What to Look for in a Law Firm Marketing Advisor

When a regional law firm decides it needs outside help with marketing, the first instinct is usually to look for someone who can fix the output. Better website. Stronger campaigns. More content. A cleaner digital presence. The search begins with the question: who can make our marketing better?

That question is reasonable. It is also, at most firms, the wrong question.

The reason marketing underperforms at most regional firms is not a production problem. The marketing department can write. It can design. It can execute campaigns. What it cannot do is invent the inputs it needs to execute against. When attorneys do not know how to brief the department, define a target, or describe what progress looks like, the team produces work with no measurable purpose. Hiring someone to improve the output does not fix that. It produces better-looking work with the same structural problem underneath.

The right question is not who can make our marketing better. It is whether the firm has a production problem or a structural one. The answer determines everything about what kind of outside help is actually useful.

Two problems that look identical from the outside

A firm where the marketing department is genuinely under-resourced and a firm where the marketing department is structurally disconnected from attorney behavior look nearly the same from a leadership perspective. Both produce marketing that does not move the needle. Both generate frustration from attorneys who expect results. Both lead to conversations about whether the team is the right team.

The difference only becomes visible when you ask a specific question: what percentage of marketing department time is consumed by requests that arrived without a defined target, a relationship stage, and a measurable outcome?

At firms with a production problem, that number is low. Attorneys know what they want, brief the department effectively, and the bottleneck is capacity or capability on the execution side.

At firms with a structural problem, that number is high. The department is busy. The firm is not growing. And every attempt to fix it by improving execution makes the underlying gap harder to see.

Research tracking attorney requests across multiple regional firms found that the vast majority of marketing department time is consumed by requests that arrive without defined outcomes. The department fills in the blanks, produces something, and the work cannot be connected to any measurable result. The firm concludes the department is the problem. The actual problem is upstream. (Thomson Reuters Institute, 2023)

What a production-focused advisor looks like

If your firm has a genuine production problem, the right advisor brings execution capability. They audit your digital presence, identify gaps in content or search visibility, improve campaign quality, and build systems for measuring results. Their work is primarily about what the marketing department produces and how it reaches the market.

This is the most common type of legal marketing advisor. Most firms offering outside help to law firms are solving this problem. The advice tends to focus on search engine optimization (SEO), content strategy, digital advertising, website quality, and social media presence. If your marketing department is well-briefed by attorneys and the bottleneck is genuinely on the output side, this is the right kind of help.

The tell: a production-focused advisor will spend the first conversation auditing your marketing channels. They want to see your website analytics, your content calendar, your search rankings.

What a structural advisor looks like

If your firm has a structural problem, the right advisor works on the gap between attorney behavior and marketing department utilization. Their focus is not on what the department produces. It is on whether attorneys know how to use the department effectively, whether requests arrive with the inputs required to execute against, and whether firm leadership has a system for connecting marketing activity to business development (BD) outcomes.

This type of advisor is less common in the legal marketing space. The structural problem is harder to name and harder to sell, since it requires firm leadership to acknowledge that the issue is not the marketing team. It also requires working with attorneys directly, which means the engagement has to reach partners and practice group leaders, not just the chief marketing officer (CMO) or marketing director.

The tell: a structural advisor will spend the first conversation asking about attorney engagement patterns. How often do attorneys initiate contact with the marketing department? When they do, what does the request look like? Can attorneys describe their BD targets with enough specificity for the department to execute against them?

The question that separates the two

Before engaging any outside advisor, ask this: is the marketing department under-resourced, or is it under-briefed?

Under-resourced means the team has the inputs it needs but lacks the capacity or capability to execute effectively. The solution is production support.

Under-briefed means the team has capacity but lacks the inputs required to direct it toward measurable outcomes. The solution is structural, and it starts with how attorneys are prepared to work with the department.

Most firms assume the problem is the first one. Most firms, when they look closely, find it is the second.

The distinction matters because the wrong kind of outside help does not just fail to fix the problem. It makes the structural gap harder to address, since every improvement in output creates the appearance of progress without changing the underlying dynamic.

Common Questions