How business clients decide to trust you

I've come to realise there's an uncanny resemblance between how I approach marketing for Law Firm Profit Success and how most specialist law firms should be marketing themselves.

I've written before about how, depending on your practice area, your clients either behave like a consumer or like a business. That piece was about how the two types judge you once they're in front of you. What I didn't cover is how they got in front of you in the first place, because that's just as different.

For the bulk of specialist practices, clients behave like businesses. Corporate transactions. Financial services. Insurance litigation acting for insurers. Workplace investigations. Cross-border work. These clients don't run a Google search and they won't be moved by a Facebook ad. Same can be said for the kinds of clients I work with. You see, the trust mechanism works differently.

The difference that matters

A consumer client builds trust at the moment of need. Something happens to them, they go looking, they judge quickly from whatever they can see, and they choose. The whole cycle can run inside a day. Being findable is the game.

A business client builds trust long before the need exists. There's no moment where a CFO sits down and searches for a lawyer. The need appears inside a deal, a dispute or a board paper, and the question is "who do we use", asked of a person rather than a search bar. By the time that question gets asked, the decision has largely already been made. The work that decided it was done months or years earlier.

So for business clients the flow looks like this.

You get into rooms. Physically, digitally, or by way of someone else's introduction. Presenting to an audience of your ICP, or being put forward by someone the client already trusts.

That leads to direct conversations. One on one, in an office or online, about their actual situation. Paid or unpaid, either works in the right circumstances.

And your online content sits underneath the whole thing, doing the credibility work. Not as a third step, but running the entire time, for the client and for the person putting your name forward.

Getting into rooms

First, work out which rooms. If you act for insurers, that's the insurance industry's events. If you do workplace investigations, that's HR conferences and employer associations. If you do corporate transactions, that's the accounting and corporate advisory networks, and the industry bodies of the sectors you transact in. Would your client or people that have access to those clients be in the room.

Second, the room is an input as well as an output.

You go in thinking about what comes out of it. Introductions, a conversation, maybe a lead. You also come out with material. A day in a room full of your clients tells you what that industry is dealing with at the moment, in their words and in their order of priority.

That matters because the hard part of content is deciding what to write about. Sit down cold and the easiest subject is the law, which is how a firm ends up with a blog full of legislative updates and case summaries.

After a day in the room you have three or four things the industry is actually worried about, from the people who have the worry.

The conversations narrow it further. Ten meetings with people in that sector and the same two or three questions start coming up. Those are worth writing about, because you already know people ask them.

It runs the other way too.

Once the content exists and is clearly about their world, the next room is easier to get into. The association is looking at someone who understands their industry rather than a lawyer asking for a slot.

And by the time the meeting happens, the content has done some of the work. Credibility was mostly settled before they sat down, so the hour goes on their situation instead of on you.

Referrers work the same way. Accountants, business brokers, corporate advisers, bankers with commercial desks, insurance brokers, HR consultants, and other firms in practice areas that don't compete with yours.

I've written separately about what an accountant is actually thinking before they refer you a client, and the short version applies to all of them. They're not assessing whether you're a good lawyer. They're assessing whether referring you could embarrass them. Their client relationship is worth more to them than your gratitude, so the entire question is risk.

That means these relationships are built slowly and in person, and a small number worked properly beats a long list contacted once. This is grunt work. There's no shortcut in it.

The half that's usually missing

Lawyers are generally good at the rooms part. It comes with the profession. You go to the events, you know the accountants, you sit on the committee, you have the coffees. Most specialist principals already have a network and are perfectly capable of building more of one.

The part that's missing is the credibility layer vis-a-vis online content, and it fails in one of three ways.

Sometimes there isn't any content at all. Someone hears your name, goes looking, and finds a website telling them you're a leading provider of commercial legal services.

Sometimes it's there but it isn't consistent. There are articles, and the most recent one is from two years ago. That tells the reader something about how the firm is run, and none of it is good.

Most often it's the wrong content. There's plenty of it, and it's all legal updates and case summaries. That proves you can read a judgment. It says nothing about whether you understand what the judgment does to a business like theirs, which is the only thing they were checking.

So the introductions are happening. They're just not landing anywhere, because when the person goes and looks, there's nothing waiting that speaks to what they're actually worried about.

What content to put out

So what should be there instead.

They're not checking whether you know the law. They assume that. They're checking whether you understand their world. Write about the commercial situation, and let the law appear inside it.

Consistency beats frequency. A monthly piece that's genuinely useful does more than weekly commentary that says nothing.

Depth beats breadth. You're proving you're the person for one specific kind of problem, not that you have an opinion on everything.

And remember the second audience. The referrer and the program organiser look you up too, before they put their name next to yours. What they find decides whether they keep putting you forward.

Content's job is to survive the search, not to start it. The rooms start it.

These two halves don't work separately. The rooms without the credibility layer produce introductions that quietly go nowhere. The credibility layer without the rooms produces good writing nobody finds.

And that's how you build a great law firm.

More next Tuesday,

Gordon