Brand and marketing specialist Damian Reed sets out the simple mistakes high street law firms make when it comes to marketing, and explains how to rectify them.
I visit a lot of law firms. As head of brand and marketing at QualitySolicitors, it comes with the territory, and I genuinely love it. There is something about walking through the door of a high street firm and spending time with the people who run them that reminds me why this sector matters. These are often the firms that have served their communities for decades, built on reputation, trust and hard work.
But there is a pattern I keep seeing. A set of recurring challenges that show up regardless of whether a firm is based in a market town in Shropshire, a suburb of Manchester, or a coastal community in Kent. These challenges are not unique to any one firm. They are structural, and in my view, they are the primary reasons why so many high street practices find it hard to grow their profits – even when they are busy, well-regarded, and doing genuinely great legal work.
The four issues I encounter most consistently are: not enough quality leads; increasing overheads; capacity challenges driven by recruitment difficulties; and a lack of structured sales training across all staff.
None of these are insurmountable. But they do require honest diagnosis and deliberate action.
1. Not enough quality leads
The most common complaint I hear from practice managers and partners is that enquiries are either too low in volume, too low in quality, or both. And while it might be tempting to treat this as a marketing problem – something to throw budget at and hope for the best – the reality is more nuanced.
A high-quality client enquiry is not simply someone who fills in a form or picks up the phone. It is someone with a clear and immediate legal need, a realistic expectation of cost, and a matter that aligns with the firm’s expertise and capacity. When those conditions are met, conversion becomes much more efficient, fewer follow-ups, cleaner fee conversations, faster progression to instruction.
In 2026, the landscape for generating these enquiries has shifted meaningfully. AI-driven search is changing how potential clients discover law firms. The old rules – be visible on Google and have a decent website – are still relevant, but no longer sufficient on their own. AI tools are increasingly surfacing firms that demonstrate genuine local authority, explain their services in plain language, and have strong review profiles. Volume of enquiries is less important than quality, and firms that chase volume without attending to conversion will find themselves on a treadmill that never quite reaches profitability.
The most effective enquiry strategies I see in high-performing firms combine three things: local SEO that captures intent at the moment it matters; pay-per-click advertising used with precision (not as a scatter gun); and diversification through trusted third-party platforms that bring pre-qualified demand.
Crucially, none of these channels works in isolation. And none of them deliver their full potential without equally strong internal processes for handling and converting what comes in.
2. Increasing overheads
The cost of running a law firm has never been higher. National insurance contributions have increased. Wage expectations have risen, and rightly so, but that does not make them easier to absorb. Supplier costs across the board: IT, compliance software, professional indemnity insurance, legal research tools have crept upward with little sign of reversing. And the regulatory environment continues to impose its own costs, both directly in fees and indirectly in the management time required to remain compliant.
Taken individually, each of these pressures may feel manageable. Taken together, they represent a significant and sustained squeeze on margins, particularly for high street firms operating on tighter fee structures than their larger commercial counterparts.
One area that is often overlooked is the opportunity to reduce supplier costs through collective negotiation or network membership. Firms that belong to groups with pre-negotiated supplier arrangements – whether for software, referencing services, or professional support – can access meaningful savings that are simply not available to standalone practices. This is not glamorous. It will not feature in a partnership away day as a strategic breakthrough. But the cumulative effect on overheads can be significant.
The other overhead that deserves scrutiny is marketing spend. Most high street firms are not overspending on marketing, many are underspending, but the question is not simply how much is being spent, it is where. In an era of AI-driven search, reputation management has become genuinely strategic. AI models are trained to reference and recommend firms with strong, consistent, authentic review profiles. A firm with 200 five-star Google reviews and a well-maintained profile is not just well-regarded by real people, it is increasingly well-regarded by the algorithms that sit between a potential client and their choice of solicitor. Marketing budget allocated to building and maintaining that reputation is rarely wasted.
3. Capacity issues and the recruitment challenge
Recruitment is, without question, one of the most consistently painful topics in my conversations with firm leaders. The demand for experienced solicitors and legal support staff continues to outstrip supply in many practice areas. Salaries have risen. Candidate expectations have shifted. And the competition is no longer just from the firm down the road, it is from national practices, remote-first employers, and businesses outside the legal sector altogether.
What strikes me, however, is how many firms are trying to solve a modern recruitment problem with outdated tools. Posting on job boards and hoping for the best is rarely sufficient in 2026. The question I ask firms when this comes up is a simple one: do you actively use LinkedIn?
Not as a broadcast channel for news and announcements, but as a genuine recruitment and employer brand platform. Are you posting content that gives candidates a real sense of what it’s like to work at your firm? Are you showcasing the career journeys of long-standing team members? Are you articulating – clearly and compellingly – what makes your firm a genuinely good place to build a legal career?
This leads directly to the question of employee value proposition, or EVP. Most high street firms have never formally defined theirs. Yet the EVP – the sum of what you offer to employees beyond salary – is arguably the most powerful recruitment and retention tool a firm has. Flexibility, culture, career development, community impact, stability: these things matter to candidates. But they only attract people if they are communicated deliberately.
A dedicated careers page on your website is not a luxury reserved for large firms. It is a practical asset that can meaningfully increase the quality and volume of candidate applications. Done well, with real stories from real people, honest descriptions of what you look for and what you offer, and a clear application process, it signals to candidates that your firm takes its people seriously. That signal matters more than many firms realise.
4. The sales training gap
Of the four issues I encounter, this is the one that surprises people most when I raise it, and yet it may be the one with the highest immediate impact on profitability.
Sales training in law firms remains chronically under developed. There is a persistent cultural resistance to framing legal work in commercial terms, which is entirely understandable given the professional context. But it comes at a cost. Every member of staff who interacts with a client or a prospect, from the receptionist taking the first call to the fee earner handling the initial consultation, is either strengthening or weakening the firm’s ability to convert an enquiry into an instruction.
The initial contact is where the battle is often won or lost. How a call is answered, how quickly an enquiry is followed up, how confidently a member of staff explains what the firm does and what the client should expect: these are not soft considerations. They are directly correlated with conversion rates.
Cross-selling is another area where most high street firms leave significant revenue on the table. A client coming in for conveyancing may well need a will. A client navigating a divorce may need advice on their business interests. These are not pushy upsells – they are genuinely helpful conversations that serve the client and grow the matter value. But they only happen if staff are trained to spot the opportunities and feel confident having those conversations.
Perhaps most telling of all: most high street firms I visit have no structured conversion tracking in place. They cannot tell me with confidence what percentage of enquiries become instructions, which practice areas convert best, or where the drop-off points are in the client journey. Without that data, improving conversion is largely guesswork.
Sales training does not need to be extensive or expensive to make a difference. A half-day session with a focus on initial contact, active listening, fee conversations and cross-referral awareness can shift behaviours in ways that ripple across the firm’s revenue for months. The firms I see investing in this, even modestly, consistently out-perform those that do not.
The bigger picture
High street law firms are not struggling because they lack talent, or because they have lost relevance, or because the demand for their services has diminished. They are struggling because the environment around them has changed, and the internal structures that drive growth have not always kept pace.
The four issues above are not a counsel of despair. They are, in my experience, areas of genuine and achievable improvement for almost every firm I visit. The firms that are growing profitably in 2026 are not necessarily the ones with the biggest marketing budgets or the most sophisticated technology. They are the ones that have diagnosed their challenges honestly, prioritised the right things, and committed to consistent execution across all four of these dimensions.
If any of this resonates, whether it is one of these issues or all four, the starting point is always the same: an honest conversation about where you are now, and what the path forward looks like. That is the kind of conversation I have every week. And it is almost always a productive one.
About the author
Damian Reed is head of brand and marketing at QualitySolicitors, the UK’s largest network of high street law firms. He works with firms across the country on marketing strategy, growth and business development.
