Nobody clicks an ad to hire corporate counsel. This one runs on authority, visibility, and referral.
Corporate and business law does not have an ad auction worth winning. General counsel and founders hire on reputation, on a referral, or because they watched a partner explain something clearly and thought that person knows what they are talking about. The marketing job is to manufacture those moments at scale.
By the time there is a matter, the name has already been picked.
A general counsel does not go looking for a securities lawyer the week the deal breaks. She calls the person she watched present, or the name her banker gave her, or the partner she wrote down at a CLE session a year earlier. The choice was made long before the work existed, and there is no term you can bid on that gets in front of it. That changes what a budget is for. You are not buying demand that is already in the market, you are paying to be the name that comes to mind when the matter shows up. The unit is different too. Corporate work is a relationship, not a file. One company that keeps you on retainer sends over contracts, an employment problem, a lease fight, and a diligence request across the same three years. A single new client can carry a marketing year and three of them can change the firm, which is also why none of this looks impressive in a weekly dashboard.
Put partners on camera explaining real issues, because that is what buyers actually evaluate
Produce CLE webinars, panels, and livestreams that put the firm in front of the right room
Build LinkedIn presence for named partners, not just the firm account
Support the referral network with content the network can forward
Bidding on searches your buyer never runs
Most of the volume under business lawyer and corporate attorney is a founder who wants an entity filed for a few hundred dollars, someone chasing an unpaid invoice, or a consumer with a complaint against a company. Pay for those clicks and you fill the calendar with work you did not want while the general counsel, who is not searching at all, hires someone else. Search still has a narrow job here. It is not the engine.
Publishing under the firm instead of the partner
In-house counsel hire a person who owns a subject. Anything that leaves the building under the firm account has no author, which is exactly why nobody forwards it. The same explanation posted by the partner who actually handles that work gets sent to three people before lunch. Build the partners and the firm collects the credit anyway.
Letting the recorded hour die on a drive
Firms already do the hard part. A partner preps for a panel, presents a CLE, sits for an industry webinar, and then the file goes into a folder nobody opens. That hour is the most expensive content the firm will produce all year and it has already been paid for. Cut properly it becomes a gated session, a stack of question-by-question clips, an article, and a quarter of posts.
Sending the same client alert as every other firm
A rule changes and thirty firms email the same summary by Friday. In-house counsel reads none of them, because a summary is not a position. The version that gets forwarded to the CFO says what the partner would do about it, which companies it costs money, and which clause in the template has to change by Monday. One of those is a notice. The other is the reason your name gets said out loud when the problem is real.
In this order.
Pick the lane, name the partner
Not corporate law. One partner, one recurring problem, described the way the buyer describes it: restrictive covenants, an internal investigation, an earnout that went sideways, a vendor contract nobody read closely. A five-partner firm should own five narrow things rather than one wide one.
Shoot the partners once
Attorney hours are the constraint, so we batch. A day or two in your office produces bio films, the firm story, and a run of short explainers covering each partner's lane. Every later step is fed from that footage, which is why it happens before anything gets scheduled.
Produce the room
CLE sessions, client panels, and webinars streamed out of your own conference room, produced so the firm reads as the host instead of a guest on someone else's platform. The registration list is the point: name, title, company, and an hour of attention given on purpose. The recording then stocks the library.
Publish under names, supply the referrers
LinkedIn runs on the partners' personal profiles, with the firm page holding the record. Accountants, bankers, and co-counsel get material they can forward in one line without explaining who you are. The monthly report is the list of conversations it produced, with title and company attached, because impressions will never tell you whether you reached a decision maker.
Video Production
Testimonials, streaming commercials, FAQ libraries, and content batches.
Priority 2Social Media
Managed social that turns attention into signed cases, not just followers.
Priority 3Web Design
Firm sites and practice-area intake pages built to convert, not to win awards.
Priority 4SEO
Rank in the map pack, and get cited by ChatGPT when someone asks who to hire.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every case is different.
Good to know.
Does Google Ads work for a corporate law firm?
Rarely as the main channel. The searches that exist under terms like business lawyer skew small and transactional: entity formation, a demand letter, a consumer complaint against a company. A general counsel with a real matter is not typing that, she is calling a name she already has. Two narrow uses hold up. Bid on your own firm name so a competitor does not sit above you, and run tight campaigns on the few commercial terms a funded company really does search, such as a lawsuit already filed against them. Past that, the same money does more on LinkedIn, where the job title you want to reach exists as a targeting option.
How do you market a law firm that gets most of its work from referrals?
Start by supplying the referral network you already have. The people sending you work are accountants, bankers, insurance brokers, and firms that conflicted out, and they forward whatever makes them look useful to their own client. Most firms hand them nothing but a website. Give every referral source material with a partner's name and a specific subject on it and the flow stops depending on whether you had lunch that month. It compounds with the visibility work too, since a referrer is far more comfortable naming a partner their client has already watched speak.
Are CLE webinars worth producing for a business law firm?
It is one of the few formats where the exact buyer volunteers an hour and registers with a name, a title, and a company. Attendance is real because the credit is real. High Arc Media produced a CLE webinar livestream for Lawrence & Bundy LLC, a corporate and business law firm in Atlanta, streamed from the firm's own office in January 2024. That engagement was invoiced at $7,072.50 for a single session, which is a useful anchor for planning: it is production cost, not media spend, and the recording keeps working long after the session ends.
Should partners post on LinkedIn under their own names or the firm page?
Their own names. Personal profiles travel further than company pages, and the person sizing you up wants to see the attorney rather than the brand. A general counsel opens the partner's profile before she opens the firm's site. Keep the firm page for the record: announcements, hires, the archive. The usual objection is that a partner could leave and take the audience, which is a real risk, and it gets handled by owning the calendar and the footage the firm paid to produce rather than by keeping your best lawyers quiet.
How long before corporate law marketing produces new work?
Longer than the practice areas that run on urgency, and it lands in lumps. Nothing here intercepts a matter already in progress, so the first thing to move is the quality of the conversations: who replies, what title they hold, how large the company is, whether they arrive with a problem or a price question. Watch that before you watch revenue. Signed relationships follow on their own schedule, and because one corporate client can send work for years, a quiet quarter followed by two good relationships is a normal outcome and a profitable one.