Featured · Operations
Law firm digital marketing: who runs it, and in what order
Most firms do not fail at digital marketing because they chose the wrong channels. They fail because nobody inside the firm actually owns the work, decisions wait three weeks for a partners' meeting, and by month five the agency is producing whatever it can get signed off rather than whatever was planned.
This guide is about that half of the problem — the operating half. Which channels to run is a genuinely separate question, and a well-argued channel plan will still die if the firm cannot make a decision in under a fortnight.
Who actually runs digital marketing inside a law firm
There are only three workable arrangements, and the wrong one is chosen for the wrong reason more often than not. The deciding factor is not budget; it is how much internal attention the firm can genuinely commit each week. Digital marketing for a law firm is production work with a constant appetite for decisions, and the arrangement you choose has to be able to feed that appetite.
Fully in-house works when the firm is large enough to hire someone senior, and it fails badly when it is a junior hire with no authority reporting into a partner with no time.
Fully outsourced works when someone inside the firm is empowered to approve things quickly, and fails when every deliverable queues behind fee-earning work.
The hybrid — an internal owner with the authority to sign off, and an agency doing the production — is what most firms between five and fifty fee-earners actually need.
In all three, the single point of failure is the same: approval speed. An agency that waits a fortnight for sign-off delivers a third of what you are paying for.
Name one person, give them a budget ceiling they can spend without asking, and let them be wrong occasionally. That is the whole arrangement.
The partner sponsor matters as much as the owner. Digital marketing competes with billable work for everybody's attention, and it loses that competition every time unless somebody senior has said out loud that it will not.
Marketing that reports to nobody in particular gets the leftovers of everyone's week, which is precisely why so many firms conclude the channel does not work for law.
Firms that get this right usually do one unglamorous thing: they put a standing thirty-minute slot in the diary and never move it.
Why the first year stalls
These are execution failures rather than strategy failures, which is what makes them frustrating: the plan was fine, and the firm still has nothing to show for the year.
Sign-off bottlenecks. Content written in week two goes live in week eleven, by which point the plan has moved on and nobody can remember why the page existed.
Every partner reviewing everything. Content by committee reliably produces text that says nothing, and it is the single commonest cause of a stalled content programme.
Starting four channels at once, so that when results are thin there is no way to tell which one was the problem.
Changing direction at month four, before anything begun in month one has had time to work at all.
Measuring the effort rather than the outcome — pages published, posts scheduled, hours billed — none of which tells the firm whether a single matter arrived.
No budget for the year, only a monthly invoice that gets questioned whenever a quarter is tight, which quietly guarantees the work never compounds.
A twelve-month sequence that works
The order below is deliberately conservative. It front-loads the things that make everything afterwards cheaper, and it does not start anything expensive until the firm can prove it can ship at all.
Months one to three: fix the site and instrument it. Speed, structure, the pages you already have, and analytics that records every enquiry with its source. Publish nothing new yet.
Months two to four: name an owner, agree a budget for the full year, and establish the standing review slot. This is the part firms skip and then regret.
Months three to six: build the pages for your three highest-value matter types, one search each, and put paid advertising behind those same matters while the pages mature.
Months six to nine: reviews and reputation. It is the cheapest lift available and it improves the conversion rate of everything already running.
Months nine to twelve: widen to the next tier of matters, and only now consider a channel you have not tried.
Throughout: one thirty-minute review a fortnight, on the same day, with the same single number at the top of the agenda.
At month twelve, cut whatever cannot show a cost per instructed matter. Not because it definitely failed, but because a year is long enough to have found out.
Then re-plan for year two from evidence rather than from the pitch deck you started with.
None of this requires unusual discipline; it requires ordinary discipline applied for four consecutive quarters, which is rarer. The firms that compound are simply the ones that did not restart in month five.
FAQs
Should a law firm hire in-house or use an agency?
For most firms between five and fifty fee-earners, a hybrid: one internal owner with real authority to approve work and spend, and an agency doing the production. Fully in-house needs a senior hire to be worth it; fully outsourced needs someone internal who can still make decisions quickly.
How much of a partner's time does digital marketing need?
Less than firms fear, but it has to be predictable. Thirty minutes a fortnight from a partner sponsor, and a few hours a month from whoever owns the work. What kills programmes is not the volume of time but its unreliability.
How long before digital marketing pays for itself?
Plan for a full year and budget for it up front. Paid advertising can return inside a quarter; content and search generally take two to three. A firm that reviews the spend quarterly and threatens to cut it will never reach the point where it compounds.
Why does content by committee fail?
Because every reviewer removes the specific claims that made the page useful, and what survives is text that could describe any firm. Give one person editorial sign-off, with a partner reviewing only for accuracy and regulatory risk, not for style.
What is the first thing to fix?
The site and the measurement, before any new spend. Every other channel pays to send people to that site, and until enquiries are recorded with their source attached you cannot tell which spending is working.
End Note
Firms tend to treat digital marketing as a purchasing decision, and it is really a management one. The channels are broadly the same for everybody; the difference between the firms it works for and the firms it does not is almost entirely about who decides, how fast, and whether anybody stayed the course.
Pick the owner, protect the budget for four quarters, keep the standing slot, and judge the whole thing on cost per instructed matter at the end of it. The rest is production.
Key Takeaways
Most digital marketing fails on operations, not on channel choice.
Name one owner with authority to approve and spend, plus a partner sponsor.
Approval speed determines how much of your retainer you actually receive.
Fix the site and the measurement before funding anything new.
Give it four consecutive quarters — restarting in month five is the real failure.
