what to build. It does not tell anyone in the practice group what to do. And since attorney behavior is what determines whether any of the marketing production reaches actual clients and prospects, the plan can be executed perfectly and produce nothing the firm can point to.

What the plan needs that it usually does not have

Three elements transform a practice group marketing plan from a document into a working system.

The first is individual attorney commitments. Not a group goal. Not a collective aspiration. Each attorney in the group has a named target list and a specific commitment for the next thirty days: who they will contact, what they need from the marketing department to support that contact, and when they will report back. The group plan becomes the container. The individual commitments are what actually drive activity.

The second is a defined briefing cadence. The plan should specify how often each attorney will meet with a marketing department contact, what they need to bring to that meeting, and what the marketing department will produce in response. Without that cadence, the attorney-marketing relationship defaults to sporadic requests and unclear mandates.

The third is a measurement system that tracks relationship advancement, not just marketing activity. How many of the group's named targets moved from awareness to conversation in the last quarter? How many conversations produced a matter? What did the marketing department produce that can be connected to a specific relationship outcome? Those questions require a measurement system the plan almost never establishes.

Why practice group leaders do not push for these elements

Because individual accountability is uncomfortable to create and maintain. A group goal diffuses responsibility. When nobody hits a group goal, the conversation is about market conditions, firm resources, and competing priorities. When an individual attorney misses their personal commitment, the conversation is about that attorney.

Practice group leaders who have the standing and the appetite to have those conversations produce meaningfully different outcomes than those who rely on the group plan to carry the accountability it was never designed to carry.

The plan is not the problem. The plan is the starting point. What it needs to become useful is a structure for individual commitment, a regular briefing cadence with the marketing department, and a measurement system that connects what the department produces to what actually moves in the market.

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