Guide for law firms
Written for managing partners, practice managers and marketing leads at regional and mid-sized firms. It covers how to pick a supplier, how to brief one properly, how to tell a good proposal from a confident one, and how to run the relationship afterwards so the money does not quietly leak away.
Reading time
About 14 minutes
Written by
Brian Schur, 1968 Consulting
Last reviewed
August 2026
I worked in and ran a digital agency for two decades. I have written the proposals, sat on the other side of the pitch table, and made the arguments agencies make. I now work independently, with no reseller agreements, no platform commissions and nothing to sell you at the end of a build.
That is the whole basis of this guide, and I will say it once rather than keep reminding you. Nothing here is an attack on agencies. Most of the ones I know are competent and are trying to do good work. The problem is structural. A supplier cannot be expected to scrutinise their own output, and no amount of good faith changes that. If your only source of advice about the work is the firm doing the work, you have no independent read on whether it is any good.
You are not stupid about this. You are unfamiliar with it, which is a different thing, and most writing on the subject fails to make the distinction. So I have written it the way I would explain it across a table.
Four things about a law firm make supplier relationships harder than they are in most businesses of the same size. None of them are anybody’s fault. All of them are worth naming, because you cannot manage around a pattern you have not noticed.
One
A decision that eleven equity partners agreed to is a decision nobody owns. When the work underdelivers there is no single person whose judgement is on the line, so the uncomfortable conversation with the supplier never happens. It gets raised at a partners’ meeting, noted, and carried forward. Meanwhile the invoices continue.
Two
Client confidentiality, conflict checks, transparency rules on price publication, professional indemnity implications of what a website promises. An agency working mostly with retail and hospitality clients will not know where those lines sit, and will present you with a marketing idea that your COLP has to unpick. It costs goodwill on both sides.
Three
In a profession where standing is the asset, anything that looks like promotion makes a lot of partners uncomfortable. That instinct is sound and it also produces paralysis. The usual result is work that is approved because it is inoffensive rather than because it is effective, and inoffensive marketing is the most reliable way to spend money without moving anything.
Four
Firms hold on to suppliers far longer than other businesses do. Partly loyalty, mostly risk aversion. The supplier holds the domain, the hosting, the analytics and the institutional memory, and untangling that looks like a project nobody has capacity for. So the relationship persists on inertia, which is the worst reason to keep any supplier and a very common one.
Enquiry quality, not enquiry volume. If you take one thing from this guide, take that.
Ten enquiries that fit your practice areas, sit in your fee range and are in your jurisdiction are worth more than fifty that do not. Everyone in a law firm knows this instinctively, and almost no firm measures it. The reporting pack shows sessions, form fills and rankings, because those are the numbers an agency can influence and demonstrate. Nobody is being dishonest. They are reporting what they are paid to affect.
The consequence is quietly expensive. Volume-led work pulls in price shoppers, out-of-area enquiries and matters you do not want. Fee earners spend chargeable time triaging rubbish. Reception fields calls that go nowhere. The dashboard improves and the firm feels no better off, because it is not better off.
The single most useful number in the pack. Requires someone to tag enquiries at intake, which takes a receptionist a few seconds.
If this falls while volume rises, the work is bringing you the wrong people. That is a finding, not a failure, and it should change the brief.
Compare it against referrals and repeat clients. If digital brings in your cheapest work, you are buying the wrong traffic.
Cheap to fix and frequently the largest single loss in the funnel. No agency can compensate for a form that sits unread until Monday.
Nobody records this and it is the richest source of insight in the firm. The pattern in your rejections tells you exactly what to stop attracting.
A weak brief is the most expensive document in the process, because every proposal you receive against it will be a guess, and you will end up comparing four different guesses rather than four approaches to the same problem. The rule is simple. Specify the outcome and the constraints. Leave the method to the supplier, because that is what you are paying them for.
One more thing. Record the baseline before the work begins. It sounds obvious and it is the step most often skipped, and without it you will spend the next two years arguing about whether anything improved.
Pitches reward confidence, and confidence is not competence. The most polished document in the pile is often the one produced most frequently, which means it has been produced for firms nothing like yours. What you are looking for is evidence of thought about your situation specifically.
These are the questions that separate the two. Ask them in the room, not by email, and pay attention to how comfortable the answers are.
One
A supplier who has thought about your firm can tell you what they have ruled out. One who cannot name anything they would decline to do is selling capacity rather than judgement.
Two
A fair question and a revealing one. Everyone has a commercial interest. The good ones will name it without flinching and explain why they still recommend it.
Three
Everyone has one. An agency that claims otherwise has either not been going long or is not telling you the truth. What matters is what they learned and what they changed.
Four
The pitch team and the delivery team are frequently different people. Ask for the names, the seniority and the proportion of their week you are buying. Get it into the contract.
Five
Most digital work that stalls stalls on the client side. A supplier who has costed your fee earners’ time honestly is a supplier who has done this before and expects to be held to a date.
Six
Domain, hosting, analytics, ad accounts, content. In your name, or theirs. Ask at the proposal stage, when it is an administrative question rather than a negotiation.
Selection gets all the attention. Management is where the money actually goes. Three leaks account for most of it, and all three are visible early if you know what you are looking at.
Blog posts published, keywords moved, sessions up. All true, none of it an answer to the only question that matters, which is whether the firm is getting better work. Ask for one page that starts with qualified enquiries and instructions, and let everything else be an appendix.
The tell: the report gets longer over time while the summary gets vaguer.
Rarely a single large change. It is a small addition each month, each individually reasonable, until the retainer covers a set of activities nobody chose and nobody can now stop without an argument. Re-baseline the scope every six months in writing and ask what was dropped to make room.
The tell: you cannot describe what the retainer buys in two sentences.
This is the real problem and it is the one firms are least willing to name. If no one on your side can tell a good technical answer from a plausible one, the supplier is effectively self-marking. You do not need to hire anybody. You need one person with authority and, occasionally, an independent read.
The tell: meetings end with everyone agreeing and nobody quite sure what was decided.
Changing agency is expensive and disruptive and it frequently solves nothing. You lose six months to onboarding, you pay for a discovery phase covering ground the last supplier already covered, and you often arrive at the same recommendations from a different letterhead.
In my experience most firms who think they need a new agency need a better brief and someone to hold the existing one to it. The case study below is the proof of that. That firm nearly tripled its enquiries without rebuilding anything and without changing everything about how it worked.
Case study, anonymised
Eighteen months of phased, focused work on the site the firm already had. No redesign, no migration, no change of platform. The point of including it here is not that the numbers are large. It is that the obvious expensive option was never taken.
The work began where most firms do not want to start, which is with what was already happening. Enquiries were being received and lost. Some practice areas were invisible and others were attracting matters the firm did not want. None of that needed new technology to diagnose.
What followed was a sequence rather than a project: fix what is losing enquiries now, then make the practice areas that matter findable, then improve what happens after somebody makes contact. Each stage was small enough to judge on its own, which meant the firm could have stopped at any point and still been better off than when it started.
Published anonymously at the client’s request. The detail here does not go beyond what is already public.
Concrete and checkable, so you can hold this up against your own arrangement rather than take my word for it. If you can say yes to most of these a year in, the relationship is working.
Twelve articles sit behind the sections above, on selection, briefing, reading proposals and holding a supplier to account.
There is no single figure and anyone who gives you one has not asked enough questions. What matters more is what the spend is attached to. A firm paying a monthly retainer with no defined outcome is usually spending too much whatever the number. A firm paying for defined work with a measurable result can spend a great deal and still be getting value.
Specialism helps with the regulatory picture and it shortens the education process, which is worth something. It is not decisive. A general agency that asks good questions about your practice areas will usually outperform a legal specialist selling the same template to every firm on the circuit. Ask to see two clients in the sector and what was different about each.
For most firms, meaningful movement takes six to twelve months of consistent work. The firm described above went from 182 to 529 enquiries across eighteen months. Anyone promising results in weeks is describing paid advertising, which can be fast and stops the moment you stop paying, or is not being straight with you.
Usually not. A rebuild is the most expensive and most disruptive option available, and it is frequently proposed because it is the largest single piece of work an agency can sell. Sometimes it is genuinely necessary, when the platform is unsupported or the site cannot be edited without a developer. Start by asking what a rebuild would fix that cannot be fixed otherwise.
One named person with the authority to say no. A partner, a practice manager or a marketing lead, it matters less than you would think. What does not work is a committee, because a committee cannot hold a supplier to account between meetings and cannot make a decision at the speed the work requires.
Yes, and that is the more common outcome. An independent review often finds a competent supplier being managed badly, which is a cheaper problem to fix and a less disruptive one. I have no reseller agreements and no delivery arm, so I have no interest in the answer being a change.
A structured review of the supplier you already have, with no interest in the answer being a change.
Four different things are sold under one name. The honest market range before anyone quotes you.
Long reads on the decisions people get stuck on. Free, and they sell nothing.
I review supplier relationships and digital work independently, with nothing to sell at the end of it.
Thirty minutes on the phone is usually enough to tell whether there is a problem worth looking at, and if there is not I will say so.
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