TinkerX

Okey-dokey! And now the band will strike up the tune while the lovely Lennon Sisters sing Andy’s favorite chorus of, "You Can’t Define the Roles, Until Ya Gots the Goals!"

How many marketers do you need per lawyer?

I don’t know.

How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? It only took that rascally owl three, but he bit down hard after number three, remember?

My point being that the question itself reveals one of the problems with industry. The idea that there is "an answer" is absurd. It’s like the question about "what’s the average spend on marketing at law firms." Yes, it’s nice to know what your competition is spending… if you’re sophisticated enough to do a share-of-voice calculation… but I don’t think anybody’s using that logic.

Law firms are driven by herd mentality, and if all the other firms are spending around 2% of gross on marketing, then maybe we should… if all the other firms have 1 marketer for every 40 laywers, then maybe we should…

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

No.

Stop it.

Please.

Just. Stop. It. You can process bills that way. You can plan training sessions that way. You can take care of your facilities that way. You can process phone calls that way. You can even, in some cases, practice law that way. But you simply CAN NOT MARKET BY NUMBERS! It all depends on what your goals are.

Goals! Do you hear me??!! Goals!!!

What GOALS might lead you to have more marketers?

• If you want your lawyers to each have a personalized marketing plan and to have a professional marketer help keep them on track
• If you want your marketers to be involved in every RFP
• If you want marketers to help prep lawyers for meetings with clients where there might be a good opportunity for cross selling
• If you want marketers to scan business and trade journals for good articles that your lawyers can respond to in order to make networking connections
• If you want your marketers to actively work the local press in order to gain leverage for story pitches
• If you want your marketers to write first drafts of articles, newsletters and blogs so that your lawyers have more time to practice law

If you want to do fewer of those things, you can do with a lower headcount in your marketing department. Don’t take this the wrong way, but, "Duh."

Most firms, however, have no logical marketing goals. They want to simply continue to float along at more-or-less the same level they always have.

Which, I guess, is a goal. A sad, ultimately ineffective goal, but a goal nonetheless. And which, since it’s the same for so many firms, could provide a reasonable basis for an industry-wide lawyer/marketer ratio.

So, if your firm has no interest in actually accomplishing anything with its marketing, I think the ratio of 40 lawyers to 1 marketer is fine. Then again, if you really don’t want to accomplish anything, you could simply suffer a brief fit of insight, cut back to 80 lawyers to 1 marketer, and still accomplish nothing.

If you’d actually like to do something with your marketing, however, I suggest working upwards from a platform of business goals, rather than backwards from a random number that just happens to be an industry standard,  generated by years of inattention and spotty attempts to "do something about this marketing thing."

Yakshemash.