Featured · Agencies
Running the relationship after you have hired someone
Almost everything written about attorney marketing firms is about choosing one. Very little is about the eleven months afterwards, which is unfortunate, because the difference between engagements that work and engagements that quietly fail is mostly decided there rather than at the signature.
Two firms can hire the same agency, on the same terms, at the same price, and get entirely different results. What separates them is not luck; it is a handful of things the client does or fails to do in the first ninety days.
The first ninety days
The pattern of the whole engagement is set in the first quarter, and it is very difficult to reset afterwards. What happens in these weeks is mostly the client's responsibility, not the agency's.
Week one: agree who signs things off, and confirm that this person can do so alone. If the answer is a committee, the engagement is already slower than it was priced to be.
Weeks one to two: hand over access properly — analytics, Search Console, the site, the Business Profile, the advertising accounts — in the firm's ownership, with the agency added as a user.
Weeks two to four: give them the specialist knowledge. A few hours of fee-earner time here is the difference between pages nobody could copy and pages anybody could.
Week four: agree what will be reported monthly and in what form, before the first report is written rather than after you dislike it.
Weeks four to twelve: expect groundwork and very little visible output. A first quarter full of published pages usually means the technical and measurement work was skipped.
The single most useful thing a firm can do in this period is answer quickly. Agencies work on whatever is unblocked, and a client who takes a fortnight to respond receives whatever could be done without them.
The second most useful is to be honest about capacity. If a partner genuinely cannot give three hours next month, say so in week two rather than cancelling twice in week six.
How engagements go wrong without anyone deciding to end them
Very few engagements fail loudly. They decay, in recognisable stages, and the stages are visible long before the firm concludes that marketing does not work.
Reports arrive later each month, and shorter, and stop containing anything the firm did not already know.
The named senior person from the pitch is no longer in the meetings, and nobody has said who replaced them.
Everything proposed is a variation on what was proposed last quarter, because nothing is being learned from the results.
Questions get answered with metrics rather than with explanations, which is usually a sign that nobody on the account can explain.
The firm stops attending the monthly call, having concluded it is not worth an hour — which is the point at which the outcome is effectively settled.
None of these is a reason to leave immediately. All of them are reasons to say something immediately, and most agencies will correct course when told plainly.
Running it well, and knowing when to leave
The management overhead of doing this properly is roughly an hour a month. That is a very small price for the difference it makes to what a retainer produces.
Hold the monthly call, at the same time, and attend it. Standing meetings that move stop existing within a quarter.
Ask the same three questions every month: what did you do, what did it produce, and what will you change as a result.
Give feedback in the month it applies to, plainly, rather than saving it for a review where it arrives as a complaint.
Keep the sign-off with one person, and keep that person reachable.
Review properly at six months against what was agreed at the outset, not against what you have since started hoping for.
Before leaving, say the specific thing that is wrong and give one quarter to fix it. A good agency responds; a poor one confirms your decision.
If you do leave, retrieve everything first: account ownership, content, analytics history and any documentation. Do this before giving notice rather than after.
And be honest in the post-mortem about which failures were the agency's and which were the firm's, because the second kind will follow you to the next one.
That last point is the one worth sitting with. A firm that cannot approve work, cannot spare fee-earner time and cannot answer an enquiry quickly will get a disappointing result from every attorney marketing firm it ever hires, and will conclude each time that it chose badly.
FAQs
What should happen in the first ninety days?
Access handed over in the firm's ownership, a single named person with authority to sign off, a few hours of fee-earner time for specialist knowledge, and agreement on what monthly reporting will contain. Expect groundwork rather than visible output in the first quarter.
How much time does managing an agency take?
About an hour a month if it is done well: one standing call, attended, with the same three questions each time. The firms that stop attending that call are almost always the ones that later conclude the engagement failed.
How do we know if it is working before results arrive?
Ask what changed as a result of what was learned. An agency responding to evidence proposes something different each quarter; one repeating last quarter's plan in new words is not learning, whatever the metrics say.
When should we leave an attorney marketing firm?
After naming the specific problem and giving a quarter to fix it. Leaving without doing that tends to reproduce the same outcome elsewhere, particularly when part of the cause sat inside the firm.
What do we need to retrieve before ending an engagement?
Ownership of the analytics, Search Console, advertising accounts and Business Profile, plus the content and any documentation. Arrange it before giving notice — recovering access afterwards is considerably harder and occasionally impossible.
End Note
The best attorney marketing firms are noticeably better than the worst, and the gap between them is smaller than the gap between two firms working with the same agency. That should be encouraging: the part with the largest effect on the outcome is the part you control.
Give them access, give them a decision-maker, give them a few hours of expertise, and give them an hour of your attention every month. Then judge the result at six months against what you actually agreed.
Key Takeaways
Choosing gets written about; managing decides the result.
Set sign-off, access and reporting expectations inside the first ninety days.
Agencies work on whatever is unblocked — slow answers cost you deliverables.
Engagements decay in visible stages; say something in the month it happens.
Before leaving, name the problem, give a quarter, and retrieve your accounts.
