Over the past 24 years, Contra Agency has developed legal marketing strategies for some of the UK’s leading law firms.

Every day, I speak to legal marketing leaders to understand what’s keeping them up at night, sharing solutions to help them grow intakes and revenue.

Here are the five main legal marketing challenges I’ve discovered (and how to overcome them).

1. Disparate systems.

Any business needs to have the full picture of its marketing activities.

Law firms are no exception.

Most law firms don’t have an end-to-end view of their legal marketing and matter/case management activities.

Their disconnected systems and software cause inefficiencies and a lack of comprehensive insights.

Without this knowledge, you’re carrying out your marketing efforts with one arm behind your back.

Disparities between your website, CRM, email marketing, SEO, and case management hinder access to crucial KPI and ROI insights for growth.

How to solve it

Integrating all your systems into a central platform resolves this monumental legal marketing challenge…

…but it isn’t easy.

It requires significant legal marketing digital transformation, which takes time, effort, and the technical know-how of a strong team of developers and marketers (hello Contra). However, it’s well worth it in the long run.

A fully integrated system allows for improved efficiency and data-driven decision-making to optimise your law firm’s growth in the future.

2. Change management.

To transform processes, software and tools of a law firm requires a lot of change.

However, changing the culture of the business is an even bigger legal marketing challenge.

Naturally, some partners are likely to be reluctant to change.

Especially when the firm seems to be functioning well at face value. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

A lack of willingness to change is compounded considering fee earners’ significant caseloads – they might not see the value in giving themselves what appears to be more work.

How to solve it

There are several elements legal professionals must learn to effectively manage this transformation and ensure all partners are on board.

One of those is clearly communicating the benefits of change.

Start by addressing the specific queries and concerns of different stakeholders.

Naturally, some members of your team will be more influential in pushing forward change than others.

It’s important to nurture these as internal advocates and champions.

Start small, implementing change with your most engaged stakeholders where possible.

Once the process is underway, highlight how it has helped your internal champions.

Using data and communication can help to reinforce the positive feeling around the changes you’ve made.

Your champions can then play a crucial role in training and supporting other key stakeholders, equipping them with the skills they need to adapt to new systems and processes.

The process can be simplified by reading up on change management methodologies for valuable insights.

Remember, your law firm transformation journey is never solo.

Make it a collective journey by engaging and involving all key stakeholders.

3. Fee earner engagement.

Fee earners play a vital role in generating revenue for your law firm.

They provide the services your clients pay for.

Likewise, legal marketers are also crucial to bringing in revenue.

Both have similar goals.

However, in many firms, these two roles are still viewed as separate.

To achieve optimal effectiveness, marketing, business development, and fee earners must collaborate towards a unified goal using shared tools, systems, and processes

A key part of this is ensuring your fee earners are contributing to thought leadership.

Passle's US & UK Legal Marketing Leadership Survey provides some striking insights on the importance of thought leadership:

  • 45% of Managing Partners rank thought leadership in their top 3 marketing priorities, compared to 28% of Chief Marketing Officers.
  • 77% of General Counsels spend more than eight hours per week staying up-to-date via thought leadership.
  • 100% of General Counsels consider thought leadership a responsibility of current and potential suppliers.

Beyond the commercial need for thought leadership, modern law firm SEO prioritises content written by experienced lawyers.

Google's 2024 core update highlights the need for thought leadership, driven by experienced members of your team.

This is a significant legal marketing challenge considering how busy your fee earners are.

However, it’s your responsibility to help fee earners brainstorm content as much as possible.

How to solve it

We’ve developed a legal marketing thought leadership brainstorming sheet you can share with your fee earners.

Designed to help fee earners come up with content ideas, it breaks thought leadership down into four key areas:

  • Answering prospective clients’ questions (based on keyword research)
  • Sharing personal stories
  • Commenting on industry news and legislation updates
  • Legal breakdowns of landmark cases and legislation

Spending 30 minutes a month brainstorming with your fee earner should easily generate at least 4 content ideas.

Once content is rolling, showing fee earners how their efforts drive intakes and revenue can further inspire them.

Consider creating visual content KPI dashboards using Looker Studio.

Show fee earners key metrics such as users, engagement and organic conversions.

Each month, you could use a small percentage of your legal marketing budget to reward the top-performing fee earner with an Amazon voucher.

4. Reporting.

How can you overcome legal marketing challenges without reliable data to inform your strategy?

From my 24 years of experience working with law firms, accurate reporting is one of the biggest thorns in legal marketing leaders’ sides.

Even if legal marketers can unlock KPI and ROI data, they often struggle to understand and present it in a way that makes it easy for leadership to digest.

How to solve it

We strongly recommend our law firm clients start by configuring Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and setting up key conversion events.

GA4's conversion events enable you to monitor key client actions and behaviours crucial to your success.

These actions could be phone calls, form submissions, chats, or just about anything else that transforms a website visitor to an intake.

By integrating GA4 and SEO tools with Google Looker Studio, law firm marketers can create custom reports that partners can easily understand.

Some metrics you might want to present are:

  • 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 average rankings 
  • Subservice average rankings 
  • Rankings distribution
  • Benchmark rankings vs current rankings
  • Sources and engagement
  • Best and worst
    • Rankers
    • Climbers
    • Performing pages (traffic, conversions, engagement time)

While Looker Studio is great for presenting website and SEO metrics, legal marketers need to go one step further to unlock ROI reporting.

After configuring key events in GA4, integrate it with your CRM, and then connect your CRM to your case management system.

Now, data from your case management system (such as case revenue) will be automatically pulled into your CRM.

Because you already have attribution data in your CRM, you can associate specific marketing channels and activities with revenue to calculate ROI.

Congratulations. You’ve unlocked a number of insights, including:

  • 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

We make it sound simple but, in reality, it is incredibly complex.

That’s why law firm marketing leaders lean on Contra Agency to connect the dots.

5. Generative AI adoption and risks.

It’s a big subject on everyone’s lips…

…Generative AI creates new content like text, images, or code by learning patterns from existing data, mimicking human creativity.

The technology is now more accessible and advanced, leading to broader use within legal marketing.

And it can increase efficiency and save costs by automating processes, such as:

  • condensing emails
  • writing personalised emails
  • writing advice pieces
  • writing SEO-friendly content for your website
  • generating ad copy for campaigns
  • condensing and summarising large pieces of information
  • powering client chatbots
  • enhancing internal knowledge databases

However, it brings several risks.

These include intellectual property issues, data protection and privacy concerns, cybersecurity threats, and the potential for biased or misleading outputs.

There have also been a number of infamous cases where AI has generated fictitious case citations.

With no current statutory obligations requiring AI companies to ensure output accuracy, solicitors remain liable for inaccuracies or errors.

There is still little regulation in the UK. Therefore, lawyers should adopt a risk- and principles-based approach to regulating AI.

How to solve it

As generative AI is still a nascent technology, it’s a legal marketing challenge with no specific solution.

The best approach is to be cautious and seek advice from industry thought leaders.

The Law Society recommends considering the following points when using generative AI:

  • Define the tool's purpose and use cases.
  • Outline the desired outcomes.
  • Follow professional regulations under the SRA Code of Conduct, Standards and Regulations, and Principles
  • Adhere to policies on IT, AI, confidentiality, and data governance.
  • Review the vendor’s data management and security practices.
  • Establish rights over prompts, training data, and outputs.
  • Ensure input data is appropriate for the AI tool.
  • Manage risks related to confidentiality, IP, data protection, cybersecurity, and ethics.
  • Establish liability and insurance coverage.
  • Document inputs, outputs, and errors.
  • Provide effective staff training and protocols.
  • Verify the accuracy and fact-check outputs, addressing biases.

The Law Society also recommends communicating with clients on the use of AI, with some firms even using it as part of their value proposition.

For example, Thomson Reuters' 2024 Future of Professionals report reveals that 75% of the UK's top 20 law firms actively promote their use of AI to clients. Interestingly, only 45% of law firms ranked 21-40 do the same.

Currently, generative AI is in its infancy and is, admittedly, a minefield.

Whatever legal marketing assets you produce or processes you deliver using generative AI, strict oversight on outputs is an absolute imperative.

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Need an agency to help you solve your legal marketing challenges?

Contra has a wealth of experience helping some of the UK’s leading law firms digitally transform to tackle their main marketing challenges.

We’ve helped our legal clients integrate their systems, instil a positive attitude to change, and unlock the power of valuable data insights. We’re ready to do the same for you. Connect with Contra for a free consultation today.

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Roberto Ciarleglio, Founding Partner & Managing Director I co-founded Contra Agency in 2000, creating beautiful, high-converting websites, automating processes, and using the latest technology to drive business goals. View my profile