Lawyers: Use Both Marketing and Business Development to Grow Your Practice
Marketing raises awareness; business development builds relationships to win clients.
Why it matters: Understanding the distinct roles of marketing and business development helps lawyers create sustainable growth. Integrating these strategies aligns firm efforts with client needs and market demands.
- Legal marketing raises awareness through advertising, content, and PR.
- Business development focuses on building relationships to convert prospects.
- Am Law 200 firms show a gap between marketing and BD teams’ capacity and firm growth alignment.
- 2025 saw the highest hiring for BD managers, with key areas in litigation, antitrust, private equity, and M&A.
Law firms aiming to grow must clearly differentiate between legal marketing and business development. According to Berbay Marketing & PR, "marketing is essentially everything you do to raise a decision maker’s awareness of the firm," including activities like advertising and content creation. FindLaw explains that marketing serves to create initial interest and visibility for the firm’s services.
Business development, by contrast, is about relationship-building and converting prospects into clients. As Berbay states, it involves lawyers "creating, fostering, and leveraging partnerships and strategic relationships with existing clients and new prospects to generate business."
However, analysis of 80,000 hours of time-tracking data from Am Law 200 firms reveals a structural misalignment. Many marketing and business development teams are operating at full capacity but are not strategically aligned with their firm’s growth objectives, limiting effectiveness.
Firms that integrate marketing and business development with a focused strategy—targeting ideal clients and key markets—achieve more sustainable growth, according to Hong Kong Lawyer. This approach ensures that awareness created by marketing is efficiently converted into client relationships via business development.
Recently, business development manager roles dominated hiring trends in legal marketing, particularly in litigation, antitrust, private equity, and M&A, highlighting where firms see growth potential. This hiring data from Ambition US reflects the industry’s priority to enhance relationship-building capabilities for sustainable client acquisition.
Moreover, law firms must address evolving client expectations by demonstrating transparency and value, including clear communication about technology adoption like AI. A law firm executive noted at the Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer Forum 2026 that firms "must be able to explain their approach to AI and demonstrate its value to clients," further underscoring the evolving role of business development in client engagement.
By the numbers:
- 80,000 hours — time-tracking data analyzed from Am Law 200 firms revealing misalignment
- 2025 — year when business development manager roles were most actively hired in legal marketing
- 4 practice areas — litigation, antitrust, private equity, and M&A led demand for BD talent in 2025