A new survey of legal marketing pros

Have you seen the Legal Marketing Association’s recent survey of 864 professionals regarding their roles and their compensation?

The results paint a picture of a specialty that is still evolving, where professionals are treated differently at different firms. They may or may not be invited to company retreats (one third always attend, one third sometimes attend, one third never attend.) A few always go to partnership meetings (13%), but most never go (45%). 31% of the respondents report to the managing partner or chairman, but 27% report to someone in adminstration.

The vast majority of the respondents wear many hats, and classify themselves as “marketing generalists” (72%). But the number that concentrate their efforts in a single area is growing, and the largest area of specialization is business development (12%). I predict that this specialization in business development will accelerate in the next few years, as clients continue to become more demanding, and the firms that master traditional selling skills are the winners.

About half of the firms (49%) did not have a formal marketing plan. But don’t worry, they probably had a formal marketing budget (82%). So they may not know where they’re going, but at least they know how much it will cost.

In this survey, the average marketing budget represented about 2.4% of gross receipts. That’s much higher than the 1.1% found in the Law Firm Inc survey I’ve mentioned before. But you’d expect it to be higher because this survey was limited to firms that had a marketing specialist, and the Law Firm Inc. survey included all firms. In a future posting, I will discuss the percentage spent on marketing and sales in other industries, and exactly how low that legal figure is.