How much law firm marketing is enough?

June is a busy time for management in law firms and at KMS it's no different, with lots of work around Australia in helping establish appropriate KMSWorkPlans for individual fee-earners in most KMS client firms.
Law firms have always been interested in how much money should be spent on marketing...


However this year a strong trend is already emerging from this work in planning utilisation of fee-earner resources...a more vigorous interest in how much KMSFirmTime should be allocated to Business Development(Marketing) by each fee-earner...

The answer at one level is easy..."The correct amount for each individual commensurate with their skills and interests, and the firm's business and marketing plans", but that doesn't help most firms much!

As an aside, I regularly see lawyers, young and not so young, who claim to have no time to attend to marketing, when their outputs in other areas are demonstrably low.

A modest amount of business development done regularly will achieve more than occasional bursts of effort in desperation when clearly there isn't enough Client work...hasn't been for months!

Of course all lawyers should learn to take all ad hoc opportunities to be involved in business development, but there should also be some FirmTime allocated each working day on average...

As a rough guideline I like to see fee-earners with 30 minutes a day allocated on average at a  minimum...

If someone has a particular aptitude, and/or a responsibility to grow the work volume to get a team busy or cause a busy team to grow further, it would be unlikely this could happen without an average of an hour a day effective effort.

Principals roles vary greatly of course, but typically I would aim for much larger chunks of a principal's day to be devoted to business development...

Whatever the allocation I would expect to see it boosted sharply as soon as it became apparent the individual or team did not have a "healthy backlog" of client work...soaking up the spare time and making good use of it...

It goes almost without saying that allocating time to Business development is one thing...planning well and executing well are something different altogether!

Far too often I see in firms far more time allocated to Business development than is actually invested...and the effort does not appear in other useful categories of FirmTime or in ClientTime...

Teach people what to do and establish systems to enable them to do it and monitor outcomes...but if after a reasonable period the inputs or outputs are poor consider whether the time may be better spent doing Client work that someone else has brought into the firm by more effective investment of time...

I posted earlier on 50-plus Tools of Business Development...01/11/2001
http://lawfirmprofit.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/55-tools-of-business-development-for.html