Legal marketing for law firms and solicitors in London, the UK and Europe.
In most law firms, the marketing function is the partners. They’re the ones with the relationships, the reputations and the referral sources. They’re also the ones with a caseload, a billing target and a hearing on Thursday.
That’s the constraint everything else has to work around. A marketing plan that needs partner time it’s never going to get isn’t a plan, it’s a document.
What’s different about marketing a law firm?
The people who win the work are fee earners with billing targets, not a sales team. Clients are usually bought once and kept for years, so retention and referral matter more than acquisition. Partnerships make decisions by consensus, which slows everything down. And conduct rules limit what you can claim. Marketing advice written for other industries rarely survives any of that.
The challenges law firms face
Partners are expected to bring in work and were never shown how. It’s in the appraisal, it’s discussed at every partners’ meeting, and nobody has ever sat down with them and explained what it actually looks like alongside a full caseload.
Practice areas pulling in different directions. Every department wants marketing’s attention, each has a different audience, and there’s no agreed basis for deciding who gets what. So resource goes to whoever asks loudest.
Cross-selling that never moves. You’ve got clients using one department who’ve no idea you do the other six. Everyone agrees this is money left on the table. Nothing changes, because the partner who’s looked after that client for a decade doesn’t want to complicate the relationship.
Client relationships owned by individuals, not the firm. When a partner leaves, the work is at risk, and nobody knows quite how much until it happens.
Directories eating the year. Chambers and Partners and Legal 500 absorb enormous effort, usually from people with no time for it, and then almost nothing gets made of the rankings once they arrive.
Lateral hires who don’t bring the following. You’ve recruited a partner partly for their client base and assumed it would move with them. Often it doesn’t, or not as much as expected, and nothing was built to help it.
Competing with firms that aren’t structured like you. Fixed-fee providers, tech-enabled entrants and alternative business structures compete on price and convenience. Your advantage is real, but it isn’t cost, and the website doesn’t say what it is.
Marketing for clients and for talent at the same time. Recruitment is as hard as business development in most firms, and the two are usually planned as if they’re unrelated.
How I can help
If you’re a managing partner without a marketing function
You’re running the firm, carrying your own matters, and marketing is the thing that never reaches the top of the list.
- Build a marketing and business development plan that’s realistic about the partner time you’ll actually get.
- Sharpen your positioning so a prospective client can tell why you rather than the firm down the road.
- Put business development in place that partners can sustain in a busy month.
- Work out what marketing resource you need, and help you recruit it when the time comes.
If you’ve got a junior or small marketing team
They’re capable and busy. What’s missing is someone senior telling them what good looks like.
- Give them a plan with priorities, so effort goes where it generates work.
- Mentor and upskill them so their judgement and confidence grow.
- Provide the senior oversight you haven’t got, without a full-time hire.
If you’re a head of marketing or marketing director
You know what needs doing and you haven’t got the hours or the hands.
- Extra senior capacity on campaigns, sector launches, rebrands or office openings.
- A second experienced view on strategy, and someone who’ll constructively challenge it.
- Support demonstrating return to a partnership that wants to see the link between marketing and fees.
Services I offer law firms
Business development
The part that matters most in a law firm. Sector and service line plans, individual business development plans for partners built around their actual clients and networks, cross-selling structures, and the referral relationships with accountants, IFAs and banks that currently belong to individuals rather than the firm.
Fractional marketing director and CMO services
For law firms wanting practical marketing and business development training, I deliver tailored talks, workshops and training programmes that make an immediate impact. Whether you’re developing partners, fee earners or your marketing and BD team, every session is designed around your firm’s objectives and combines real-life examples with practical techniques that people can apply straight away.
Marketing planning and strategy
Firm-wide, practice area, sector and office plans covering positioning, target clients, channels and messaging, with priorities and owners attached. Built around the resource you’ve genuinely got.
Marketing reviews and audits
Senior marketing leadership one or two days a week, for firms that need someone owning marketing at partner level without carrying a full-time salary.
Why choose me?
- I’ve been running Helen Cox Marketing since 2016 and have worked with clients across professional services. Before that I was in-house in the legal sector, and I’ve held marketing, communications, campaign and business development roles, which means I can see how the pieces are meant to fit together rather than just one of them.
- I understand partnerships. I know why a plan needing someone in court on Tuesday won’t happen, how consensus decisions actually get made, and how to get senior people who didn’t come into the law to sell to engage with business development anyway.
- I’m a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM) with Chartered Marketer status.
Who I work with in the legal sector
Firms: magic circle and silver circle firms, national and regional practices, growing firms from ten partners upwards, boutique and full service firms, and solo practitioners.
People: managing partners, senior partners, heads of practice, marketing directors and heads of marketing, practice and sector marketing leads, marketing managers, and marketing executives and assistants.
If you’re a barristers’ chambers or a corporate finance adviser, I’ve written separately about how I work with barristers’ chambers and M&A firms and corporate finance advisers.
Who this isn’t for
I’m not the right person if what you need is someone to run your social accounts, write your directory submissions or produce content week to week. There are specialists who do that well and they’ll cost you less than I will.
I’m brought in to work out what the firm should be doing and why, to build the plans, and to help your partners act on them.
Let’s talk
Most law firms don’t have a marketing problem so much as a direction problem. The activity is usually fine. What’s missing is anyone deciding what it’s all supposed to add up to.
Book a discovery call and tell me where your firm is.
I work with B2B businesses, law and solicitors firms, accountants and consultancies in London, the UK and Europe
Happy clients
Quickly adapted to our people and priorities
Helen stepped confidently into a gap we needed to fill in our Corporate BD manager role and quickly adapted to our people, priorities and ways of working. Her can-do attitude, calm presence, practical approach and ability to build trust across the team made a real difference. Thank you, Helen, for your professionalism, flexibility and the positive impact you made.
Natalia Slattery, Head of Business Development, Cripps
Brought a valuable combination of strategic mindset, constructive challenge and energy
Helen stepped in when we had need of an experienced senior marketeer for a few months, bringing a valuable combination of strategic mindset, insight, constructive challenge, creative thinking and energy to get things done.
She quickly gelled with the team and senior stakeholders across the firm, ultimately enabling the development and smooth transition of key strategic projects back to the team, leaving us well placed to take these forward successfully.
Julian Wenban, Head of Marketing, Burges Salmon
Law firms I’ve worked with
Case study highlight
Reigniting momentum across corporate teams
A leading professional services firm brought me in after struggling for six months to recruit a Corporate BD Manager. With momentum slowing across teams, they needed interim senior support to re-energise marketing and business development activity.
FAQs
By asking for less, but specifically. An individual plan built around a partner’s existing clients and the handful of relationships most likely to produce work is something they can sustain alongside a caseload. “Everyone needs to do more BD” isn’t, which is why it’s been said at every partners’ meeting for years without much changing.
Mostly by making it safe rather than by making it compulsory. Partners resist it because they’re protecting a relationship they’ve spent years building, so the answer is usually a warm introduction process they control, plus enough internal communication that they actually know what the other departments do. Incentives help, but they’re not the first fix.
For most firms in most practice areas, yes, but not at the cost of everything else. What I’d change is the process: gather the evidence as matters conclude rather than reconstructing it in a panic each season, and then use the rankings once they arrive. Enormous effort goes into submissions and very little into making anything of the result.
Make the move visible and make it easy. That means announcing it properly to their network rather than assuming people will notice, giving them something to talk to former clients about, and being realistic that some relationships were with the old firm rather than with them. Planning this before the hire works considerably better than after.
Both, and they’re closer than firms usually treat them. The positioning that tells a client why you’re different tells a good associate why they’d want to work for you. Planning them together saves duplicated effort and produces a more coherent firm.
No. Plenty of the firms I work with have one marketing executive or nobody. Working out what resource you need, and in what order, is often part of the job.
It’s a free 30 minutes for me to understand what you’re dealing with and work out whether I’m the right person to help. If I’m not, I’ll tell you and point you somewhere bette
Let’s talk…
For more information on any of my services, get in touch and let’s talk.