A Note from Shireen
Law firms spend a time and money on marketing and business development and rarely know exactly what’s working, so most keep funding the same activities because everyone else does them: publishing legal updates, sponsoring familiar events, sending kitchen-sink proposals, etc.
I wrote this article because firms need a better strategy and make the case that the better test for marketing is usefulness: Does it help a client understand something, make a decision, solve a problem, or trust how your firm thinks?
A few ways that shows up in practice:
- Strong thought leadership leads the conversation: Legal summaries are readily available. Go further. Explain what the change means for their business, where you think the risks or opportunities are, what may come next, and what they should do about it.
- Make it easy for clients to know what it will look like to work with you: Most firms still send pages of bios, awards, firm history, and rates, then leave the client wondering how work will get done. Instead, cut the fluff and lay out your approach, what they’ll receive, who will do what, realistic budget, and where the unknowns are.
- Create conversations instead of buying exposure: A logo on a conference coffee cup doesn’t move a relationship forward. Curate your own intimate settings focused on conversation with the right people.
Bottom line, be relevant - be useful now so clients remember who helped them think better when they do need you.
We help law firm leaders build stronger growth strategies, including how they sharpen marketing, business development, proposals, and client outreach. If your firm is burning time and money but not sure you’re getting a payoff, I’m happy to brainstorm ways we’ve helped firms like yours get better ROI. Meanwhile, the full Law360 article is below.
As Published in Law360
Marketing and business development are among the largest discretionary investments law firms make, and they're also the hardest to measure. The challenge is figuring out where to spend your firm's time and money when the path from marketing effort to engaged clients is rarely obvious.
That question is becoming harder to ignore. A May report from Thomson Reuters found that rising costs are eating into law firm growth, putting more pressure on leaders to be disciplined about where the firm spends time and money.[1] Marketing and business development are part of that equation, especially as the cost of staying visible continues to climb.[2]
At the same time, clients are becoming more selective before hiring counsel. They are pushing back on bills, asking for more proof of value and moving work in-house or to alternative providers.[3] Point being, firms cannot assume that visibility alone will move the right prospects closer to hiring them.
Still, without a clearer way to decide which marketing and business development efforts deserve continued investment, most leaders fall back on the same playbook as their peers: putting out alerts in response to new legal developments, attending the usual events and keeping the firm visible in familiar ways. But in this market, familiar is not enough.
So, where can your firm start? The first step is to sort activities into two categories: what you know is working and what still needs to earn its place. If an activity has a clear record of producing work, strengthening key relationships or moving the right prospects forward, keep doing it and keep improving it. This article focuses on the harder category: the activity firms keep funding even when the return is unclear. For that, usefulness is the better test:
- Does the marketing activity give the recipient something valuable before you ask for anything in return?
- Does it help a client understand an issue, identify a practical next step or trust how the firm thinks?
- Is it likely to be shared or start a conversation?
As explained in more detail below, relevance takes more work, but that's where the return is.
Why Most Marketing Falls Short
The familiar activities are not inherently wrong. Firms should publish, attend events, build relationships and send proposals. But those activities work better when they start with what clients want to know, not what the firm wants to say.
Too often, firms begin with internal questions: What do we want to announce? Where do we want our name to appear? What credentials do we want to highlight? Those questions are reasonable, but they tend to produce marketing that looks familiar and feels thin: sponsorships with no real conversation strategy, thought leadership that summarizes legal developments without offering business guidance, and proposals filled with bios, accolades, and rates, with no clear picture of how the firm will help.
Clients are asking different questions. Do you understand the problem? Can you help us make a better decision? Do we trust how you think?
Leading the Conversation
Most thought leadership doesn't contain original thought and is better defined as legal summaries or regulatory updates. That content is readily available elsewhere.
Good thought leadership offers usable insight and reflects a deep understanding of the audience's context. Right now, that means helping clients make sense of geopolitical and economic uncertainty that is slowing investment, complicating deals, and creating pressure around restructuring, disputes, workforce decisions, and risk.[4]
It also means leading in the gray areas where business, technology and regulation are moving faster than settled law. Clients are not looking for another recap of what changed; they want guidance on what it means, what may come next and how to make decisions when there is no clear precedent. For example:
- Instead of summarizing proposed artificial intelligence regulation, explain how you're helping companies create and manage internal policies before regulators catch up.
- Instead of repeating new privacy or cybersecurity rules, explain where clients are exposed operationally, what gaps are showing up in vendor contracts or incident response plans and what they should tighten up first.
- Instead of reciting employment trends, show how companies can design work policies that balance cost, retention and risk.
Once you've written good thought leadership, how do you get more juice from the squeeze? You want the content to land in the right inboxes and trigger action. One of the biggest mistakes firms make is treating content like a one-way broadcast instead of the start of a conversation. For better outreach:
- If you publish a regulatory update, say what it means for the recipient's business and offer to talk it through. That might mean segmenting your email list — for example, by industry or jurisdiction.
- Don't assume clients will read everything. Flag what matters: "We're being asked the most questions about XYZ, and you can find that in the third section below."
- If the topic is evolving, follow up. Short updates in the form of a reply can be more valuable than the original piece, feeling more like a natural conversation and less like a news blast.
- Finally, make your content easy to use internally. Adding a short summary or a few bullet points that the recipient can forward to a CEO or other stakeholders gives your content a practical application.
Ask yourself: Would someone use this, share this or act on it? If not, say less.
Treating Your Proposal Like the First Deliverable
Whether it's a formal response to a request for proposals, a pitch follow-up or a fee proposal after an initial conversation, the proposal is where your firm shows a potential client how it will handle the work.
Yet most firms send dozens of pages cluttered with accolades, firm history and bios of people the client probably won't meet, ending in a rate matrix and a vague reference to being open to other fee models.
None of that tells a client how the work will get done, what they'll receive, who will be involved or what the investment will look like.
The firms that win more pitches don't leave potential clients guessing. That means giving clients a structured view of what to expect. A strong proposal should:
- Lay out your approach clearly. Break the work into stages and explain how you will solve the problem so it's clear you've done this before and will be focused and efficient.
- Define deliverables and outcomes. Be explicit about what the client will receive, such as analyses, filings, drafts or action plans, at different stages.
- Provide a realistic budget. Move beyond a rate card: Give ranges, break them down by phases where that's helpful and be clear about the factors that will affect the range.
- Offer options where possible. Present a recommended approach alongside alternatives, with clearly identified trade-offs, so the client can make choices based on their priorities.
- Address uncertainty upfront. If there are unknowns, explain how you'll handle them and how that affects scope, timing and cost.
- Show your point of view. Especially in gray areas, explain how you think. That's what differentiates you.
- Give real examples. If you've successfully done this — or similar engagements — before, showcase those wins and how you got there.
Good proposals don't make clients piece together what it will be like to work with you.
Investing in Connection Over Exposure
Firms spend heavily on visibility — conference booths, logo placements, coffee stations and so on — but those dollars rarely deliver meaningful return because the exposure is passive. It doesn't build trust, create context or deepen relationships.
Connection does, so if you want a better return on investment for your spending, start creating environments where you can ensure meaningful conversations with prospects you want to work with you. Here's how to do it better.
Curate a room, don't rent a booth.
Skip the sponsorship at a crowded conference and instead host a private breakfast or dinner at a nearby location. For example, invite six general counsel from the same sector to a conversation framed around the prompt, "What will your CEO expect from legal this year?"
Develop executive roundtables around real pressure points.
Consider arranging virtual roundtables for your clients and prospects to talk about common struggles, such as those of chief compliance officers of financial institutions or business owners of midmarket companies. Let your participants actually participate in shaping the agenda.
Strengthen referral relationships.
Arm your referral sources with useful tools and better ways to help their own clients. If accountants, bankers, consultants, HR advisers or other professionals regularly notice issues before clients call you, create short guides or discussion tools around those moments. Then keep the relationship active with small-group check-ins around shared client issues or market trends.
The bonus to building events around conversations with depth is those topics can naturally feed back into your thought leadership strategy so you're writing about the issues that matter most to your clients base and referral sources.
Conclusion
Today's clients have more information before they ever speak to counsel, but that doesn't mean they have more clarity. That's your opening for better marketing: Help them understand what matters before they hire you.
Generic updates and logo placements won't get you there. Give clients something they can use, show them how your firm thinks and make their next decision easier.
Moving past the obvious takes staying close enough to clients to know what they are really wrestling with and developing a point of view worth sharing. That will take more time, but it will also raise the level of thinking inside your firm, and that payoff goes beyond the return on marketing dollars.
Shireen Hilal is the chief executive officer at Maior Strategic Consulting.
The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employer, its clients, or Portfolio Media Inc., or any of its or their respective
affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
[1] https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/legal/lffi-q1-2026-strong-inputs-average-output/.
[2] https://attorneyatlawmagazine.com/legal-marketing/why-law-firm-marketing-costs-are-skyrocketing-in-2025.
[3] https://www.law.com/international-edition/2026/01/26/law-firm-margins-shrink-as-gcs-press-for-transparency-and-value-like-never-before.
[4] https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/legal/lffi-q1-2026-strong-inputs-average-output/.
