Top 11 Reasons Most Lawyers Don’t Marketing

1. Lawyers are trained skeptics.

Marketing requires faith and patience. Lawyers like to push and push a marketing effort until they can show with great satisfaction that there’s no way it’s going to work.

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2. Lawyers love to argue.

Most lawyers are smart. When it comes to embarking on unknown ventures, such as marketing, they find it difficult to “be stupid” and benefit from the wisdom and experience of other experts.

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3. Lawyers are risk averse.

The wisest (and safest!) advice lawyers give is “Don’t do it!” They live in a universe where mistakes result in liability, negligence, and sweeping judgments. In marketing, mistakes are a necessary part of growth. Taking and managing risk are essential elements of marketing and growth. Lawyers like contracts and guarantees.

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4. Lawyers often know little about business.

The law school did not offer courses on how to be an entrepreneur. Any high school business student knows that marketing is an important and required part of any business. This comes as a surprise to lawyers who often consider themselves to belong to some kind of 19th century guild. Lawyers were brought up in an anti-marketing culture. They learned that they were in a “profession” in which refined ladies and gentlemen did not go to unseemly efforts to secure business. Those people were “ambulance chasers”. (The practice of law is a profession, but that practice is carried out within a business entity called a “law firm” – subject to the laws of economics like any other business.)

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5. Lawyers look at costs.

Most lawyers hate it when a prospective client drops into the lawyer’s office and starts with, “How much is this all going to cost?” However, that is the first question the marketing lawyer asks. Focusing on costs causes paralysis. Law firm owners need to focus on generating revenue and driving results.

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6. Lawyers like to waver.

High “fact finders” on the Kolbe Index, they like to analyze things. They want to do extensive due diligence. They want to consult with all their colleagues. They enjoy thinking about action more than acting, with the risks that this entails. Purposeful action overcomes fear. Life rewards action and punishes inaction. Fortune favors the brave.

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8. Lawyers lack perseverance.

If lawyers attempt any form of marketing,
any bump in the road will knock them down. And there are always bumps in the road. Lawyers get excited about a new marketing program and passionately jump into it. Then after 45 days or so, life happens. A large box explodes. One of the children gets sick. A check does not fit. Marketing did not produce instant wealth. The lawyer decides that he made a big mistake and gives up.

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9. Lawyers are uncomfortable with the idea of ​​making money.

Most lawyers are motivated by a desire to serve people. Most subscribe to some form of Judeo-Christian ethics that is full of mixed messages about the pursuit of wealth. Most are conflicted, if not guilt-ridden, over the profit motive. Many secretly think that what they do is not worth the money, since it does not involve hours of hard physical work. These lawyers might be more motivated if they thought of marketing and growth as “being able to serve the most people” rather than “making more money” or “being more successful.”

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10. Lawyers define themselves as lawyers, not as owners of a law firm.

This is the biggest bug and is a contributing factor to all the others listed here. Lawyers don’t understand that these are two completely different roles that require two completely different mindsets and two completely different skill sets. What lawyers believe to be your greatest asset (your ability to practice law) is actually your greatest responsibility. They are too busy working on their business to work on it. In order to grow a practice and be successful, it is necessary for lawyers to think of themselves first as business owners called a law firm, and only second (if at all) as practicing lawyers.

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11. Lawyers are obsessed with what other lawyers think of them.

In no other business does the owner care about how he is rated by competitors. Lawyers are often afraid to put in even the slightest marketing effort for fear that they will be thought to be “undeserving” or “overly pushy.” Let me assure you, a lamp shop owner doesn’t care what the competing lamp shop owner thinks, about nothing.