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Marketing And The Law

Marketing in the legal field is broken. There are no easy answers on how to fix it.

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MarketingMarketing in the law is broken. Across the legal field, lawyers, expert witnesses, litigation finance firms, and a variety of other related parties all struggle with that fundamental part of the business.

The trouble with marketing in the law probably stems in part from the attitude some lawyers have towards marketing. The legal field is divided between different sub-fields, and some of those sub-fields such as personal injury attorneys market themselves extensively via every medium possible — phone books, online, billboards, on the side of buses, and anywhere else they can find.

Yet many other attorneys, particularly those with larger law firms and those serving businesses, hesitate to do any marketing. As one business attorney I know once put it, “any attorney worth their fees doesn’t need to market themselves — word of mouth will take care of business”.

That view has leaked through and permeated many of the other industries that service the field of law. Attorneys sometimes do not market themselves, and so many seem to take a dim view of service providers that feel the need to. As a result, expert witnesses, litigation finance providers, litigation consultants, and others rely on personal networks to get work in most cases.

To be clear, there are plenty of expert witnesses and other service providers marketing themselves through various directories and other online advertising methods. These methods generally do not work well in my experience. In most cases, service providers do not get the results they expected from what I have seen.

Successful legal service providers have to cultivate networks of attorneys in order to slowly build up new business over time. Attorneys who do go looking for a service provider outside of their personal network most often simply use Google to find one — that requires a good website for the service provider — an ironic fact since many solo practitioner attorneys do not use websites at all.

The current system is not particularly efficient or effective. There is no reason to believe that the people attorneys know personally are always the best choice for the needs of the attorney. The problem is that the legal field is so big and so balkanized that the search costs to find new providers are high. As a result, it is often not feasible for an attorney to search through the mountain of alternatives to the status quo.

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To summarize, the marketing dilemma in the legal field is straightforward — attorneys and legal service providers lack effective tools to reach their customers when targeting anything other than the general public.

So what is the alternative to the current marketing morass?

The answer is unclear. Content marketing through sites like Above the Law is effective — but it requires investment on the part of the marketing in coming up with something meaningful to say that is not just advertising.

Google provides a partial solution in the legal field as it does so many other areas because it can give specialized attention based on the audience needs. The problem with Google is that it requires a large upfront investment in an effective web presence, and it is not that great at distinguishing between businesses in different areas of the country. Google also gets cluttered by other marketing vehicles trying to ride its coattails. Just search “expert witness in” any state for evidence of that.

Another alternative solution to the marketing issue would be less industry diffusion. Many industry participants in the legal field are small firms or solo practitioners. This is true even in litigation finance and more complex service fields. These professionals lack the time and money to effectively market themselves in a way that cuts through the clutter. One way to deal with this is either more mergers and vertical integration in the space, or forming professional coops the way some other industries do.

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Marketing in the legal field is broken. There are no easy answers on how to fix it. But with the excess capacity in the field, unless lawyers and those who work with them start to think outside of the box about how to connect with clients and grow the industry’s value proposition, hard times are likely in the future for the field as a whole.

Michael McDonald is an assistant professor of finance at Fairfield University in Connecticut. He holds a PhD in finance. Michael consults extensively through Morning Investments Consulting and writes for Litigation Finance Journal. Michael has served as an expert witness in legal disputes, and is an arbitrator with the Financial Industry National Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Michael can be reached at [email protected].

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