The challenge
Professional services marketing is unlike selling any product. In a law firm, the product is the people: clients hire a lawyer they trust before they hire a firm. Which creates the central tension, every lawyer needs a visible personal profile, yet the firm needs one coherent brand, one voice and one standard across all of it.
Add the audiences: sceptical partners who own the business, staff across practice areas who see marketing as someone else's job, and a client base that arrives through reputation and referral more than any ad. AWS Legal ran at real scale for a regional firm: 85 staff across five offices, each office with its own community, clients and personality. When I joined, my brief was the whole function: strategy, communications, brand and reporting, built from the ground up, and made consistent across all five locations.
What I did
- Set the firm-wide strategy. Developed and executed the overarching marketing strategy, covering client acquisition, reputation and internal communication, grounded in market analysis and client surveys rather than assumption.
- Defined and implemented the firm's voice and tone. A law firm speaks in high-stakes moments, a property settlement, an employment dispute, a will. I helped codify how the firm sounds, authoritative without being cold, plain-spoken without being casual, and implemented that voice across five offices and 85 staff, from partner bios to reception signage.
- Ran the firm's social media end to end. Strategy, calendar, content and community management across the firm's channels: turning legal expertise into posts people actually read, celebrating people milestones that humanized the firm, and keeping five offices visible in their own communities.
- Taught lawyers to market themselves. Developed and delivered in-house training workshops that showed lawyers and partners how to build their personal profiles, in their language, with the firm's brand as the frame rather than the cage. A lawyer who understands why a client chooses them becomes the firm's best marketing channel.
- Wrote the playbooks. Custom marketing playbooks for staff and practice areas, so the standard survived busy weeks, personnel changes and my eventual departure. Capability that lives in documents outlasts capability that lives in one person.
- Ran rapid-response communications through COVID-19. When lockdowns hit mid-tenure, I turned legal change into client guidance at speed: website banners, social updates and client notices on employment law, commercial leases, tenancies and temporary visas, published as the rules changed, positioning the firm as the calm, current voice its clients needed.
- Turned law changes into client education campaigns. When the Trusts Act 2019 came into force, I built the seminar campaign around the firm's own associates, invitations, event creative and promotion that made the lawyers the faces of the expertise. The same model ran for tenancy and water-services law changes.
- Marketed the firm as an employer too. Graduate and clerkship recruitment campaigns that competed for talent against the big-city firms, employer brand as part of the marketing remit.
- Held the brand line everywhere. One voice and one visual standard across the website, press releases, industry publications, social channels, community sponsorships and event presence, from A&P shows to dairy awards, so a client met the same firm at every touchpoint.
- Reported to the partnership board. Regular data-driven marketing reports presented directly to the partners: what we did, what it produced commercially, what we learned, what's next. The room that taught me to speak the board's language.
The work itself
A few pieces from the tenure, the playbook, the campaigns and the rapid-response work described above:
The results
- A complete marketing function where none had formally existed: strategy, calendar, brand standards and reporting rhythm
- Rapid, trusted client communications through the most legally turbulent period in decades, delivered across web, email, social and print
- Lawyers and partners actively marketing themselves inside a coherent firm brand, capability the training and playbooks left behind
- One recognizable voice and visual standard across 85 staff and five offices, from social feeds to office signage
- Consistent, professional presence across press, publications, digital channels and client-facing collateral
- A partnership board with clear, commercial visibility of marketing for the first time
Why it matters
Service businesses, law, accounting, consulting, agencies, engineering, all share this shape: the people are the product, trust is the currency, and marketing succeeds by making experts visible without making the brand incoherent. This role proves I can market what can't be photographed on a shelf, and hold my own in front of the owners while doing it.