Marketing in a law firm: who owns it at each size

In an Australian firm, marketing sits in one of 4 places: nobody, part of somebody's role, a dedicated hire, or a retained supplier. Which one fits is a question of size and of how many practice areas need promoting, rather than of budget. Each arrangement stops working at an identifiable point.

Last updated: 5 August 2026

Who actually does the marketing in an Australian firm?

One of four people, and in the smallest firms somebody who was hired to do something else entirely.

The four arrangements, and where each one runs out:

Nothing on that list is peculiar to Australia except the weight of the last row. Brisbane family law runs at 8,800 searches a month and around A$24.29 a click, measured 3 August 2026, which is cheap enough to test demand — so the internal question is less whether to spend than who keeps the work moving between the spending.

The damaging admission first: a supplier telling you an internal hire is never the answer is selling. Somebody inside the building can chase a fee earner in a corridor. An outside supplier waits three weeks for the same email, and that delay is the single largest cause of legal content that never gets published.

When does it stop being the practice manager's spare hour?

At the second practice area, at the second missed month, or the first time somebody asks what last quarter produced.

Those are the three signals, and any one of them is enough.

The second practice area. One area can be promoted by somebody with other duties, because the material is familiar and there is only one audience to keep track of. Two areas double the page count, the question set and the calendar while the spare hour stays the same size.

The second missed month. Search work is cumulative. A page published in March keeps earning; a March that produced nothing is not recovered by a double April. When a second month goes past without anything published, the arrangement has already failed and only the reporting is lagging.

The question nobody can answer. When a partner asks what the marketing produced last quarter and there is no answer that survives ten seconds of scrutiny, the work has been happening without measurement — which, for a room trained to test evidence, is the same as not happening.

None of these is about firm size directly. A five-lawyer practice with three practice areas passes the threshold before a twelve-lawyer practice doing one thing.

How much should a law firm spend on marketing?

Work backwards from what the searches would cost to buy, not forwards from a share of turnover.

Brisbane family law is 8,800 searches a month at around A$24.29 a click, measured 3 August 2026. Buying every one of those clicks for a single month would come to roughly A$213,752. That is arithmetic on two measured figures, not a forecast and not a recommendation — nobody buys a whole search — but it puts a ceiling on the conversation that a share of turnover never establishes.

The useful version of the sum is smaller. A hundred of those clicks is about A$2,429, the price of finding out in a fortnight whether enquiries from that search become the kind of matters the firm wants. That figure, not a percentage, is the anchor for what an internal role or an outside supplier ought to cost.

Our own prices are A$1,900 for the sprint and A$4,200 for the build. Fixed, published, no minimum term. Of 40 legal-marketing suppliers we read in full on 3 August 2026, twelve published a price at all, five showed only a "from" range, and one offered work with no minimum term.

What should stay inside the firm, whoever else is involved?

Four things, none of which can be bought.

• The facts of the work. What actually happens in a property settlement at this firm, in what order, is knowledge that lives with fee earners and cannot be researched into existence by anybody outside.
• The decision about what to say on price. Australia has no rule requiring firms to publish fees, so this is a commercial choice about positioning rather than an obligation, and it belongs to the partners.
• Intake. What happens between an enquiry arriving and somebody ringing back is operational, sits inside the firm, and determines whether any of the rest was worth paying for.
• Who the firm wants to hear from. A supplier optimising for volume will produce enquiries the firm declines, and the declining costs staff time nobody counts.

An outside supplier owns the opposite list: the pages, the publishing cadence, the technical layer, and the measurement that answers the partner's question in ten seconds.

Why does marketing done in bursts produce nothing?

Because the mechanism it depends on is cumulative, and a burst does not accumulate.

Six pages in one week and nothing for four months is the same total output as one page a fortnight, and a very different result. The steady version compounds — each page is indexed, and internal links from later pages strengthen earlier ones. The burst version competes with itself, then goes quiet at the point where consistency would have been rewarded.

The consequence for the internal question is that a small reliable capacity beats a large unreliable one: one page a fortnight that actually appears beats a six-page plan the diary decides.

What can a supplier not do for the in-house function?

Three things, said plainly.

We do not manage ad spend. If the answer needed is this quarter, paid search is the correct channel and we are not the supplier for it.

We do not sit in the building. The corridor conversation with a fee earner is the one advantage an internal person has, and no retainer replaces it.

We give no advice about professional obligations. Australia has no publication rule and a firm's obligations are a matter for the firm and its own advisers. What we build are pages, and what we report is what those pages did.

What this is worth where you are

In Brisbane, 8,800 people a month search for family law, and Google charges around A$24.29 for one of those clicks. We hold the same figures for 52 cities.

The free report gives you yours, plus which pages are missing from your site, and what 40 suppliers charge.

Get the report →

No call required. Our own prices are on that page.

Where should I read next?

If the decision is what to buy in rather than who holds it: marketing services for law firm covers scope, and online marketing for law firm covers the online channels in the order they are worth starting.

If the constraint is producing the material: content marketing law firm and lawyer content marketing both cover getting facts out of fee earners and onto a page.

If the internal person needs somebody to check their work: law firm seo experts covers what an outside specialist adds to an existing in-house function.

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