One Big Legal Marketing Takeaway From This Year’s Summer Reboot Camp

Across all of our legal marketing panels at this year’s law firm summer reboot camp, there was one big commonality: an emphasis on branding. Legal marketing is trending toward consolidation as agencies get acquired, but the law itself is just as fractured as ever.

Standing out is difficult in a fragmented market. In practice areas like personal injury, it’s even worse; you’re competing for advertising space with increasingly national brands like Morgan & Morgan!

According to our experts, however, your brand can be your saving grace. By crafting a brand that speaks to people and stands for something, you can distinguish yourself both from big players and other smaller firms. In this post in our October Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp Recap series, we’ll be talking about three key perspectives on branding from our guest experts.

Why Branding Is Important For Law Firms

First, of course, our experts had to discuss why branding is so important. It might seem like a no-brainer; your brand represents your firm, after all. It’s a reflection of your reputation and your work, and it will get you clients. The problem, however, is that branding is an investment.

As Conrad Saam brought up, he knows what a Pepsi is, but will never order one over Coke. How does Coke maintain that kind of market dominance? Through billions spent on brand-building ads, in movie theaters, on television, and even on billboards! Those advertisements may not induce people to buy Coke right away, but they keep Coke top of mind when you’re craving a soda.

Obviously, you’re not looking to become the Coca-Cola Company of your practice area (not yet, at least), but branding of any kind is an investment that, as we will discuss later, does not immediately pay off with new cases. As such, our experts spent a lot of time talking about why you should invest in branding.

If you’re not thinking about or investing in your brand, you probably think you’re doing enough. After all, you’re a hardworking attorney who gets results for your clients!

In 2018, Clio’s Legal Trends Report found that law firms have customer satisfaction scores analogous to airlines, banks, and credit card companies.

Trust is hard to earn in attorneys. Isn’t proving you’ve done that enough?

Unfortunately, it’s not. Your competitors all have a JD, and they all promise that they are trustworthy. Many of them even display their results in the form of client testimonials! Your firm needs a way to stand out from the crowd, and that is by having a distinctive brand.

Quick Tips On Branding For Law Firms

Luckily, we also got a lot of advice from our guest experts on branding. While they often agreed with each other, there were a few spirited discussions on the value of certain branding decisions, and on what the right decision might look like for the size of your firm.

The biggest advice we got was from Conrad Saam, who told attorneys it’s best to stand for something. He mentioned the Texas Law Hawk, whose brand is very aggressive. Even though you might not agree with what he stands for, Conrad argued, you can’t argue that his branding strategy is not successful.

Gyi Tsakalakis followed that advice by recommending you establish your goals first. Your marketing can take you places, but only if you know where to go! If you’re an attorney with a very local target audience, then branding in local, traditional places like little league baseball fields might be your best bet. Meanwhile, if you have more of an online presence, you might want to take more generalized stands.

And remember that branding is an investment, and it takes money and time before it starts paying off. Andrew Nasrinpay said that a branding campaign can take anywhere from three to eighteen months before you start seeing results that move the needle! Diligence, dedication, and patience are the name of the game when it comes to building an effective brand for your law firm.

How Not To Brand Your Law Firm

As we mentioned earlier, there was plenty of spirited discussion throughout our panels, and it often led to our viewers getting some great advice on avoiding some common branding pitfalls.

In particular, Seth Price cautioned that when you take a stand on something, anything, you are going to alienate some part of your audience! Even if you’re just supporting dog rescues and little league teams, there are going to be some people who hate dogs or root for the rival little league team and take that rivalry very seriously!

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a stand. Lawyers are risk-averse, even amongst business owners, but all business decisions carry a bit of risk. Seth’s advice was a warning: be aware that you’re alienating potential clients when you make a branding decision! Whether you decide to lean in or be careful is up to your personal risk tolerance.

Lastly, there was plenty of advice across our panels on the patience required to successfully brand (or re-brand) a law firm. Branding campaigns, after all, are not direct-response marketing. Your personal injury firm might have a billboard on a highway, but you’re not expecting people to call your number as they drive. If they did, you might be creating more accidents than bringing in cases!

Overall, our experts across both weeks of the Law Firm Summer Reboot Camp emphasized that branding takes a lot of time and money and is a full effort on its own. It requires special attention, separate from other marketing efforts. But it will be well worth it in the long run!

How Responsiveness Affects Your Brand

If there’s one thing that perhaps went undermentioned throughout all of the discussion on law firm branding, it was how picking up the phone—or not picking up the phone—affects how your leads and clients see your firm.

In their 2024 Legal Trends Report, Clio found that only 40 percent of the 500 law firms they called answered the phone, and that 90 percent of consumers whose phone calls aren’t answered become detractors to a brand down the line!

Clearly, answering phone calls is one of the biggest ways to improve your brand’s reception amongst your audience. And when you’re successfully getting clients and marketing your brand, you’re going to want to pick up their call, or else your money is just being wasted!

But how can you make sure that happens without sacrificing your precious time, whether that time is spent practicing the law or relaxing with family? Well, if you’re looking to capitalize on your brand and make responsiveness a key part of it, look no further than Answering Legal.

With our highly-trained virtual receptionists on your phone lines, you’ll never miss another new client call. That means your marketing money has a higher chance of paying off! Those leads you’re paying for won’t bounce off your voicemail and find another law firm.

We don’t just make it possible to capitalize on a marketing campaign, either. We make it easy! With our law firm software integrations, your new leads will automatically be entered into your CRM. And our mobile app lets you handle everything from your phone!

Next week, for the final entry in our Summer Recap series, we’ll be talking about a big topic in nearly all of our panels. Stay tuned to find out what legal marketing, legal tech, and law office management experts thought was the biggest thing to keep an eye on in 2025!

Make the most of your marketing. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.