Corporate & Commercial Law marketing
Marketing a corporate practice when almost nobody searches for one
Corporate work is bought by founders, finance directors and in-house counsel who are assessing credibility rather than looking for a lawyer. Search volume is tiny, matter values are enormous, and panels and preferred-supplier lists quietly decide who is even eligible.
Measurement
What we report on, and what we ignore
Sessions are not on this list. These are the numbers that tell you whether the marketing is producing customers.
- Matters opened, by named source, recorded at the point of opening rather than reconstructed later
- Average matter value and the mix against the work the practice wants to build
- Panel and preferred-supplier invitations received, and prequalification submissions made
- Pitch and tender invitations, and conversion from invitation to appointment
- Named target organisations that engaged with partner content in the period
- Referrals received by referring firm or adviser, tracked as relationships rather than as a channel
- Directory submission outcomes against the bands the practice is aiming for
- Elapsed time from first recorded contact with an organisation to its first instruction
What usually goes wrong
Where corporate law marketing tends to fail
A corporate practice can be excellent, well known among the people who matter, and completely invisible in every metric a marketing agency normally reports. That is not a failure. It is what a category with a few dozen relevant searches a month and matters worth six or seven figures actually looks like.
The commercial question is therefore not how much traffic the site attracts. It is whether the firm is on the list when a founder rings their accountant, when a general counsel builds a shortlist, and when a procurement team opens a panel review.
- The website lists the same capabilities as every competitor.
- Mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, joint ventures, commercial contracts, restructuring. A general counsel comparing four firms reads the identical list four times and falls back on the name they recognise or the band in a directory. Escaping that requires committing publicly to something specific: the size of transaction the firm is built for, the sectors it genuinely knows, the work it declines, and a stated view on a live legal question that a competent competitor could argue with.
- The panel review happened and nobody told you.
- Large organisations, public bodies and insurers buy legal services through panels and preferred-supplier lists on fixed multi-year cycles, run by procurement or legal operations rather than by the lawyers who use the firm. A practice that is unknown to those teams when the review opens is not beaten, it is never considered. Tracking which target organisations run panels, when the cycles fall, and what the prequalification asks for is unglamorous work that decides years of revenue.
- Nothing published carries a partner’s name.
- This is an audience that reads legal commentary as part of its job, so the ceiling on content here is genuinely high. It collapses the moment the byline is the firm rather than a person, because the reader is assessing whether a particular lawyer understands their problem well enough to be trusted with it. The practical fix is a production process built around an hour of a partner’s time — an interview, a draft returned for correction, publication under their name — rather than a request that they write.
- The referrals that matter most are the ones nothing records.
- Accountants, corporate finance advisers, bankers, insolvency practitioners and other law firms without the relevant capability introduce a large share of corporate matters. None of it appears in analytics, and firms routinely conclude that marketing produces nothing while the referral network quietly produces everything. Recording the source of every matter opened, by name, is the single cheapest change available and it usually reallocates the budget within a quarter.
- Your best evidence is confidential.
- The transactions that would most persuade a buyer are frequently subject to confidentiality, and consent to publish is awkward to request years later. The workable answer is to build consent into the engagement conversation at the point the matter closes, to publish structure rather than identity where consent is refused — sector, deal shape, size band, the difficulty solved — and to use directory submissions, which have their own referee and confidentiality conventions, for the material that cannot be public.
Search behaviour
What your customers are typing
Founder and finance-lead problem searches
Low volume, high value, and usually happening years before an instruction. This is where a firm becomes a name.
- do i need a shareholders agreement
- what does legal due diligence involve
- cost of legal fees on a share sale
- how to structure an employee share scheme
- asset purchase or share purchase which is better
In-house counsel and procurement research
The buyer verifying a shortlist or preparing a panel review. Small volume and disproportionate commercial weight.
- law firm panel review process
- outside counsel guidelines template
- corporate law firms advising [sector] companies
- legal directory rankings corporate [country]
- alternative fee arrangements law firm
Named lawyer and firm verification
Somebody has been given a name and is checking it. Almost every instruction passes through this search at some point.
- [partner name] corporate lawyer
- [firm name] reviews in house counsel
- corporate partner [sector] experience
- [firm name] directory ranking
Regulatory and legislative change
Spikes on announcement and commencement dates. Whoever published a usable explanation that week is read by the whole market.
- [new act] what it means for companies
- new merger control thresholds [year]
- directors duties changes [jurisdiction]
- company filing requirements changes
Engagement and cost structure
Increasingly searched by finance leads and legal operations rather than by lawyers, and rarely answered by firms.
- fixed fee legal work for startups
- law firm capped fee arrangement
- when to hire in house counsel instead of a law firm
- how are corporate legal fees calculated
These are examples of how customers in this market search, drawn from keyword research and from the questions that come up on sales calls. They are illustrative, not a volume claim — the actual demand in your area is something we size before recommending anything.
Buying behaviour
How your customers actually decide
Strategy follows this, not the other way round. Everything on this page is downstream of how the decision genuinely gets made.
- They start with a name they already have. A colleague, an accountant, a previous firm, a directory band or a lawyer who has moved in-house supplies the shortlist, and the website is used to verify it rather than to build it.
- They hire a named partner rather than a firm, and they follow that partner between firms. The individual’s track record, sector knowledge and published views matter more than anything on the homepage.
- Directory rankings function as a shortcut for boards, procurement teams and general counsel who need a defensible reason for a choice, which makes the annual submission cycle a real acquisition channel rather than a vanity exercise.
- Fee predictability increasingly decides between two credible firms. Fixed and capped arrangements, budget adherence on prior matters, and a clear position on billing structure are assessed explicitly by in-house teams.
- Conflicts and sector coverage are checked early and can end a conversation before capability is discussed, which is why sector positioning has a commercial cost as well as a benefit.
- Responsiveness is judged over a day rather than over minutes, but it is judged. A first email answered the same day by the partner named on the page is read as evidence about how the matter itself would be handled.
Where the money goes
The channels that earn their place here
In priority order for this business, not a menu. Anything not on this list is something we would need a specific reason to recommend.
Partner-bylined analysis, produced in an hour of their time
The highest-return channel in this practice area and the one most firms attempt badly. The audience reads professionally, so quality has a real ceiling here, but only under a named lawyer’s byline. Build the production around an interview and a correction pass rather than a writing request, and the constraint that has blocked every previous attempt disappears.
Search designed for a category with almost no volume
The correct target is a few dozen queries a month that a founder or general counsel types before an instruction, not a keyword list ranked by volume. Structure questions, cost questions, process questions and legislative-change questions, each owned by one page under a named partner. Judged on which organisations arrived, never on sessions.
Where general counsel and founders actually are
This audience is professionally present on one platform and largely absent from the rest. Partner accounts consistently outperform the firm account, which makes the work a coaching and enablement exercise as much as a publishing one: a defensible view stated regularly, in the partner’s own voice, to a following built deliberately from the target list.
Cover a named list rather than a market
When the addressable market is two hundred organisations, treating it as a market wastes most of the budget. Build the list from target companies, panel holders and referring advisers, map who inside each one influences legal selection, and cover them repeatedly through the partners who would service the work. Panel cycle dates belong on that list too.
Commentary tied to legislative change, and the directory cycle
Two connected disciplines. Being quoted usefully in the trade and sector press when the law changes puts a partner in front of the exact readership that instructs, and the annual legal directory submission — evidence, referees, matter descriptions, consent — is the closest thing this category has to a scheduled acquisition event. Both need a calendar and an owner.
The website
What the site has to do for this customer
- A stated position on who the firm is built for, including the work it declines
- Partner pages that lead the site, with sector experience, published views and direct contact
- Matter experience described by structure, sector and size band where identity is confidential
- A clear account of fee arrangements, including fixed and capped options and how budgets are managed
- A route for referring advisers — accountants, corporate finance, banks — with a named contact
- Sector pages that demonstrate knowledge of the industry rather than of the law
- Legislative-change commentary that is dated and attributed to a named lawyer
- Directory rankings and credentials presented accurately and only where they can be evidenced
- A conflicts and onboarding path that does not require three emails to begin
Constraints
What the rules allow, and what they do not
Corporate legal marketing sits under the same professional conduct and legal advertising rules as any other practice area, and the two that bite most often are outcome language and comparative claims. Describing a deal as successfully completed in a way that implies a result for a future client, publishing win rates, or claiming to be the leading or best firm for a type of work runs into restrictions in most jurisdictions. Nothing published may imply a guaranteed result, including implicitly through a matter description.
Client and matter publicity is a confidentiality question before it is an advertising one. A client name, a transaction value, a deal description or a logo on a website may not be disclosed without permission, and permission is far easier to obtain when it is raised as the matter closes than years afterwards. Testimonials and client endorsements are separately restricted in a number of jurisdictions regardless of consent.
Specialist and expert designations, accreditations and quality marks may only be used where the governing body permits, and the permitted wording varies. The same applies to directory rankings, which have their own publication conditions about how a band, a tier or a recommendation may be described and for how long it may be displayed.
A corporate practice frequently markets into jurisdictions where its lawyers are not admitted. Rules about advertising legal services, describing a practice as international, and soliciting clients differ by country and by state or province, and a page that is compliant in the firm’s home jurisdiction is not automatically compliant where the reader is.
These requirements differ by regulator and by market, they differ between law societies and bar associations even within a single country, and they are revised periodically. We design to the constraints we understand apply and flag what needs professional judgement, but the firm must confirm its position with its own regulator, and responsibility for compliance remains with the firm. We give no legal advice.
Questions
Questions we get from this industry
Nobody searches for corporate legal services. Why would search marketing help us?
Because a small number of very specific searches happen at exactly the right moment, and because the same content that answers them is what a shortlisted buyer reads when they verify your name. Judged on volume this looks pointless. Judged on which organisations arrived and what they went on to instruct, it usually does not.
The honest version is that search is a supporting channel here rather than the engine. Referrals, panels, directories and partner reputation do most of the work. What search does is make sure that when somebody goes looking for you, or for the question you answer well, they find something that stands up.
Our partners will not write. Is a content programme realistic?
Yes, if you stop asking them to write. The blocker is almost never willingness, it is that a partner’s writing hour has a visible price and the task expands to six of them.
The workable model is an interview of forty-five minutes, a drafted piece returned for correction rather than composition, and publication under their name once they are satisfied. Partners who have refused to write for years will generally give you an hour, and the resulting material carries the byline that makes it worth publishing.
How do we get onto a panel we have never been invited to?
By finding out when the review happens and being known to the right people well before it opens. Panels are usually run by procurement or legal operations on multi-year cycles, and prequalification windows are short and rarely advertised widely.
The practical work is a target list with the cycle dates on it, a relationship with the people who administer the process rather than only the lawyers who use the firm, and the prequalification evidence — insurance, diversity data, rate cards, matter references, conflicts position — assembled before it is asked for rather than in the fortnight you have to respond.
Most of our best work is confidential. What can we actually publish?
More than most firms assume, provided consent is handled at the right moment. Ask as a matter closes and while the client is pleased, and a surprising proportion agree to some form of description even where they will not agree to a name.
Where consent is refused, publish the shape rather than the identity: the sector, the transaction structure, the size band and the specific difficulty that had to be solved. That is genuinely informative to a buyer weighing whether you have done something like their problem before, and it discloses nothing.
How should we measure this when a matter can take three years to arrive?
Not with last-click attribution, which will attribute a seven-figure instruction to whichever page the general counsel happened to open last. It is worse than useless in a category with this cycle length.
What works is recording the source of every matter at the point it is opened, by name, and tracking movement at the organisation level: which target companies engaged with partner content, which advisers referred, which panel processes you entered. Those are leading indicators you can act on while the instruction is still two years away.
Is our sector positioning worth the conflicts it creates?
That is a commercial judgement rather than a marketing one, and it deserves to be made deliberately rather than by default. Depth in a sector is what gets a firm shortlisted and what supports a higher rate, and it also increases the frequency with which a conflict ends a conversation early.
What we would push back on is the middle position: claiming several sectors shallowly. It generates the conflicts without generating the credibility, and it produces exactly the capability list that makes a firm indistinguishable from its competitors.
Find out what is realistically winnable in your market
A strategy call is a working session on your corporate law business specifically — your area, your competitors, the searches that matter and what it would take to compete for them. If we do not think we can move it, we will tell you.
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Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal