TL;DR

Attorneys don’t use law firm marketing departments because nobody taught them how. The gap is a skills gap, not a motivation gap. The fix is structured training followed by 90 days of coached reinforcement, not better messaging or bigger budgets.

Most managing partners I talk to have the same theory: attorneys don’t engage with the marketing department because they don’t see value in it. Fix the relationship, fix the problem.

That theory is wrong. And the reason it persists is that it lets everyone off the hook: the attorney, the marketing director, and the firm’s leadership.

Here is what I actually saw running marketing at regional American Lawyer (AmLaw) firms for fifteen years: attorneys are not avoiding marketing because they think it does not work. They are avoiding it because nobody ever taught them how to use it.

Two departments. One missing conversation.

Law firm marketing departments are built to produce. They have writers, designers, event managers, and business development (BD) coordinators. They know how to execute. What they need from an attorney is a brief: a clear picture of the target, the relationship stage, and the goal.

Attorneys are trained to think and argue. They know their clients, their practices, and their industries. What they do not know (what law school never taught them and no one inside the firm has explained) is how to translate what they know into something the marketing department can execute against.

So the attorney walks into a BD meeting with a vague aspiration. The marketing director walks out with an unclear mandate. Neither person failed. The process failed them. Research on attorney engagement with marketing departments found that fewer than one in three attorneys could articulate a measurable business development goal before a BD meeting, even when the meeting was scheduled specifically to set one. (Legal Marketing Association, State of Law Firm Business Development, 2023)

Why the standard fixes do not work

Firms that recognize the problem typically respond with one of three interventions: hire a better BD director, bring in a motivational speaker for a partner retreat, or roll out a client relationship management (CRM) system and hope attorneys populate it. None of these address what is actually broken.

A better BD director cannot teach attorneys the skill if the attorneys will not engage with the process. A partner retreat creates energy that dissipates within weeks without reinforcement. A CRM is an output system: it records activity, it does not generate it. Studies on behavior change in professional service firms consistently show that skill acquisition without sustained reinforcement reverts within 60 to 90 days, regardless of the quality of the initial training. (Calibrate Legal, Attorney Behavior Change Research, 2022)

The skill gap remains. The cycle repeats. The marketing budget renews.

What the skill actually looks like

Attorneys who generate consistent BD results are not more motivated than their colleagues. They are more skilled at one specific thing: they know how to brief a marketing department.

They can walk into a conversation with their marketing director and explain who they are trying to reach, what relationship stage they are at, what they need from the department in the next 30 days, and how they will know if it worked. That is the skill. It is teachable. Most attorneys at regional firms have never learned it.

When an attorney has that skill, the dynamic with the marketing department changes completely. The department stops guessing and starts executing. The attorney stops avoiding meetings and starts driving them. Activity becomes measurable because the attorney has defined what they are trying to accomplish.

What this means for firm leadership

If the problem is structural, the solution has to be structural. That means identifying the gap precisely, not assuming it is the same at every firm, and building a deliberate process to close it.

The firms that get this right do not look like firms with better attorneys. 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 were order-takers are operating as strategic partners.

That change does not happen through culture or aspiration. It happens through a structured, measurable process that teaches the skill, reinforces it over time, and holds both sides accountable for the result.

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