Law firm marketing digital transformation: what stage are you at?

Every day, we speak to Marketing & Business Development Managers at law firms to understand where they’re at in their marketing digital transformation journey.

Some are chugging full steam ahead, harnessing the power of shiny new CRMs, automation, and marketing intelligence platforms.

Others have derailed, bogged down by internal politics, dinosaur partners, and miniature marketing budgets.

For the latter, it's our job to pave the road to revolution. We round up the dinosaurs and paint a vision of a streamlined digital future, helping them break into the modern age of marketing.

With over 24 years experience as a law firm marketing agency, we've compiled our knowledge to help you understand exactly where your firm is at in the marketing digital transformation journey.

We also detail exactly what your firm needs to do to move to the next stage of digital marketing evolution, offering insights and advice on how to get there.

So, let’s see where you’re at.

Stage 0 | Digitally Formative. (40% of law firms are at this stage)

Sadly, ground zero is where most law firms are at.

You know the score…

…progress can be painfully slow.

Decisions are made via meeting upon meetings.

There’s a litany of partners who have different (and often antithetical) views and possess a highly cautious and detail-orientated mindset.

Not to mention the (ahem) odd partner who has a reluctance to change.

At this stage, it's about getting things off the ground and pulling your firm out of the nineties.

Key identifiers

Culture:

• Partners say they want change but are highly cautious, even fearful.
• Lack of internal digital champion / marketer. Any digital activities are often lumped with IT.
• Lawyers operate in silos rather than under a clear marketing and business development vision.
• Competitive culture rather than team culture.

Brand:

• Weak branding and messaging.
• Basic website, often dated.
• No defined value proposition or point of difference.

Strategy:

• Believe law firm SEO is just using Yoast.
• Believe a content strategy is writing the occasional article.
• No ad strategy, relying solely on referrals and networking.

Technology:

• No CRM or marketing automation, just a basic case management system.
• Apart from business development and networking, the website is the only form of lead generation, however, it’s tired and dated.

Insights:

• No formalised audience personas and profiles.
• A lack of understanding of the customer journey.
• No clear marketing KPIs.
• Cannot report on marketing attribution.
• Cannot report on marketing ROI.
• Currently not tracking website conversions such as form submissions and conversion rates.
  What do I need to do?

What do I need to do?

At this stage, it's about addressing the basics before implementing groundbreaking marketing technology.

Step 1: Consultancy.

Work with a marketing agency to understand your brand, value proposition and customers. They’ll help you uncover key insights into your values, your unique positioning in the market, and how to effectively communicate your firm and services to prospective clients.

Step 2: Website.

Develop a beautifully bespoke website that’s based on audience research. It's the most valuable marketing tool in your arsenal. A bad one will instantly turn prospective clients off.

Real-world example

We created a sleek, professional law firm web design to capture the essence of Magrath Sheldrick’s boutique brand. By incorporating bold, contrasting colours, we improved readability and user experience. A variety of microinteractions were also implemented to boost engagement, add dynamic movement, and create visual appeal.

Step 3: SEO fundamentals.

SEO-optimise your law firm's website. Focus on the basics at this stage (on-page SEO, meta titles and meta descriptions).

Step 4: Google Analytics 4.

As the old adage says, what gets measured gets managed.

If you’re serious about growth, you absolutely must set up Google Analytics 4 (and particularly conversion events).

We’ve had kick-off calls with law firms who have requested our services, only for us to dig into their analytics and discover they have been incorrectly tracking conversion events for years. This means they were making key business decisions based on incorrect data.

By (correctly) implementing GA4, you’ll have the key website and marketing insights needed to:

• gain a deeper understanding of how potential clients interact with your firm’s website, including user journeys, traffic and conversions across landing pages, and behaviour across devices
• segment website visitors by demographics, interests, and behaviour to tailor marketing strategies and content effectively
• measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and channels more accurately to optimise marketing spend

Use an agency to configure GA4 to your needs. It might cost more but it’s certainly cheaper than the cost of basing business decisions on unreliable and unusable data.

Step 5: Google Ads.

Start experimenting with Google Ads for key services. Ads provide instant traffic and opportunities. Don’t worry too much about a CRM at this point. Even if it's just a shared inbox for dealing with ad enquiries, just get the leads flowing in.

Stage 1 | Digitally Focused. (30% of law firms are at this stage)

Congrats on getting this far. From our experience working with law firms, you’re already ahead of 40% of competitors.

At this stage, you have the foundations set with a strong, SEO-optimised website and short-term marketing strategies such as digital advertising to generate intakes.

However, most law firms stop here. After all, if you have a good website that’s generating leads, why keep going, right? 

Wrong.

Becoming complacent at this stage will leave you falling behind other firms. If you want to hit the top 20% of firms you need to continuously digitally transform your marketing function.

Now, it’s about diversifying your lead generation activities, introducing time-saving technology such as a CRM and marketing automation, and exploring longer-term organic strategies in line with paid campaigns.

Key identifiers

Culture:

• Partners understand marketing as a core business driver.
• Marketing is seen as an isolated department, rather than an organisation-wide effort.
• Danger of complacency because leads are flowing and business is stable.

Brand:

• Have a clear brand, value proposition and point of difference in the market.
• Style guidelines are in their infancy.

Strategy:

• Employ a full-time marketing manager or work closely with an agency.
• Running basic Google ad campaigns for key services.
• Produce basic content but with no SEO strategy in mind. 
• Find it difficult to get lawyers to commit to content production.

Technology:

• Have an SEO-optimised, well-designed website that is generating leads via ads.
• Use a shared inbox that handles enquiries and utilise a basic case management system.
• No CRM or marketing automation.

Insights:

• Very little insight into clearly defined marketing KPIs.
• No insights into attribution and ROI.

What do I need to do?

This is the grunt stage where you’ll face an uphill battle. Marketing & Business Development Managers need to implement technology that will streamline marketing operations, as well as influence culture across the firm.

Step 1: Change management methodologies.

From our many years working with law firms, if we could offer you one piece of advice (apart from ‘wear sunscreen’), this would be it:

Now is the time to read up on change management methodologies.

According to Passle's Legal Marketing Leadership Survey 2024, 75% of firms now have senior marketers on their boards, yet only 20% of Managing Partners believe marketing's value is well understood.

Clearly, legal marketing leaders face an uphill challenge in ensuring everyone is on board.

To truly transform your marketing department (and subsequently, your law firm) you're going to need to implement some changes – changes that might not seem big to you but may be earth-shattering to the firm’s partners:

• A new CRM.
• New business processes.
• A culture of content production.
• The development of a data-driven organisation.

Ensuring the whole firm is aligned and partners understand that marketing and business development is a firm-wide collaboration will be your key to success.

Step 2: Technical SEO.

Technical SEO is a dark art and we won't bore you with the intricacies, mainly because it takes a robust knowledge of SEO and development to execute it effectively. (If you are a rare breed of Marketing & Business Development manager who is an expert in technical SEO and knows how to code, hats off to you.)

However, for the mere mortals amongst you, technical SEO refers to the process of optimising your website for search engine crawling and indexing.

It focuses on improving technical aspects like site speed, mobile-friendliness, URL structure, and internal linking to ensure search engines can easily access, crawl, and interpret your site's content.

Most law firms hire an external agency (such as Contra) to perform monthly technical SEO audits and fixes on their website.

By addressing technical SEO factors, law firms enhance their site's visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), ultimately driving more organic traffic to the site.

If you don’t regularly audit your site from a technical SEO perspective, it can seriously impact your search engine rankings. This is tragic if you’re already investing masses of time into content production to increase your organic rankings.

And here’s the kicker:

It can be one simple thing on your website that goes unnoticed and bombs your rankings – something that could have been fixed by a developer had they been performing a regular technical SEO audit.

So if you’re serious about ranking, don't scrimp out on technical SEO. 

Step 3: CRM and basic marketing automation.

Implement a good CRM and marketing automation. CRMs come in many forms and budgets. Sometimes, justifying a CRM to partners and ensuring fee earners are on board can be half the battle.

A good CRM will enable the marketing team and fee earners to:

• automatically create new contacts based on form submissions
• quickly respond to queries via automation or directly from the CRM
• automatically log all correspondence for firm-wide visibility
• route intakes to the right team members
• call directly from the CRM
• create meetings links for fee earners to send to intakes
• map out your matter pipeline stages
• send and receive important documents
• enable you to qualify and set tasks and reminders to follow up with your intakes
• smoothly manage matters and cases with automated workflows
• measure team performance and success through customisable reports

When choosing a CRM, ensure it has an open API and excellent integration capabilities.

You’ll need to integrate it with your case management system for end-to-end visibility of attribution and ROI. We’ll get to this later.

Step 4: Content strategy.

Content has become a dirty word over the past 10 years. Rewind to 2008 and marketing managers could produce a PDF guide, hide it behind a form and your audience would be fighting their way in line to download it and give you their details.

Now, it’s a different ballgame. Content is so prolific audiences are suffering from serious content fatigue.

But this certainly doesn't mean you shouldn’t produce content – nobody won a race by not putting their Nikes on.

Put simply, content needs to be super valuable and provide a level of insight your competitors aren’t providing.

As a law firm digital marketing manager, there are two paths you can take when it comes to content strategy and content production.

Path A: The purist approach

The purist approach involves creating an SEO-founded content strategy and leaning on your internal expertise to help produce the content.

Here, you extract your fee earner’s knowledge to create a range of articles and advice pieces.

This will require you to conduct keyword research and create a content strategy based on a particular topic and range of subtopics. You will then need to create SEO-optimised blog templates that your lawyers can work from, and assign the right fee earners to write content over the templates.

Pros:

• Extract nuanced and highly valuable information from your fee earners.
• Provide high-quality content to your audience.
• Partners and fee earners feel like they have more control over the content production process.

Cons:

• You will need to instil a culture of content production.
• You rely on your fee earners' input, which will inevitably ebb and flow as their legal workload changes (clients come first).
• You may face the awkward situation of chasing fee earners when they miss deadlines, creating friction.

If you decide to go down this route, it's important to help the fee earners understand how their contribution benefits the firm.

We recommend creating dashboards based on the content they produce. This can be in your CRM, or using an analytics platform such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and integrating with Google Looker Studio to create simple visual dashboards for your fee earners.

These dashboards would include key metrics based on the content they’ve helped produce, such as Users, New Users, Engagement, and Conversions. (Going one step further, Stage 3 law firms can attribute revenue to particular content pieces, which provides extra incentive for fee earners to produce content.)

Fee earners can also repurpose the content for their own LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

Path B: The AI-assisted approach

There have been huge advancements in AI content production in recent years.

AI content hubs can now generate:

• repurposed content for a range of channels
• SEO-optimised blogs
• content that aligns with your brand voice
• images from prompts
• audio narration for your blogs 
• multi-language translations for all your blog posts
• podcasts based on audio uploads or generated audio from text, narrated by AI voice selections

Of course, AI isn’t necessarily a silver bullet. Let’s break down the pros and cons.

Pros:

• More content output as Marketing & Business Development Managers can produce content more independently.
• Content can easily be repurposed and used across a range of channels for more visibility.
• Arguably requires less marketing & SEO expertise as this is embedded and assisted within the AI.

Cons:

• As a law firm, content will still need to be refined and approved by fee earners.
• The quality of content and insights will not be as high without extra input from fee earners.
• Marketing & Business Development Managers may need to overcome an internal distrust of AI.

So which one should you choose?

This entirely depends on your law firm. If your fee earners are confident they can dedicate time to content production then take the purist approach.

However, be aware what they say they can deliver will swiftly change when a huge case lands on their desk.

If you’d like to work more independently, take the AI-assisted route.

But please note, we use the term ‘AI-assisted’, not ‘AI-generated’. Your firm’s fee earners will still need to dedicate time to review and edit the AI-assisted content. And depending on the quality of the AI content, it can take even more time editing it to get it right than it can by producing it from scratch.

While the best AI content hubs may produce technically sound, SEO-optimised content, it will never be a lawyer who works on the legal frontline and deals with clients, matters, claims or cases daily.

Think of AI-assisted content like you’re baking a cake. The AI will produce a standard sponge base (perfect shape and fluffiness but fairly bland in taste). Your fee earners will add the jam and icing. 

Google’s Core Update.

Creating high-quality, relevant content is essential for your law firm’s SEO and user engagement.

However, Following Google’s March 2024 core update, content that appears to be obviously AI-generated is now penalised.

To demonstrate that your content is original and produced by experts, consider these trust signals:

• Create Solicitor Bios: Develop a bio for each member of your legal team and link any content they produce back to their bio. Each bio should include a photo, professional background, and accreditations.
• Implement Author Schema: Use author schema on your advice pages to verify authenticity and provide trust signals to Google. 
• Author and Company Snippets: Including a brief company description and also a brief author description (approx 130 characters) at the end of each article to further enhance trust signals.
• Highlight Sector Experience: Leverage your team's sector experience in your content. AI cannot replicate personal experiences, so use this unique aspect to underscore authenticity and credibility.

Real-world example

Content production and conversion rate optimisation were at the heart of Hudgell Solicitors' website re-design and marketing strategy. We designed friendly, down-to-earth landing pages in line with the Hudgells brand. We produced a range of articles based on keyword research, focusing on a select number of service areas and claim types. Each article included expandable callback CTAs and in-copy CTAs. Articles were attributed to solicitors with short author snippets to send trust signals to Google.

Hudgells experienced a 199% increase in organic conversion rates and a 45% increase in overall organic traffic in less than a year for target service areas.

Step 5: Newsletter and email.

Now you have a brand-spanking CRM and you’re producing content, you can now begin segmenting your audience and communicating with them more effectively.

Start running monthly email newsletters based on the service(s) they are interested in. Your CRM will track opens and engagement, enabling you to create lists of the most engaged contacts.

Create customised lists based on your best opportunities and get your fee earners to send emails that include embedded personalised videos using tools such as Vidyard.

This humanises your law firm and is a novel way to get prospective clients to engage or reengage with your firm.

Also, be sure to include advice articles that your fee earners have written both in your newsletters and your one-to-one emails. “I wrote this advice piece and thought of you..” could be the subject line that turns a lukewarm prospect into a keen client.

Step 6: Google Looker Studio.

Now you have an SEO-optimised website, a content strategy and GA4 set up correctly, you’ll want to amalgamate these metrics into a digestible dashboard so you can track progress.

At Contra, we recommend using Google Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio). This enables you to integrate with GA4 and your SEO tool(s) to create highly visual reports for senior stakeholders.

For law firms, we track the following metrics, including both year-on-year and month-on-month comparison dashboards:

• YoY Summary and Previous Period summary (reporting on both ‘all users’ and specifically ‘organic users’)
  • Active users
  • New users
  • Total conversions
  • Conversion event breakdown
  • User conversion rate
  • Percentage of engaged users
  • Average engagement time
• Service rankings (e.g. Personal Injury)
• Subservice rankings (e.g. Accidents at Work) 
• Rankings distribution
• Benchmark rankings vs current rankings
• Sources and engagement
• Best and worst
  • Rankers
  • Climbers
  • Performing pages (traffic, conversions, engagement time)

Stage 2 | Digitally Developed. (20% of law firms are at this stage)

Now we’re cooking.

‘Digitally Developed’ law firms have a diversified range of marketing channels, from digital advertising to content production.

They have clearly defined customer profiles and marketing & business development pipeline stages. This is bolstered by a powerful CRM that streamlines the lead-nurturing process, enforces timely follow-up actions and increases the intake-to-client conversion rate.

To go beyond Stage 2 and rise to the upper echelons of law firms, you must now focus on connecting disparate systems and improving marketing intelligence.

Here, the ultimate goal is to have an end-to-end view of your marketing and business development activities so you can accurately report on marketing attribution and ROI.

Key identifiers

Culture:

• Fee earners understand their role in improving marketing and business development (a shared goal and a sense of unity).
• Data is at the heart of the organisation, with the marketing team regularly reporting KPIs to senior stakeholders.
• Marketing metrics show value in terms of lead generation and engagement but are yet to demonstrate revenue generated and ROI.

Brand:

• Have a clear brand, value proposition and point of difference in the market.
• Clear brand guidelines and style guides.
• Prospects and clients engage with the brand via multiple touchpoints including email, social, digital ads, advice pieces, podcasts and video.

Strategy:

• Employ a full-time Marketing & Business Development manager who works closely with an agency for the highly technical aspects of marketing.
• Run Google ad campaigns for a range of key services.
• Have a clearly defined content and SEO strategy, incorporating topic clusters and a robust content production plan.
• Work with an agency to execute regular technical SEO audits to improve their website’s discoverability in search engines.
• Regularly communicate with their prospects and clients through newsletters and personalised emails.

Technology:

• Have an SEO-optimised, well-designed website that is generating leads via ads.
• Have a powerful CRM that enables fee earners to view the information they need and automatically log email correspondence, as well as automation to effectively assign leads to the relevant teams and manage and nurture prospects.
• Google Analytics 4 tracks a range of data, from website performance metrics to conversion events. 
• Case management system is a separate entity from the CRM, making revenue reporting and attribution incredibly difficult and time-consuming.

Insights:

• Have data insights from a range of sources, including Google Ads, social media, the CRM, SEO tools and Google Analytics.
• Do not have an end-to-end view of attribution and ROI.
• No single source of truth when it comes to marketing intelligence.

What do we need to do?

Now’s the time to get technical.

The holy grail of law firm digital marketing transformation is to integrate all your systems so you have a central platform for reporting and marketing operations.

If you have a powerful CRM, this will involve integrating your case management system, GA4, SEO tools, social media, and digital ads.

This will unlock the end-to-end insights you need for effective attribution and ROI reporting.

You can either risk bringing in your IT bigwigs or, work with a digital agency.

However, be warned:

As a digital agency, while we may be somewhat biased, we’re also honest. We’ve seen law firms take a DIY approach to integrations and custom dashboards and time and time again we check in with them years down the line and they’ve barely made a snail trail.

This is partly due to internal politics and partly due to overestimating their own capabilities.

This may sound harsh but we’re not here to make friends, we’re here to make law firms money.

Many law firms partner with Contra because:

• we act as a mediator between various departments so projects are far less likely to stall due to internal politics
• we have the technical expertise across a range of IT and marketing functions
• we’ve executed these integrations with many other law firms, understanding the pitfalls and best approaches, therefore streamlining the process (time equals money) 
• we have already developed off-the-shelf solutions in many cases

Whichever road you choose, here’s what you need to do to become a digitally robust law firm.

Step 1: Integrate GA4 with your CRM.

While GA4 has powerful reporting capabilities, it’s not the most user-friendly interface. It’s much more beneficial to have your CRM as a central reporting hub.

Most CRMs will easily integrate with GA4, meaning you can then present data in a range of visual reports. Also, it’s far less of a hassle using one system as a one-stop shop than bouncing in and out of various marketing software.

Step 2: Integrate your digital ads and social channels with your CRM.

If you want to report on attribution via your CRM, you’ll need to integrate your social channels and digital ads.

Step 3: Integrate your case management system with your CRM.

We speak to hundreds of law firms every year and have discovered that integrating their case management system with their CRM is the second biggest challenge (after successful change management).

By integrating your case management system with your CRM, data can be shared between them both which will unlock true ROI reporting.

For example, you may be using your CRM to nurture leads and your case management system to manage cases. Imagine you ran a Google Ads campaign through your CRM. The prospective client instructs your firm to represent them. However, the case revenue may not be confirmed until years after the case has been instructed.

When a particular case revenue has finally been confirmed, an integrated approach can enable you to automatically pull this data from the case management system into the CRM as a ‘deal’ (or whatever term you prefer to use).

Because you’ve already integrated your digital ads with your CRM, the case revenue can then be attributed to that particular ad campaign and spend. And voila, you have attribution and ROI reporting.

You know you spent X on the ad campaign and it generated Y in terms of case revenue, therefore:

(Combined Case Revenue – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI

You can also attribute specific cases that came via organic search, referrals or social to understand your ROI on these channels too.

With this level of marketing intelligence, you can see which channels are the most profitable and reassign your budget to these channels.

Not only this, but you can also see which services provide the most ROI in terms of marketing spend vs case revenue.

The result? A highly optimised marketing spend and a rapidly improved pipeline.

Now, let’s climb down from Case Revenue Cloud 9 for a second and sink our feet firmly on the ground.

From our experience, many law firms already have legacy case management systems with closed APIs (in simple terms, they won't directly integrate with a case management system).

The solution is to integrate both your case management system and CRM with a data warehouse, which acts as a go-between.

Of course, this is extremely technical so be sure to hire an integrations agency that has years of experience executing such integrations for law firms. You know where we’re at ;-)

Step 4: Develop powerful marketing intelligence dashboards.

It’s the Marketing & Business Development manager’s pies des resistance…

…a beautiful MI dashboard that shows senior stakeholders everything they want to see.

“Here’s what we’ve spent on this channel and here’s how much revenue we’ve made.”

“John Timbleton has produced eight articles this year, generating 36 conversions, 5 cases and a combined case revenue of £1,354,506.”

“Our ROI on Google Ads is double the ROI on social ads. Equally, Personal Injury has the highest ROI via Google Ads out of all our services. Looking at search trends and enquiries from the past three years, we can also see Personal Injury enquiries peak during Q4. Therefore, we recommend doubling down on Google Ads for Personal Injury in Q4.”

By choosing a CRM with powerful reporting capabilities, you can develop customised MI dashboards to make highly informed decisions that will drive serious revenue for your firm.

Stage 3 | Digitally Robust. (10% of law firms are at this stage)

Congratulations. You’ve achieved the elusive law firm marketing mic drop – all technical dots are connected across your law firm and you have end-to-end insights and ROI reporting to make highly informed budgetary decisions.

Key identifiers

Culture:

• Partners and the Marketing & Business Development team work in tight cohesion to drive the firm forward.
• Data is at the heart of the organisation, with the marketing team using advanced attribution and ROI insights to inform budgetary decisions.
• The Marketing & Business Development Manager is seen more as a business partner rather than someone who simply “generates leads”.

Brand:

• Have a clear brand, value proposition and point of difference in the market.
• Deep data insights enable the firm to create highly tailored campaigns for their audience, solidifying the brand and building a strong connection to both prospects and clients

Strategy:

• Run Google ad campaigns for services that generate the highest case revenue and ROI.
• Produce content at scale, driven by highly motivated fee earners who have specific insights into how their contribution affects the bottom line of the firm.
• Work with an agency to execute regular technical SEO audits to improve their website’s discoverability in search engines.
• Regularly communicate with their prospects and clients through newsletters and highly personalised emails.
• Business decisions are data-driven, utilising advanced insights from the CRM and marketing automation platform.

Technology:

• Have an SEO-optimised, well-designed and regularly maintained website that ranks for a significant number of high-value target search terms.
• Have a powerful CRM that enables fee earners to target and nurture the most high-value prospects, capitalising on automation for significant time-savings. 
• Digital ads, social media channels, SEO tools, website, GA4, and case management system are integrated with the CRM and marketing automation platform.

Insights:

• Boast an end-to-end view of attribution and ROI.
• Have a central function hub for marketing intelligence, with integrated insights from a range of channels funnelled into the CRM.
• A range of marketing intelligence dashboards measure detailed metrics such as:
  • Intake-to-instructed conversion rate
  • Monthly intakes vs target
  • Lead source and attribution
  • Number of prospects in each matter pipeline stage
  • Conversion rates between matter pipeline stages
  • Matter stage percentage of total
  • Intakes by week, month, all-time
  • Matters instructed by week, month, all-time
  • Closed lost reasons
  • Total matters in pipeline by stage and by fee earner
  • Stale matters (no activity in X days)
  • Average time in matter stages
  • Average matter/case revenue
  • Average cost per client (broken down by service)
  • ROI by service
  • ROI by channel

What do I need to do?

There’s always room for improvement. After all, a marketer’s job is never done.

At this point, it's about continuously measuring and refining:

• Implement conversion rate optimisation tools to improve website conversion rates and reduce your client acquisition costs.
• Continue to focus resources and budget on the channels that have the highest ROI.
• Realign your content strategy with the most profitable services.
• Further explore AI and automation opportunities to drive process efficiencies.

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