Why don't lawyers trust marketers?

I'm sure that you've experienced the frustration of clients not taking your advice. They instruct you and happily pay your bill, but based on their limited knowledge, they question or, worse still, ignore virtually everything that you tell them. Sound familiar?

So why is it that so many solicitors' firms do the same thing with their marketing staff? Perhaps it's in their psyche. Perhaps it's because the Legal Practice Course (LPC) does exactly what it says on the tin and places its focus on the technicalities of legal practice, at the expense of practice development. It is strange really as the Law Society's website states that the LPC is "a key element of vocational training to become a solicitor". BusinessDictionary.com defines vocational training as "emphasising skills and knowledge required for a particular job function". It would appear that practice development is not considered as such.

I am not a marketer with an axe to grind. The partners at my firm really do 'get' marketing and business development. They see the value of being an active member of law firm network LawNet and, within sensible business constraints, allow me a reasonably free hand to use my expertise and experience to their benefit. I feel that my advice is trusted as much as I trust our lawyers' advice on areas outside my expertise.

But it seems my experience is still the exception, not the rule. In a 2010 Marketing Week feature about the world's hardest marketing jobs, the law came in equal third with accountancy, ahead of financial services and behind only tobacco and the government.

In the article, KPMG's Ken Fenwick said: "Selling the people within your business is complicated. The hardest sell in the world is people. If you have a people proposition, you can have thousands of employees and every one of them is different. You're trying to market all of them together, but you're also trying to market each one."

In fact, what needs to be accepted, and is invariably overlooked, is that the prospective client is likely to instruct your firm based on reputation or recommendation, but then the allocated fee earner, in the client's eyes, becomes the firm. It's your marketing department's job to balance this.

Marketing isn't about events and giveaways, it's about getting the right product or service in front of the right people at the right time and at the right price. As such, it is an income, not a cost, generator, which is why it should take its seat in the boardroom and feel confident in justifying its existence.

So if you were confident enough to appoint whoever is in charge of your marketing function, why shouldn't you be confident enough to trust their judgement? SJ

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