What Managing Partners Get Wrong About Marketing

In 30 years of working at the most senior level inside law firms, I have watched managing partners make the same mistakes about marketing repeatedly. Not because they are unintelligent — they are often brilliant lawyers — but because the legal profession has a deeply embedded misunderstanding of what marketing actually is.

The most common mistake is treating marketing as a cost centre rather than a growth function. When revenue is strong, the marketing budget grows. When revenue dips, marketing is the first cut. This is backwards. Marketing is how you ensure the next year's revenue. Cutting it when you need growth most is like cancelling your gym membership because you are out of shape.

The second mistake is hiring agencies instead of strategists. Agencies are excellent at execution — campaigns, content, events, design. But they cannot set your strategic direction. They do not sit in your management meetings. They do not understand the politics of your partnership. They do not know which practice group leader is blocking change and why. You need someone who has sat in your chair before you need someone who can redesign your website.

The third mistake is measuring the wrong things. Website traffic, social media followers, event attendance — these are activity metrics, not growth metrics. The metrics that matter are revenue per client, client retention rate, conversion rate from enquiry to instruction, and share of wallet within existing clients. If your marketing team cannot tell you these numbers, you have a communications department, not a marketing function.

The firms that get marketing right treat it as a board-level strategic function. The marketing director sits at the management table, has access to financial data, and is accountable for growth — not for producing brochures. This is still rare in legal. It should not be.

If your marketing strategy was written by someone who has never run a law firm's marketing function, it was not a strategy. It was a wish list. The difference matters.