What a Law Firm Marketing Department Actually Needs from Attorneys

The greatest challenge facing law firm marketing and business development (BD) departments has not changed since research on the topic began. Year after year, across surveys of marketing directors, CMOs, and BD leaders at firms of every size, the answer is the same: lack of lawyer engagement.

Not budget. Not technology. Not the quality of the marketing team.

Lawyer engagement.

That finding, consistent across more than a decade of Thomson Reuters Institute research on law firm marketing, points to something most firms are still reluctant to name directly. The marketing department is not underperforming. It is under-briefed. And the difference between those two diagnoses determines whether the solution is a personnel change or a structural one.

Why the marketing department is not the bottleneck

A regional law firm’s marketing department typically includes writers, designers, event coordinators, business development managers, and digital specialists. The team knows how to execute. What it cannot do is invent the inputs it needs to execute against.

Every effective marketing campaign starts with three things: a clear target, a defined relationship stage, and a measurable goal. Who are we trying to reach? Where are we in that relationship? What does progress look like in the next 30 to 60 days?

When an attorney submits a request without those inputs, the department fills in the blanks. It produces something. A profile update, a generic article, an event invitation with no specific audience. The work gets done. The result produces nothing measurable, since there was nothing measurable to produce in the first place.

Research tracking attorney requests at multiple regional firms found that the vast majority of marketing department time is consumed by requests that arrive without defined outcomes. The department is busy. The firm is not growing. Leadership concludes the department is the problem. The actual problem never gets named. (Thomson Reuters Institute / Marketing Partner Forum, 2023)

The bottleneck is not inside the marketing department. It is upstream, in the gap between what an attorney wants to accomplish and what they know how to ask for.

The three things a marketing director actually needs

Most attorneys frame their relationship with the marketing department as a service relationship. They have a need; the department fills it. That framing produces the dynamic that marketing directors at regional firms describe most often: requests that are vague, recurring, and impossible to measure.

What a marketing director actually needs from an attorney is not effort or enthusiasm. It is a brief. Three specific inputs that make the difference between a campaign that produces something and one that produces activity.

The first input is a target. Not a practice area. Not a general description of potential clients. A specific type of relationship the attorney is trying to develop, with enough context for the marketing team to understand what that person or company cares about and what would reach them. The more specific the target, the more executable the campaign.

The second input is a relationship stage. Is this a cold introduction, a warm reconnection, or an active pursuit? Each stage requires a different approach. An attorney who cannot describe where they are in a relationship forces the marketing department to guess, and the guess is almost always too generic to move the needle.

The third input is a definition of progress. What would a successful outcome look like in 30 days? Not a closed matter. A next step: a meeting requested, a piece of content delivered, an event attended. Without this, the marketing director has no way to evaluate whether the work they produced moved anything forward, and the attorney has no reason to follow up.

These are not complicated inputs. They are the baseline that separates a request from a brief. And they are inputs most attorneys at regional firms have never been taught to provide, since nobody in their career ever explained that this is what a productive working relationship with a marketing department requires.

Why attorneys do not provide this — and why that is not their fault

The instinct, when attorney engagement is low, is to conclude that attorneys do not value marketing. That framing is convenient. It puts the failure outside the firm’s control and gives leadership a reason not to address it structurally.

The more accurate explanation is simpler: attorneys do not know how to brief a marketing department because nobody taught them. Law school covers legal reasoning, advocacy, and procedure. It does not cover how to translate a relationship goal into a marketing request. Firms assume the skill is intuitive. It is not.

The Thomson Reuters research that identified lawyer engagement as the persistent top challenge also found that 71 percent of firms report no rise in collaboration between attorneys and marketing teams. That number has held steady across multiple survey cycles. The firms that do report increased collaboration, however, show a different pattern: 100 percent of them report positive results. The correlation between attorney-marketing collaboration and measurable outcomes is not ambiguous. What is ambiguous is why firms continue to accept the engagement gap rather than close it. (Thomson Reuters Institute, 2023)

Research tracking more than 80,000 hours of law firm marketing time found that 5 percent of attorneys consume 44 percent of marketing department time and attention. The other 95 percent are either disengaged entirely or using the department only for low-value administrative tasks. (Calibrate Legal, 2026)

That concentration is not a coincidence. The 5 percent who drive nearly half of all marketing activity are not more motivated than their colleagues. They know how to brief the department. They learned at some point, through experience or mentorship, what inputs a marketing director needs to execute effectively. That knowledge is the differentiator. It is teachable. It is not being taught at most firms.

What changes when attorneys know how to brief the department

When an attorney can walk into a conversation with their marketing director and describe their target, the relationship stage, and what progress looks like in 30 days, the dynamic changes completely.

The marketing director stops guessing. The department produces work with a defined purpose. The attorney follows up because they have a reason to, since they defined the outcome they are tracking. The work becomes measurable because the attorney made it measurable before the campaign began.

Firms where this dynamic exists do not look like firms with bigger marketing budgets. They look like firms where the attorneys and the marketing department are working from the same page. Partners who were invisible in BD meetings are running their own pipelines. Marketing directors who spent most of their time managing vague requests are operating as strategic partners. Attribution between marketing activity and BD outcomes becomes visible because someone defined what they were looking for before the work began.

The firms that close this gap do not do it by hiring better marketing directors or pushing attorneys to try harder. They do it by treating the briefing skill as exactly what it is: a specific, teachable capability that attorneys at regional firms are not getting anywhere else. Once that skill exists, the collaboration research at Thomson Reuters describes becomes possible. Until it does, the engagement gap persists, the department stays under-briefed, and the survey results stay the same.

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