How to Get Clients for Your Law Firm

In more than ten years of working in law firm marketing, one question has come up more than any other:

How do we get more clients?

You might expect me to give you the familiar lawyer’s answer: “It depends.”

I have a more useful starting point: become competitive.

I can almost hear the response. “I’m a lawyer. Of course I’m competitive.”

I believe you. You prepare carefully, know your subject, and care about doing a good job. You may be very good at getting results for your clients.

But being a competitive lawyer and running a competitive law firm are two different accomplishments. I’ve encountered capable, competitive people running oddly uncompetitive businesses.

Their expertise is difficult to find. Their websites give strangers little reason to choose them. Their best work stays inside the office. People who do inquire encounter a process that makes becoming a client harder than it should be.

Those are business capabilities the firm needs to develop. Legal ability alone won’t do that work.

My approach has two substantial parts.

First, develop your Competitive Baseline. Get your website, search presence, relationships, intake, and other business capabilities ready to compete seriously for the work you want. Establishing that foundation takes real work.

Then build your Advantage Stack. Choose a few things you want to be exceptionally good at. Perhaps that’s an outstanding video series, memorable advertising, or a website that teaches your subject better than anyone else’s. Put serious work into building those things. Their combination makes your firm increasingly difficult to compete with.

Both parts involve the same areas of the business. Consider the full picture as you build your Competitive Baseline. Then choose where you want to put the extra effort into becoming unusually good.

This Learning Center’s guides will take you deeper into each area, including how to develop your baseline and the advantages you choose. You can start with building your Competitive Baseline, jump to developing your Advantage Stack, or go to deciding where to start.

Build your Competitive Baseline

The Competitive Baseline is the set of capabilities your firm needs to compete seriously for the clients and matters it wants.

The word baseline can make this sound modest. Building it can involve substantial work, especially when a firm has accumulated disconnected marketing activities over several years. A website, some social accounts, and an occasional marketing invoice don’t tell us whether the necessary capabilities are there.

You need to consider every area below. The required work in each depends on the business you want, the people you need to reach, and the alternatives those people can choose. Some areas will need major development. Others will have a smaller, clearly defined role. You might decide paid advertising has no place in your current plan. That should be a considered decision, with another credible route to the work you need.

Two ideas run through the whole picture. Reach means the right people encounter your firm. Authority means they encounter credible evidence that you understand their problem and are worth trusting with it. The capabilities below help create those encounters, give people reasons to choose you, and carry their interest through to becoming clients.

As you work through these areas, look at your firm alongside the other firms your prospective clients could choose. Can people find you, understand why you fit their situation, and confidently take the next step? Building your Competitive Baseline gives the whole business a stronger chance of winning the work you want.

Strategy and positioning: decide what you’re building

Before deciding what your marketing should do, get specific about the business you want it to support.

You might want a larger firm with several attorneys and a strong presence in your community. You might want a small team, work you enjoy, a manageable schedule, and a good income. You might want to change the mix of matters you handle because the work filling your calendar is wearing you out.

All of those are legitimate starting points. A community legacy and a profitable practice you enjoy running are both worthwhile ambitions. Your choices should reflect what matters to you.

“More clients” becomes useful when you connect it to that ambition. Which clients? What kinds of matters? How many can you serve well? What work will support the income, team, and working life you want?

Then examine the market. What do those clients need? What alternatives do they have? What can your firm credibly offer that gives them a reason to choose you?

An owner who wants more predictable work should question a plan that attracts a growing volume of urgent, demanding matters. The phone could ring more often while the business moves in the wrong direction.

Your baseline starts with a clear direction: the work you want, the people you can serve, and a credible explanation of why your firm fits. Those decisions should shape every area that follows.

Websites: help people evaluate and approach the firm

Your website should help a stranger recognize that they are in the right place, understand what you can help with, and decide whether to contact you.

Consider a parent who lands directly on a custody page. That person may never have seen your homepage. Can they understand the situations your firm handles? Can they find the relevant attorneys and evidence of their experience? Can they tell what the first conversation would involve?

A paragraph announcing that you offer “comprehensive legal solutions” leaves most of that work to the visitor.

Practice-area pages, attorney profiles, and your homepage each need to do their part. Explain the work in recognizable terms. Introduce the people doing it. Give visitors evidence through relevant experience, reviews, credentials, and explanations that show how you think. Make the next step easy to understand.

Design, writing, organization, accessibility, and the experience on a phone all contribute. Your baseline is a website that helps someone make a consequential decision and act on it.

SEO: make the firm discoverable for the right searches

Search engine optimization helps people searching for legal help encounter your firm. Start with the services, client situations, and locations that matter to the business you are building.

Your site needs pages that address those subjects, and search engines need to be able to access and understand them. Local search also deserves attention when you serve a particular area: accurate business information and a well-maintained Google Business Profile help people find and evaluate the firm.

Consider both someone searching for your name after a recommendation and someone who has a problem but has never heard of you. What do they find? Which searches matter enough to justify work on your visibility?

The baseline includes sound technical work, useful pages, accurate information, and an understanding of where you are visible and where you are missing. The investment required will depend on how much you expect search to contribute and how competitive those searches are.

Video: let people encounter the attorneys’ judgment

Video gives prospective clients a way to hear an attorney explain something, see how they communicate, and begin to assess whether they would feel comfortable asking that person for help.

Decide where that experience would be useful. An attorney introduction can make a profile more informative. An explanation of what happens during a first consultation can help someone prepare to call. A video addressing a recurring client question can support a practice-area page.

Give each video a job and a place where people will encounter it. The viewer needs to hear it clearly, follow the explanation, and understand why it matters to their situation.

A firm’s initial role for video might be a small set of well-chosen pieces. Another firm may have reasons to use it much more extensively. Establish what would help your prospective clients, then build and maintain that capability at the appropriate level.

Social media: establish a presence and participate with purpose

People can discover your firm through social media, encounter its expertise repeatedly, or check it after hearing your name elsewhere.

Choose platforms based on the clients, professional contacts, and communities you want to reach. Make sure the firm’s presence gives people an accurate picture of who you are, what you do, and how to find out more.

Then decide what you will contribute. An attorney’s explanation of a recurring question can reach people through a community organization that shares it. A thoughtful conversation with another professional can introduce your judgment to their network. Useful material needs distribution and participation to have a chance of reaching anyone.

For the baseline, establish a credible presence, a purposeful level of activity, and responsibility for keeping it current and responding when people engage. The firm should understand whom it is trying to reach and what those encounters are supposed to contribute. A daily performance on every available platform is unnecessary.

Networking and referrals: develop relationships that can lead to work

Recommendations have to come from somewhere. Consider the professionals, former clients, community organizations, and other people who encounter the clients your firm can help.

Do they understand the work you want? Have they had enough experience of your judgment and follow-through to recommend you confidently? Does someone introduced to your firm receive the attention that recommendation deserves?

If the network barely exists, developing it is part of the work. Participate in relevant groups, make useful contributions, meet people, and follow up with a reason to stay in touch. An initial conversation becomes more valuable when there is a second one.

Your baseline includes a deliberate way to build relationships, help people understand whom you can serve, and handle introductions well. The client experience matters here too. People who have worked with your firm have something concrete to draw on when someone asks whom they would recommend.

Paid advertising: decide whether it has a useful job

Advertising can put your firm in front of people you want to reach. Before buying that attention, decide what work you are trying to attract, whom the campaign needs to reach, and what should happen after someone responds.

The message needs to match the service. The destination needs to help the person evaluate that service. The firm needs to be ready to respond, and you need a way to judge the resulting inquiries and clients against the cost.

For some firms, paid advertising will be an important part of the baseline. For others, the right decision will be to build through other routes. In either case, make the decision in the context of your goals, market, capacity, and economics. An active advertising account alone tells you very little about whether this area is doing its job.

Intake and follow-up: help interest become a client relationship

Once a person decides to inquire, the firm needs to respond competently.

Test the form. Call the number. Find out who receives an inquiry, who responds, and what happens when the office is closed. Follow the process from an initial question through screening, a consultation, a hiring decision, and engagement.

A form submission that disappears into an unattended inbox is a business problem. So is a prospective client who wants to proceed but cannot tell what happens next.

Establish responsibilities, useful response expectations, and follow-up that helps people make a decision. Carry that care into the beginning of the client experience.

Imagine a firm whose polished website promises personal attention. The first call goes well. Then the engagement paperwork looks as though it was photocopied six times and faxed in from another decade, and nobody explains what the client is supposed to do with it.

The firm has given that person conflicting evidence about the experience ahead. Your baseline should provide a dependable route from inquiry to hiring, followed by an introduction to the firm that lives up to what brought the person there.

PR and speaking: bring your expertise to other audiences

Interviews, media contributions, podcasts, workshops, and speaking engagements give people opportunities to encounter an attorney’s knowledge and judgment.

Consider which audiences would benefit from what your firm knows. A community organization may need someone to explain an issue its members face. A professional group may want help recognizing when a client needs a particular kind of legal assistance. A journalist may need someone who can explain a development accurately and intelligibly.

Decide which opportunities fit, what you can contribute, and who is prepared to represent the firm. That may mean a few well-chosen local appearances. A firm with broader ambitions may need a more sustained effort.

The baseline is a considered approach to these opportunities and the ability to handle the ones you pursue well. Prepare, make the contribution valuable to that audience, and give interested people a way to continue learning or get in touch afterward.

Measurement: understand what the work is producing

You need enough information to judge whether your marketing is helping you build the business you intended.

Track inquiries, the matters people bring, which inquiries become clients, and what you spend to generate and handle that interest. Look at the work you actually retain and whether your team can serve it well.

Ask clients how they found you and what helped them decide. A search, a recommendation, an article, and a video can all participate in the same person’s decision. Combine what people tell you with the records you have.

The baseline is a regular way to review the connection between your effort and the clients coming through the door. More visits or calls can be encouraging, but you also need to know whether they represent the work you want. That information should help you decide what to continue, improve, or stop.

Make the baseline work as a whole

These areas connect. Your positioning guides the subjects on your website. SEO helps people discover those pages. Video supplies evidence of an attorney’s judgment. Social activity, relationships, and public appearances introduce the firm to more people. Intake carries interest forward, and measurement helps you see what happens.

A firm can be capable in several areas and still lose opportunities at the connections. A trusted recommendation can lose momentum when the referred person finds confusing information. A strong website cannot help someone who never encounters it. A promising inquiry can go nowhere because nobody takes responsibility for the next step.

Examine every area, then look at how they work together. Compare the experience with the alternatives your intended clients can choose. What can someone learn about those firms? What evidence do they provide? How easy is it to get a useful response? Your Competitive Baseline needs to reflect the market you are actually in.

Establishing it is a substantial accomplishment. You are building a business that people can discover, understand, evaluate, and successfully approach for help. That deserves serious attention even before you develop an exceptional advantage.

Develop your Advantage Stack

Now decide where you want other firms to have a hard time keeping up.

Maybe you want to build the most useful website on your subject. Maybe you love meeting people and could become an exceptional networker. Maybe you want to make short videos people save and share because the explanations are so good.

Choose the things you want to become unusually good at, and put serious work into them. Together, those strengths become your Advantage Stack.

Choose where you want to be unusually good

You have choices about the kind of firm you build. That includes choosing where you want it to be exceptional.

Some choices will grow out of strengths you already have. You might be a terrific public speaker, a natural teacher, or the person who always seems to know someone who can help. Perhaps your attorneys are unusually good at making a complicated situation understandable. Perhaps your firm has close relationships in a community you care about.

Other choices begin with ambition. You can decide to become an excellent public speaker before you have given your first workshop. You can decide that your website will become the best place to learn about a particular subject while the current site still needs considerable work. The decision gives you something specific to build toward.

Your interests matter here. If you enjoy writing, you may want to create an email newsletter people make time to read. If you love teaching, you may enjoy working through how to explain something that other websites handle badly. That enthusiasm can help you keep improving long enough to become very good.

The question is where you want to put that extra effort. Which things would you like your firm to do so well that someone comparing you with other firms would have a reason to prefer you?

Picture what your advantages could become

The possibilities below sit within the same subject areas we covered in the Competitive Baseline. Each is a choice about what to develop exceptionally well so your firm becomes a stronger competitor for the clients you want. You’re choosing capabilities to build far enough that other firms have a hard time matching them. Picture what pursuing one of these would look like at your firm.

A video studio inside the office

I’ve had clients who wanted to create a video studio inside their office so they could go live frequently and record short videos without arranging a separate shoot each time.

Picture walking into a room with the camera, lighting, and sound already set up. An attorney can explain a recurring question while it’s fresh, host a scheduled live conversation, or record a timely response to something the firm’s audience is asking about.

Make that a capability your firm excels at. Develop the attorneys’ on-camera skills, plan subjects worth covering, and have someone ready to help publish and share the material. The firm can keep getting better at making clear, engaging video while building a substantial collection people can watch and return to.

A website that teaches your subject better than anyone else

Imagine someone arriving with a difficult question and finding a website that helps them understand the subject properly. The explanations are clear. The examples sound like situations they recognize. A diagram makes a confusing process understandable. A video answers the question they were about to ask next.

You could choose to build that website. Your attorneys know the questions people struggle with. Use that knowledge to develop guides, examples, explanations, and demonstrations that make the site unusually useful. Organize it so someone can follow a question as far as they need to, then understand how to approach the firm for help.

This is one of the choices I’m making for Confident Reach with this Learning Center. I want this website to teach law firm marketing exceptionally well. The explanations, examples, and visual demonstrations are part of what I’m building to make that happen.

For a law firm, a teaching website can become a substantial advantage. People can discover it while looking for answers, return as they learn more, and share it with someone facing a similar situation. They can also see how well your attorneys understand and explain the work before they contact you.

Memorable advertising that brings in the right work

Imagine a series of ads built around situations your prospective clients immediately recognize. The writing is sharp, the visual idea is memorable, and each ad feels like it comes from the same firm. People recognize the next one before your name appears.

You could choose to become exceptionally good at creating and running those campaigns. Develop strong ideas, give the writing and design serious attention, and try different ways to tell the story. Follow the resulting inquiries through to the clients and matters the firm actually retains.

That gives you a way to keep improving both the creative work and where you spend money to reach people. A firm that excels at bringing in the work it wants through advertising has a substantial advantage worth developing.

Exceptional networking

Perhaps you want to become one of the best-connected attorneys in the community you serve. You enjoy learning what people do, remember what they are working on, and see introductions that would help them.

You can deliberately build on that. Participate in relevant professional groups. Bring people together for conversations they would value. Get to know the accountants, therapists, business owners, attorneys, and community organizers whose work intersects with the people your firm serves. Follow up, make useful introductions, and become someone people are glad to hear from. You might also become deeply involved in a community you care about, helping organize events and contributing to projects that matter to the people who live there.

Over time, you are building a network of people who know you, understand your work, and have reasons to recommend you. Those relationships also help you spot opportunities and learn about needs you might otherwise miss. A firm can choose to become exceptionally good at this and make that network one of its strongest advantages.

A client experience people recommend

Some firms could build a major advantage in the experience of being a client. Imagine a firm that becomes exceptionally good at helping people through the practical demands of a difficult matter. It designs the experience around the people it serves: busy parents, clients who need help in more than one language, or families supporting a relative from another state.

That firm might develop illustrated roadmaps for the matters it handles, short explanations clients can revisit with family, and a guided way to gather documents without repeatedly entering the same information. A designated team member helps each client prepare for the next stage. The firm learns where people struggle and keeps improving the process until it makes a difficult situation unusually manageable.

You can choose to become outstanding at this. It gives prospective clients something specific to value when they compare firms, and gives former clients and referring professionals an experience worth recommending.

An outstanding podcast

Imagine a show people look forward to because the conversations are consistently good. The host prepares, asks questions worth answering, and follows an interesting response somewhere useful. Guests have room to explain what they know. Listeners leave with something worth thinking about or sharing.

A family law attorney might build a show about the practical changes people face when families separate, inviting guests with useful perspectives on parenting, work, and life in two households. Another attorney might enjoy interviewing people throughout a community the firm serves. The subject and format should give the people you want to reach a reason to listen.

Develop your interviewing, cultivate good guests, and make the listening experience worth people’s time. Your podcast gives people a way to get to know you and a reason to keep coming back. A guest can become a professional relationship. A listener can recommend an episode to someone who needs help.

Choose your own combination

Your Advantage Stack should fit your people, the clients you want, and the business you intend to build.

Consider the people you need to reach. Which of those strengths would they value? Where would they encounter it? A practical workshop, a useful social media series, and a recommendation from someone they trust offer different ways for people to encounter your firm.

Look at the other firms competing for the same work. Read their websites, watch their videos, and notice which attorneys are active in relevant groups. What are they doing especially well? Where is there room to build something substantially better? You might find a subject everyone explains poorly or a community that would welcome more sustained participation.

Choose a combination you want to develop. One firm might build a standout educational website and become especially good at helping people find it through search. Another might pair a distinctive advertising campaign with an excellent video series. A third might develop an outstanding network and a client experience that people enthusiastically recommend.

These are possible combinations. You may see other opportunities in the areas we have covered. The point is to make a deliberate choice about where your firm will put the work into becoming exceptional.

Put serious work into becoming exceptional

Once you choose an advantage, give it a concrete ambition. “Build the most useful online guide to divorce in our area” gives you something to work toward. So does “Develop workshops that local organizations ask us to bring back” or “Publish an email newsletter people regularly forward to friends.”

Then make the work part of how the firm operates. Decide who will lead it, what support they need, and how it will get sustained attention. Protect time for the attorneys’ contribution. Give the people doing the work permission to improve it beyond the first acceptable version.

For a teaching website, that means choosing the questions to explain, bringing the attorneys’ experience into the material, and working on the writing, examples, design, and demonstrations. Read the result as someone unfamiliar with the subject. Find where the explanation becomes difficult to follow, then improve it. Keep developing the collection as you discover what would help readers next.

For workshops, pay attention to where people get interested and where they get confused. Develop examples they recognize, demonstrations that make a difficult idea clear, and exercises that help them think through their own situation. Use their questions and feedback to make the next session better. Become the speaker organizers are pleased to recommend to one another.

For an email newsletter, develop a recognizable point of view and a reason to read each edition. Work on the subjects, stories, and explanations. Invite interested people to subscribe through your website, events, and social media. Pay attention to what readers ask about and share, then use that response to make the next edition more useful.

You can begin developing a chosen advantage while improving the Competitive Baseline elsewhere. Give both clear attention. An excellent video series needs a useful place to send interested viewers. A memorable advertising campaign deserves an intake experience that carries that interest through to a useful conversation.

Make your firm harder to compete with

Now imagine another firm trying to attract the same clients.

Think about the particular strengths you have chosen. A collection of excellent videos gives people many ways to encounter your attorneys at their best. The resources you have built can make your firm the place people turn to for explanations. Your campaigns can become increasingly effective at bringing in the work you want.

Together, your chosen advantages make you a more formidable competitor. A firm trying to win the same work has to contend with the combination you have built. You keep improving the things you have chosen to excel at, and more people get to experience how good your firm is at them.

That is why the choice matters. You’re deciding which things to develop far enough that other firms will have a hard time matching them. You can aim to become world-class at a few things that matter to the business and the people you serve.

The Competitive Baseline gives the whole firm the capabilities it needs to compete seriously. Your Advantage Stack gives you chosen areas of exceptional strength. Both help you build a business capable of winning the clients and matters you want.

Put the whole picture to work

Bring these two questions into your next conversation about the firm’s marketing and development.

What do we need to build or improve to establish our Competitive Baseline? Look across all ten subject areas. Identify the capabilities that need work, then follow the experience from discovering the firm through becoming a client. Decide what needs attention and who will take responsibility for it.

What do we want to become exceptionally good at? Name the advantages you want to develop. Make the ambition specific enough to guide actual work: the resources you want to build, the campaigns you want to develop, the audience you want to reach. Decide what you will do next and how you will give that work the attention it deserves.

Keep judging both parts against the business you want to run. Are you attracting the clients and matters you intended? Can your team serve them well? Is the work supporting the income and working life you want? What are you learning that should change your next investment?

You already bring preparation, judgment, and competitive drive to your work as an attorney. Bring that same ambition to the business you are building.

Develop your Competitive Baseline so the whole firm can compete seriously for the clients and matters you want. Choose where you want to become exceptional, and put the work into building those strengths. Your Advantage Stack makes the firm increasingly difficult to compete with.

That brings us back to the question we started with: How do you get more of the right clients?

Build a firm that is as competitive as you are.

The Learning Center’s subject guides will take both parts further. Each will explain how to establish the capabilities your firm needs in that area and develop the advantages you choose. You can use the full map to build your Competitive Baseline and return to particular guides as you put more work into your Advantage Stack.

I’ll keep adding guides, examples, and practical explanations here. You can join the email list to receive new material as it is published.

Want help putting this to work?

If you want to talk through what this means for your firm, get in touch for a free discovery call.

For a closer examination, the $950 Reach & Authority Assessment reviews how people find, understand, trust, and contact your firm. You’ll receive written findings, a prioritized 30-day action map, and a walkthrough with me.

We’ll start with the business you want to build and look at what needs to happen for your firm to compete for the work that supports it.