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LexisNexis survey finds lawyers turning toward pro marketers
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: August 27, 2021
The pandemic affected the way in which law firms have approached marketing, according to the 2021 LexisNexis Interaction Marketing & Business Development Survey.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. The instantaneous switch from in-person to virtual law practice created a lot of jagged edges. Since marketing isn’t really a core competence of most lawyers—especially those in large firms, the adjustment here was straight away to bringing in the professionals.
The survey found that two-thirds of firms changed their marketing strategies for both retention and for seeking new clients. This who changed their strategies by bringing in the pros found growth. The one-third that didn’t change stagnated.
Concomitant to that, the survey found that the same two-thirds of the firms said that marketing was important to a firm’s growth in the first place. So attitude here seems to be everything.
I remember when I was in law school in the 80’s, large scale marketing a firm was considered questionable, even if advertising was slowly being accepted as a part of the business. But now a new generation is starting to run things and looking expansively at business development as an integral part of the practice.
Also in the no-surprise zone, 80 percent of the marketing done by the pros was digital. The high growth firms (growth of more than 20%) were solidly strategic, up to and including using tracking metrics to quantify their marketing approach in real time. They were also four times as likely to track their metrics. Of course, tracking metrics is part and parcel of a robust marketing scheme from the get anyway.
But, of course, everyone is doing it—hiring online legal marketing firms—so the competition is now fierce out there. More than a third of the high growth firms say that competition is now their Number One Problem in the market.
I’m guessing that numerous law firms have hired the same marketing firms, so they are all sort of competing against themselves, but whatever.
The firms anticipate increasing their marketing spending by 15 percent in the next year, although the high growth firms anticipate spending up to 40 percent more.
There’s a pattern here.